The Manor

The extraordinary story of a Long Island plantation across three centuries and eleven generationsIn 1984, the landscape historian Mac Griswold was rowing along a Long Island creek when she came upon a stately yellow mansion and a garden guarded by hulking boxwoods. She instantly knew that boxwoods that large--twelve feet tall, fifteen feet wide--were hundreds of years old. And so was the house, Sylvester Manor, held in the same family for eleven generations. When Griswold went inside, she encountered a house full of revelations, like the 1666 charter for the land and a letter from Thomas Jefferson. But most remarkable--and most disturbing--was what the aged owner, Andrew Fiske, casually called the "slave staircase," which would reveal the extensive but little-known story of Northern slavery. Years after her tour, Griswold could not let go of the house and its many secrets, and she began to research the family that gave the property its name....