by Mac Griswold
1944 Mary Katharine Fiske Drury (1916–1988), daughter of Augustus, inherits the manor.
1949 By agreement, the property, now approximately 250 acres, passes to Mary Katharine’s brother, Andrew Fiske (1909–1992). Andrew lives at the manor year-round.
1992 At Andrew’s Fiske’s death, life tenancy is bequeathed to his widow, Alice Hench Fiske (1917–2006).
2006 Eben Fiske Ostby (b. 1955), Andrew Fiske’s nephew, becomes the owner of the 243-acre estate on Alice Fiske’s death.
2007 Bennett Konesni, Eben Ostby’s nephew (b. 1982), arrives to live at the manor. With the start of an organic farm and educational programs, a new phase of manor life begins, continuing the property’s history with a new focus on organic food production and community.
2009–13 Eben Ostby forms a 501(c)(3), Sylvester Manor Educational Farm, Inc.; Ostby and the Sylvester Manor Board will preserve the manor’s heritage by selling agricultural easements and transferring most of the acreage to the new foundation.
Time Line of World Events
1588 English defeat of the Spanish Armada. Reign of Elizabeth I. Birth of Giles Sylvester in England
1600–1650 Smallpox and other European diseases reduce New England’s native population by 90%
1600–1700 The Netherlands’ “Golden Age”: Dutch transatlantic and Caribbean trade increases exponentially
1607 Jamestown founded
1619 The first Africans arrive in Virginia
1620 Plymouth founded
1621 Dutch West India Company (WIC) founded
1627 Barbados settled by the English
1630 John Winthrop leads the Puritans to Massachusetts
1637–38 Pequot War in New England
1656–57 Quakers begin to visit New England and are persecuted. The Sylvesters become Friends.
1640–59 English Civil Wars (Charles I executed 1649) and Commonwealth rule
1651–96 British “Navigation Acts” progressively limit colonial trade
1660 Charles II is crowned. Quaker Mary Dyer is hanged in Boston.
1673 Quaker founder George Fox visits Shelter Island
1673–74 Third Anglo-Dutch War: the Dutch cede New York permanently to the English
1674–76 King Philip’s War ends the independent power of Indians in New England
1741 Slave “conspiracy” in New York City, where one in five inhabitants was African American
1775–88 American Revolutionary War and founding of the nation
1783 Massachusetts passes an antislavery law
1790 First census of the United States: 4 million Americans, of whom 19% are African American. Indians were not counted, although there were likely more than 80 tribes with 150,000 members.
1799 Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery passed in New York, with all slaves freed in 1827
1844 Railroad arrives in Greenport, New York, across the Peconic Bay from Shelter Island
1861–65 American Civil War. Emancipation Proclamation, 1863.
1964 The Civil Rights Act is signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson
Sylvester Manor on Shelter Island: the handsome early Georgian house stands at the edge of Gardiners Creek, the vital Atlantic connection that brought wealth to the family that has owned the place since 1651. Slaves slept in the attic, under the swooping roof.
From the water tower: on a snowy day, the boxwood maze and huge box specimens near the house stand out clearly in a pre-1908 bird’s-eye-view photograph. Crop rows visible at left indicate that this garden was productive as well as ornamental; the clustered outbuildings recall the manor’s history as a Northern plantation that shipped food to the West Indies to feed sugar planters and slaves.
Through the remains of the boxwood maze, a mowed path heads for a twentieth-century garden shelter, visible between a towering pair of overgrown yews. Sylvesters, slaves, and servants have gardened here since the seventeenth century.
Early-twentieth-century wooden rose trellises and arches stand witness to Cornelia Horsford’s love for the Colonial Revival style, America’s first evocation of a national past. Beyond, steps from what was once the chicken yard lead up to another garden level.
The roof of the beautiful garden privy, a three-holer, has tilted eaves that echo the eaves of the manor house. The interior is paneled and whitewashed.
An 1884 table monument stands among seventeenth-century grave markers. The carving on top commemorates Sylvester forebears; the slab below lists the manor’s owners, including the Manhansett Indians who once owned the entire island; around the steps run the names of Quakers, including that of the martyred Mary Dyer, who sheltered here from the persecutions of the Boston Puritans in the 1650s.
Mary Sylvester: painted as a shepherdess by the English artist Joseph Blackburn in 1754, this great-granddaughter of Nathaniel Sylvester represents the epitome of eighteenth-century colonial gentility. As Mrs. Thomas Dering, she and her family would flee the ravages of the British invasion of Shelter Island during the Revolutionary War. (Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of Sylvester Dering, 1916 [16.68.2])
On the mantel in the paneled parlor, beneath the portrait of heiress Mary Catherine L’Hommedieu (also a Sylvester descendant), sits a china fruit basket. The same basket appears in the portrait itself, which was probably painted in 1810 by an anonymous artist when Mary Catherine was about four years old. The fragile vessel has remained here for more than two hundred years.
The Horsford Girls: only Cornelia, still a child, stares straight at the camera, at ease in her black mourning clothes. Born in 1861, she inherited the manor in 1904 and firmly stamped the house and garden as her own. Her older sisters stare off into the middle distance so beloved by Victorian photographers.
