Archaeological finds shed light on Sylvester Manor's slaveholding past

A decades-long archaeology project at Sylvester Manor on Shelter Island is reshaping how historians understand slavery, labor and multicultural life on Long Island.

Excavations at Sylvester Manor, a former provisioning plantation settled in 1651, have uncovered a vast trove of artifacts and evidence that helped flesh out the lives of Africans, Native Americans and Europeans who lived and worked there from the 17th through the 19th centuries.

Discoveries there were the subject of a lecture Thursday at the East Hampton Library by Nedra Lee, an archaeologist and professor at UMass Boston.

While archaeology is associated with the ancient past, Lee aimed to show a side focused on more recent events “in what many would argue is our backyard.”

Sylvester Manor once encompassed all of Shelter Island — roughly 8,000 acres, Lee said. Now it's a 236-acre educational farm and historic site with fields, two historic cemeteries, an 18th-century Georgian manor house and a 19th-century windmill, run by a nonprofit.

The property was first settled by Nathaniel and Grizzell Sylvester, Anglo-Dutch settlers who arrived to establish what Lee called a “provisioning plantation” — an agricultural operation designed to feed and supply lucrative sugarcane plantations in Barbados. It was the largest of its kind north of Virginia and was primarily owned by 11 generations of the Sylvester family, Lee said.

A Northern plantation 

Plantations are historically associated with the Southern United States, not the north. For generations, slavery in New York and on Long Island has been perceived as “short-lived and fairly benign,” Lee said. The evidence from Sylvester Manor challenges that view.

“It opens up a totally new understanding of how we begin to think about this particular region [and] the role it played … in a larger sort-of capitalist economy that rested on plantation-based labor,” Lee said.

At its earliest, the manor held 24 enslaved Africans — among the first slaves to arrive in Suffolk County. While that number decreased over time, it was always higher than most households on Long Island, which might on average have had two or three slaves, Lee said.

“Some form of exploited labor has always been a critical part of the agricultural enterprise that took place here,” Lee said.

Archaeologists from UMass Boston’s Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research have been excavating Sylvester Manor since 1999. Over 25-plus years, faculty, staff and graduate students have recovered more than 360,000 artifacts, including animal bones, ceramics and smoking pipes, according to Lee.

Taken together, Lee said, the artifacts offer “a really interesting snapshot of everyday life at Sylvester Manor.”

One vessel has become emblematic of the site’s significance, Lee said: a ceramic pot likely used by enslaved Africans, which was made from local clay, in a European form, using Native American manufacturing techniques. That shows how enslaved Africans lived and worked alongside exploited Native American indentured servants, Lee said.

“The ceramics and lithic artifacts become a testament to how processes like colonialism, capitalism and racism ultimately brought these two groups together and created opportunities for the development of community,” she said.

Burial grounds rediscovered

Recent work at the manor has focused on burial grounds for people of color who lived and worked there, and whose resting places went unmarked by headstones.

Last summer, researchers conducted a ground-penetrating radar survey to map a cemetery without disturbing the graves. Working alongside Sylvester Manor’s history and heritage staff, they documented about 100 fieldstones on the surface, which were used as informal grave markers. They used oral histories and other historical documents to confirm the names of roughly 70 people who are likely buried there, Lee said.

Researchers knew about the cemetery because Sylvester descendant Cornelia Horsford placed a large boulder near the edge of the cemetery in 1884 and described the location in her diary.

While researchers can’t put names to individual graves, they were able to piece together one person’s grave site thanks to Horsford’s diary. Julia Havens, born free in 1809 to a woman enslaved by a Sylvester descendant, is believed to be the most recent burial there. She’s also the only known person who is buried there that researchers have a photograph of.

Identifying Havens’ burial site “brought us all to tears,” said Donnamarie Barnes, Sylvester Manor’s director of history and heritage.

In addition to being on the National Register of Historic Places, Sylvester Manor is part of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, a global network of institutions that “work to counter the erasure of the past and to foster dialogue and civic action,” Lee said.

Research through the Fiske Memorial Center has helped produce two books, several scholarly articles, a dissertation and 10 master’s theses, Lee said.

Partnerships like the one between Sylvester Manor and UMass are “underutilized” in the state, Lee said, and can “shed light on the lives and experiences of people from underrepresented communities who once lived, labored and loved there.”