Shelter Island manor being reborn

Bennett Konesni, 28, known as "Bennie" to his friends and the resident heir of Sylvester Manor to others, was working hard earlier this month, getting his farm stand ready for business.

His girlfriend designed the two-story structure, which was built with green wood cut down from the 243-acre manor property, the most exclusive estate on Shelter Island.

"When it dries, it knots up. That keeps it really solid," he said, sharing a woodworking technique he learned growing up in Maine.

Konesni sees himself as a farmer, an enlightened one, and gives workshops on how to make musical instruments. He also carries the burden of preserving and keeping alive a lot of family history -- nearly four centuries of it.

His house, Sylvester Manor, is, arguably, one of Long Island's most significant and most hidden treasures. While it was once the seat of government on Shelter Island -- before its owners began selling land, it encompassed all of Shelter Island -- it now sits snugly behind two modest white pillars on North Ferry Road.

The manor reborn

Sylvester Manor became a not-for-profit educational corporation this year under the name Sylvester Manor Educational Farm. Konesni's uncle, Eben Fiske Ostby, the 14th lord of the manor, plans to preserve most of it as open land, and transfer most of the acreage into public hands. Shelter Island's town board voted in May to spend nearly $4.8 million to purchase development rights to 57 acres of land at the manor.

The property got its name in 1651, when Nathaniel Sylvester and his three partners purchased the 8,000-acre island from the deputy director of the New Haven colony. They set up a plantation, worked by slaves, to provide food for a bigger plantation they operated in Barbados.

"This is the only intact northern plantation in the United States," said its new director, Cara Loriz, who has been on the job only a few weeks. "You'd be surprised how many people on Shelter Island have never been here."

Except for the building and the grounds, the manor property is not open to the public except on special occasions, such as open-house tours of the grounds. The six-member staff is not large enough to handle daily crowds, although Konesni and Ostby have started an ambitious program to make repairs, clean up the overgrown gardens and fields, and open the property to the public for special events.

Konesni has been living there part-time -- spending the rest of his time in his home state of Maine -- and he has been working hard to put together a farm using organic gardening principles. Since the farm is in its first year, it is too new to apply to be certified as meeting organic farming standards -- such as not spraying pesticides, using special low-water-flow irrigation and planting only a few rows of any single crop, to hold down insect problems.

His farm field, off Manwaring Road, hasn't been actively cultivated in 100 years.

Although Sylvester Manor's long history has been preserved carefully by the family since it was created, there are gaps, especially since parts of the manor were broken off and sold by the partners and then by members of the Sylvester family. By 1704, the manor only covered half of Shelter Island.

A rich history

The family kept detailed handwritten records of the activities at the manor over the centuries, and thousands of those records are now available to scholars at the Fales Library at New York University. Two archaeological digs at the site also unearthed what the family believes to be a treasure trove of artifacts from the plantation, but it will take years to evaluate that material, according to Loriz. "They're still doing the lab work in Boston and Minnesota," she said.

Walking through parts of the elegant Manor House -- some of it is a private residence -- provides a casual glimpse of life centuries ago, mixed with more modern features such as updated appliances.

In one room, the past literally oozes out. "There were only two coats of paint there since 1735. The original was deep blue," explained Loriz as she pointed to some of the dark blue blotches on a wall in a room known as the paneled parlor.

One of the best Sylvester Manor stories deals with the rusting English maritime cannon now in front of the house. It was found buried in the early 1950s but dates back to the 1600s, when Holland and Great Britain were at war. Local myth recounts that when a Dutch warship approached Shelter Island and 200 troops were set ashore, the cannon was buried and Nathaniel Sylvester -- who was raised in Amsterdam and spoke fluent Dutch -- convinced the ship's captain that he was a loyal Dutch subject.

One of the manor's most elusive mysteries is the fate of the former slaves, some of whom remained on Shelter Island and worked at the manor long after New York State abolished slavery in 1827 -- 34 years before the Civil War.

A part of the farm called the African-American cemetery reportedly holds the remains of up to 200 people -- slaves, former slaves or American Indians. Julia Havens, the housekeeper of the manor, was buried there in 1907.

The area, considered sacred ground, is fenced off, but no tombstones have been erected, and the identities of those buried there are unknown.