Community celebrates Sara Gordon, a champion of preservation

In the last rays of a spectacular Gardiners Bay sunset, scores of local elected officials, Peconic Land Trust and Sylvester Manor staff, friends, and family of Sara Gordon gathered at the home of Edie Landeck to honor Ms. Gordon’s 17 years of work with the Sylvester Manor Educational Farm and recognize her profound effect on land preservation on the East End of Long Island. 

As one speaker after another told the story of how she guided the complex land management deals that resulted in the Sylvester Manor Educational Farm, the evening became as much a celebration of the place itself as the person who helped preserve it. 

“Sylvester Manor is a place with this extraordinary capacity to make the Island healthier, stronger, and more resilient,” Ms. Gordon said.

Growing up in Connecticut, she and her sister spent their after-school hours exploring 150 acres of woods adjacent to their home, an experience she credits for her abiding love of nature. The birth of her son in 1992 was the catalyst that awakened her to the need to preserve and defend the land, and to find ways to live sustainably.

Ms. Gordon first saw Sylvester Manor, when the former Shelter Island Supervisor Hoot Sherman, a colleague at the Peconic Land Trust, drove her around the 236 acres of farmland and woods with an 18th-century house and barns that had been the home of Alice Fiske and her husband Andrew, a descendant of Nathaniel Sylvester. During that visit, Mr. Sherman, with his gift of understatement, told Ms. Gordon that there was interest in the community as to what would become of the property.

At a time when development of open space for private homes was booming, preserving Sylvester Manor became Gordon’s mission. “I had a very established, secure job at Peconic Land Trust, with all kinds of benefits, and I decided to jump into this feisty, young nonprofit with a very uncertain future,” she said.

In 2009 she joined the Sylvester Manor Board of Directors, and in 2013 became Strategic Director. During these years, she worked to complete the gift, made final on June 23, 2014, that allowed creation of the Sylvester Manor Educational Farm and the preservation of the farmlands, buildings and historical sites. 

Ms. Gordon said, “It’s just so fortunate, so lucky. When the Board received the gift of this property, there was not a dry eye in the house. It was an incredible moment.” Over almost two decades of service, she helped establish the property as an educational farm, became a Founding Board Member, and preserved 130 acres of the property in perpetuity.

“My motivation for going to the Manor was my concern over the planet and the climate and wanting to do something concrete about it at a particular place. Here was a chance to innovate and demonstrate and show the community and the world what could be done.” 

To that end, she led the implementation of the Manor’s Clean Water Project, Suffolk County’s first non-proprietary constructed wetland alternative wastewater treatment system, operating since 2017, when it was welcomed by County and local officials with “the First Flush.”  

Ms. Gordon also helped establish a food scrap collection process in 2019, which is now a Town-wide service, returning thousands of pounds of household food waste to the land as compost, and keeping it out of the waste stream.

“Sylvester Manor is one precious corner of this glorious earth that we’ve been able to protect for all time,” she said in a recent interview. That work will still be part of her life, even in retirement. “I will be putting more time into climate-crisis centered work. I don’t know what shape that will take.”

A possible hint to her future activities is the recent acquisition of a new violin. “I’m a member of the board of the Shelter Island Friends of Music, and I’m going to keep doing that,” she said. “I’m going to play a lot more violin. Take that outward focusing energy and just kind of turn it to Sara and see what comes with that.”

Summing up her time at the Manor, and her life’s work, she said, “It has been a magical journey that brought wonders beyond imagining into my life. I’ll always be a part of it, and it will always be a part of me. Thankful doesn’t begin to say it all, but boy, am I thankful.”