Shelter Island Reporter photo quiz: What is that? July 14, 2024
If you know, let us know. Send your responses to [email protected] or phone 631-275-1859.
Last week’s photo (see below) was no mystery to Fiona Musso, Ed Hydeman, Nick Ryan, Capt. Christopher Stone and Roger McKeon, who all identified the image as The Shelter Island Friends meeting space in the Sylvester Manor woods.
The Society of Friends, known as Quakers, was established by George Fox in England in the mid-17th century, around the same time that Nathaniel Sylvester and Grizzell Brinley married in England and crossed the Atlantic Ocean to become the first European residents of Shelter Island.
Quaker practices include plain speech, modesty, avoiding showy things such as flags and grave markers. Activists for peace and social justice, Quakers have advocated for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery.
Quakers have paid a price for their religion, beginning with their origins in the 17th century. Ralph J. Duvall, in his “The History of Shelter Island,” writes of persecutions of Quakers in New England that began in 1656 and lasted for years, because their beliefs challenged the religious, and therefore the governmental, power structure.
The Friends, Duvall wrote, were “subjected to cruel persecutions including imprisonment, starvation, banishment from their homes, flogged and branded with hot irons … John Rouse, son of Thomas Rouse, who was once owner of Shelter Island, had his ears cut off for being a Quaker.”
In Mac Griswold’s history of Sylvester Manor, “The Manor: Three Centuries at a Slave Plantation on Long Island,” she writes about the Quakers’ belief of “a war against darkness within.”
Duvall tells the story of an elderly couple who had been imprisoned, whipped and nearly starved in Boston but were taken in and cared for, as were other Quakers, by the Sylvester family of Shelter Island.
John Greenleaf Whittier was inspired to write a poem about their ordeal and final sanctuary, with the lines: “A peaceful deathbed and a quiet grave/Where ocean walled, and wiser than his age,/the Lord of Shelter scorned the bigot’s rage.”
All are invited to the Friends Meeting held every Sunday at 10:30 a.m. at the Quaker monument on the Sylvester Manor grounds, 116 North Ferry Road.
