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Slave Life at Lloyd Manor

Family records offer clues to how slaves, human property, kept life going on Lloyd Neck

By Joye Brown | Staff Writer

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A spoon. A sock. A room. A fireplace. A spinning wheel.

A kitchen, clams, red and white clay.

And a busy, isolated place, almost an island.

Each of them pieces, small parts of a portrait that can never be complete. To this day, the slaves of Lloyd Neck have no voice.

None wrote of their lives, of the day-to-day between birth and death. None, including the poet Jupiter Hammon, the most famous and pampered slave of the manor, wrote of their dreams, their thoughts, their joys or their fears. There was Opium, also known as Obium, brought from Boston and passed from father to son. He made an unsuccessful attempt to flee. There was Hester, who would balk at being sold to slavery in the South. She was sold to a new owner in the North instead. There was Aurelia, brazen enough to refuse an order to return to her master's home. She was hired out to someone else.

And there were countless others, who were bought, sold, who lived and died and worked 3,000 acres of idyllic beauty joined by a tendril of land to the larger community of Huntington.

This much is known through the ledgers, letters, last wills and testaments of the Lloyd family; the lives of slaves as seen through the eyes of their masters. In often-bloodless prose, the masters of the manor provide a fascinating glimpse into colonial Long Island. It's a rare picture of slave life, even if it is incomplete and falls together like a crazy quilt with no batting.

Bill for Sale of Negress
Know all Men by these present that I
Joseph Conkling ... for and in
consideration of Twenty five pounds
Current money ... sell and Convey unto
Joseph & John Lloyd and to their heirs
one Certain Negro Girl Named Phoebe
of about Six Years of Age During the
Term of her Natural Life ...

In 1685, James Lloyd of Boston bought the peninsula that now bears his name. He won a royal land grant that made it the Lordship and Manor of Queens Village. All this, and James, the first lord of the manor, never left Boston to even visit his little piece of England. At his death, his son, Henry, took over the land and built the first manor house. His four sons, Henry, John, Joseph and James, inherited the estate in 1763. Joseph would go on to build a second manor house in 1767.

Throughout the generations, the Lloyds worked the land and hired tenants and indentured servants. As that proved too few hands, they, like their neighbors across Long Island, bought slaves. And as necessity arose, they traded them, much as a modern boy might trade baseball cards.

From John Lloyd to Henry Lloyd
If it is not asking more than becomes