Bennett Konesni, born in 1982 and the fifteenth Sylvester steward of the manor, walks the old farm road that crosses the far end of the garden and leads to the fields. The property, 243 acres today, once encompassed the nearly 8,000-acre island.
Traces of the original mid-eighteenth-century blue paint are visible on the walls of paneled rooms upstairs and down. The glass on a framed piece of embroidery over the bedroom mantel has caught many reflections, such as this one, of those who passed by.
Sunlight glows through a side door that leads to darkness, the slave staircase that winds up three flights to the attic. The air-circulation holes cut into the wooden transom study us like eyes in a mask. An opulent French scenic wallpaper first blocked in 1849 wraps around the walls.
Slavery in the North: generations of enslaved African, African American, and Indian laborers climbed the steep flight of steps to sleep.
Isaac Pharoah, a Montauket Indian indentured at the age of five in 1828, called the little attic room between these white oak walls his home. The rough wooden door that gave him privacy now stands at left, off its hinges.
The west porch, added by the architect Henry Bacon in 1908, enjoys a view of the light fading quietly over Gardiners Creek. Along the shore, nineteenth-century chroniclers noted shell mounds, or middens, the remains of Manhansett Indian feasts. Today’s archaeologists have found traces of busy seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mercantile life beneath the lawn. Immigrants from Europe and Africa probably first stepped ashore at the landing beyond the posts and gate that are silhouetted against the water.
Notes
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
AFMCAR
Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research, University of Massachusetts Boston
BMHS
Barbados Museum and Historical Society
COG
Colonial Office Group
CSP
Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies
EHTR
Records of the Town of East-Hampton
GBS
Grizzell Brinley Sylvester
GSDD
General Sylvester Dering II Document Collection
JBMHS
Journal of the Barbados Mus
eum and Historical Society
JWJr
John Winthrop Jr.
LIHJ
Long Island History Journal
MHS
Massachusetts Historical Society
MoLAS
Museum of London Archaeology Service
NAA
Gemeentearchief Amsterdam, Notarial Archives
NEHGR
New England Historical and Genealogical Register
NEQ
The New England Quarterly
NGSQ
National Genealogical Society Quarterly
NHCR
Records of the Colony or Jurisdiction of New Haven from May 1653 to the Union
NS
Nathaniel Sylvester
NYGBR
New York Genealogical and Biographical Record
ODNB
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
PRO
Public Record Office
RPI
Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute
SIHS
Shelter Island Historical Society
SMA, NYU
Sylvester Manor Archive, Fales Library and Special Collections, Bobst Library, New York University, http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/fales/sylmanor_content.html
STR
Southold Town Records Copied and Explanatory Notes Added by J. Wickham Case
TB
Thomas Brinley
TNA
The National Archives (Great Britain)
WIC
Dutch West India Company
WMQ
William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series
WNYHS
Abstracts of wills, New-York Historical Society, published in 17 volumes
WP
Winthrop Papers
1. THE DISCOVERY
bought the island: Stephen Goodyear to Captain Thomas Middleton, Thomas Rous, Constant Silvester, and Nathaniel Sylvester, June 9, 1651. Records of the Town of East-Hampton, Long Island, Suffolk Co., NY, with other Ancient Documents of Historic Value, 2 vols. (Sag Harbor: John H. Hunt, Printer, 1887), 1:96–99; Benjamin F. Thompson, The History of Long Island: from its Discovery and Settlement, to the Present Time, etc., 2nd ed. (New York: Gould, Banks, 1843), 1:364.
bed hangings: The Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities has the rest of this set.
original parchment charter: Enfranchisement for Shelter Island, Richard Nicolls to Constant and Nathaniell Sylvester, March 31, 1666. Sylvester Manor Archive, Fales Library and Special Collections, Bobst Library, New York University (SMA, NYU), Series A, Box 140, Folder 6; New York State Archives, series A1895, New York Colonial Manuscripts, 38:155.
ten thousand people: Sherrill D. Wilson, “African Burial Ground,” in Slavery in New York, ed. Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris (New York: New Press, in conjunction with The New-York Historical Society, 2005), 7.
419 human remains: Wilson, 7.
“Captain Nathaniell Sylvester”: The term may be a “gentry honorific,” such as that of Captain, then Colonel, Lewis Morris of Barbados. In 1640s Dutch records, vessels in which Nathaniel Sylvester acted as a merchant factor were captained by professionals, a relationship spelled out as “the said captain and merchant.” In 1651, as one of the purchasers of Shelter Island, he is “Captain Nathaniell Silvester.” In 1652 he signs without a rank in a dispatch for payments to military forces on Barbados, but in 1655 he is called “Captain Nathiell Silvister” in a Connecticut court deposition. Thereafter, on Shelter Island, he frequently becomes “Captain.” William Nicoll and Brinley Sylvester, contract, Suffolk County Deeds, Liber B, part 1:169; Kristen Block, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 149,167; NAA 1289, fo. 101v–102v; NAA 1293/30, March 22, 1646; September 20, 1652, GSDD 1:2; TNA, PRO, CO 1/11 no. 57.1 [ff.157-8]; EHTR, 1:91–93; Richard Smith to Governor John Winthrop, Jr., Sept. 5, 1673, in Daniel Berkeley Updike, Richard Smith, First English Settler of the Narragansett Country, Rhode Island, with a Series of Letters Written by His Son Richard Smith, Jr., etc. (Boston: Merrymount Press, 1937), 100–101.
