Featured Story

Observing Black History on Shelter Island

By Reporter Staff

Stone marker commemorating Sylvester Manor’s enslaved people’s Burying Ground. (Courtesy photo)

As Black History Month is observed through the month of February, Shelter Island’s Sylvester Manor comes into focus as the repository of history and research into a significant period in the Island’s history.

The Manor, now a nonprofit organization encompassing an educational farm, was the centerpiece of an enterprise centuries ago that only flourished as a result of the slave labor that powered it.

Because the estate remained the private home of one family for 11 generations, much of its archives and artifacts were undisturbed over two centuries. In recent years, archeology digs and academic research have shed light on the people of African descent, enslaved and later freed, who lived, worked and were buried at Sylvester Manor.

Photo above of Esther J. Hempstead Green, who was born on Shelter Island in 1823. Esther was the sister of David Hempstead, a founding member of the St. David’s AME Zion Church in the Eastville section of Sag Harbor. Both David and Esther were born free, although their mother was enslaved. The family lived and worked at Sylvester Manor. In 1845 Esther married Henry Green, a boatman who was born in New Jersey, and they moved to Sag Harbor where they lived in a house they owned in Eastville. Both Henry and their eldest son, Charles, died fighting in the Civil War leaving Esther a single mother to seven children. Working as a seamstress, Esther held the family together eventually owning two properties in Eastville. This is a tintype found in one of two photo albums gifted to the Eastville Community Historical Society. (Courtesy: Eastville Community Historical Society).

One of the researchers who has been deeply involved in studies of the site is UMass Boston Professor Nedra Lee, who will be speaking on the subject at the East Hampton Library on Thursday, Feb. 26. As part of the library’s Tom Twomey series, Professor Lee will speak on “Uncovering the Past: Archaeology at Sylvester Manor,” examining the intersection of race, class, sex, and gender in the lives of African-Americans in the United States during the 19th and early 20th centuries. 

She has previously studied freed Black landowners in Texas, but has recently partnered with the Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research to oversee archaeological excavations of the historic Boston-Higginbotham House on Nantucket Island, Mass., and Sylvester Manor.

Julia Dyd Havens Johnson, ca. 1884, Manor housekeeper for over 40 years and the last known person to be buried in the Burying Ground. (Credit: Sylvester Manor courtesy photo)

To register for the talk at East Hampton Library, at 159 Main Street on Feb. 26, from 5:30-6:30 p.m., visit tomtwomeyseries.org

In early January, Sylvester Manor staff members and Board President Marc Robert participated in the first “Island to Island” conference in Barbados. Sponsored by the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill (UWI), the conference centered on The Constant/Carmichael Plantation Project, which is in its second year at UWI. Representatives from Sylvester Manor’s academic partners — NYU, UMass Boston, and the Bard Graduate Center — also attended.

An etching of a sailing ship on an attic beam at Sylvester Manor, made sometime in the 1830s by William Pharaoh, an indentured boy who lived there. (Credit: Beverlea Walz)

The four-day gathering brought together scholars, historians, professors, and graduate students as well as island cultural performers. Papers and panel discussions explored the 17th-century connection between Sylvester Manor/Shelter Island and the Constant/Carmichael Plantations in Barbados, which were owned by the Sylvester family.

A key insight that emerged during the conference was how the Sylvester family and their business partners developed an economic model for provisioning on Shelter Island that served as a blueprint for similar operations in the northeast and the West Indies. 

Students from Sylvester Manor’s academic partner institutions are currently engaged in research focusing on the Sylvester family, Sylvester Manor, and sugar plantation operations in Barbados.

Related Content