slavery in the North: Richard Shannon Moss, “Slavery on Long Island: Its Rise and Decline During the Seventeenth Through the Nineteenth Centuries,” Ph.D. dissertation, St. John’s University, 1985; A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process; The Colonial Period (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 61–100, 100–150; Grania Bolton Marcus, Discovering the African-American Experience in Suffolk County, 1620–1860 (Mattituck, NY: Amereon House, for the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities, 1995).
more human chattel: Moss, Slavery on Long Island, iii.
half the workforce: Moss, Slavery on Long Island, 110–12.
“Negro man Joseph”: General Sylvester II Document Collection, receipt, “Sylvester Dering to Joseph Hedges for negro man Peter, 1810,” 2:52, Shelter Island Historical Society (SIHS).
London, the last of the slaves: Manumission certificate for London from Esther Sarah Dering, April 16, 1821, SIHS.
for an article: Mac Griswold, “Sylvester Manor: A Colonial Garden Becomes a Colonial Revival Garden,” Journal of the New England Garden History Society 5 (Fall 1997), 25–34.
“the spread of European cultures”: James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1996), 5.
fences, roads, and buildings: Stephen A. Mrozowski, Katherine Howlett Hayes, and Anne P. Hancock, “The Archaeology of Sylvester Manor,” 1–15; Hayes, “Field Excavations at Sylvester Manor,” 34–50; and Kenneth L. Kvamme, “Geophysical Explorations at Sylvester Manor,” 51–70; in The Historical Archaeology of Sylvester Manor, ed. Katherine Howlett Hayes and Stephen A. Mrozowski, special issue, Northeast Historical Archaeology 36 (2007).
Nathaniel and his partners: Articles of Agreement, Capt. Thomas Middleton, Constant Silvester, Capt. Nathaniell Silvester, Ens. John Booth, September 20, 1652, GSDD 1:2. Only Nathaniel Sylvester did not sign the contract. On July 30, 1652, he was on Barbados to witness “An Account of What Sugar Sir George Ayscue and Capt Michall Pack Have Ordered to Be Paid for the Use of the States Fleet,” where he may have remained longer. TNA: PRO, America and West Indies Colonial Papers, CO 1/11 no. 57.1 [ff.157–58].
Giles: Henry B. Hoff, “The Sylvester Family of Shelter Island,” New York Genealogical & Biographical Record 125, no. 1 (January 1994) 13–18; no. 2 (April 1994): 88–93.
obosom: The Besease shrine appears to have been created as a tourist attraction, but that is not entirely clear. For a seventeenth-century description of an obosom, see “Wilhelm Johannes Muller’s Description of the Fetu Country, 1662–69,” in German Sources for West African History, 1599–1669, ed. Adam Jones (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag GMBH, 1983), 159, note 96; see also Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 111.
2. LIVING WITH THE INDIANS
The Manhansetts: Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), xi–xiii; Faren R. Siminoff, Crossing the Sound: The Rise of Atlantic American Communities in Seventeenth-Century Eastern Long Island (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 16–17.
clasping hands: It’s debatable whether Indians shook hands with each other as a sign of agreement before the white man came. John A. Strong, pers. comm., Aug. 24, 2005.
“The confrontation”: Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580–1640 (London: J. M. Dent, 1980), vii.
bloodbath: Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 159–60.
“fingers and thumes”: William Coddington to John Winthrop Jr. (JWJr), Newport, August 5, 1644, WP, vol. 4,
1638–44, ed. Allyn Bailey Forbes (Boston: MHS, 1944), 491.
colonists feared: Kupperman, Settling, viii.
Algonquian accusations: John A. Strong, The Algonquian Peoples of Long Island from Earliest Times to 1700 (Hempstead, NY: Long Island Studies Institute, Hofstra University, 1997), 118.
“make water burn”: William Wood, New England’s Prospect: A True, Lively and Experimental Description of That Part of America, Commonly called New England (London: Tho. Cotes, 1634), quoted in Strong, Algonquian Peoples, 117.
“one of his visits”: E. N. Horsford, Drafts, notes, and miscellaneous materials for a genealogical manuscript, SMA, NYU IV/A/11/111/20,21 and 112/1–6; Cushing/Horsford correspondence, SMA, NYU IV/A/1/a/58/54; National Anthropological Archives, Washington, DC.
“aloof, impersonal”: Strong, Algonquian Peoples, 111.
“threatened to be forced off”: William Wallace Tooker, John Eliot’s First Indian Teacher and Interpreter, Cockenoe-de-Long Island, and the Story of His Career from the Early Records (New York: F. P. Harper, 1896), 26.