Sylvester Manor Archives, Now Housed at NYU Libraries, Reveal 300-Year-Old History of Northern PlantationSylvester Manor Archives, Now Housed at NYU L

By Barbara Jester

In 1651, Shelter Island, NY, located between the north and south forks of Long Island in the Peconic Bay, was purchased as a “provisionary plantation” by Nathaniel Sylvester and his partners, owners of two large sugar plantations in Barbados. The plantation was to supply meat and grain to feed their slaves and wood to make barrels for rum, molasses, and other products. 
    Today the property is known as Sylvester Manor and comprises a 1735 manor house set on 250 acres. It may well be, according to Mac Griswold, director of archival research for the Sylvester Manor Project, the only property of its kind north of the Mason-Dixon line that is preserved with such physical integrity and with so much documentation intact. An estimated 60 linear feet of letters, maps, wills, deeds, journals, inventories, bills of sale, court papers, and photographs, reveal the 300-year-old history of a northern plantation worked by indentured Europeans, impressed Native Americans, and enslaved Africans. It also provides insight into the economic and cultural interactions among Europe, the Americas, the Caribbean, and Africa.
    Eben Ostby, a descendant of the Sylvester family, recently donated this archive to NYU’s Division of Libraries, recognizing the University’s innovative Atlantic history concentration in the Department of History and the libraries’ expertise in archival management, including preservation and access.
    Manuscripts in the archive run from the mid-17th century through 1944, the date of the death of the last proprietor born in the 19th century. Early papers chart the growth of an Atlantic economy based as much on Caribbean and overseas trade as on agriculture in the 17th century and the transformation of that economy to a more agriculturally based and geographically circumscribed one in the 18th century. Later papers show how in the 19th and 20th centuries Sylvester Manor became a “summer place,” visited by such intelligentsia as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Greenleaf Whittier, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Henry Durant.
    The archive also offers evidence of the Sylvesters’ long-term dealings with Africans, African Americans, and Native Americans living on Shelter Island and elsewhere nearby. Notable records include a 1654 Indian deed for a Long Island property, then known as Horse Neck but today a large part of the Town of Oyster Bay, witnessed by 19 Sagamores (chiefs) of Long Island tribes; a 1668 receipt that records the sale of two slaves; and other early 18th century documents revealing the sales of four slaves in Boston and the purchase of two slaves in the West Indies.
    The manor is still occupied by descendants of Nathaniel Sylvester, and the property itself is now the focus of archaeological study by the Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.
    “Having the Sylvester Manor archive here at NYU makes this unique set of resources widely available to researchers for the first time,” says Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Silver Professor of History and an expert in the field of Atlantic studies. “As scholars become aware of its existence and delve into the archive’s riches, they will initiate a whole new field of research in the interconnected early modern Atlantic world.”
    NYU has received a $72,500 challenge grant from The Gerry Charitable Trust to preserve and catalogue the archive. Funds have been received from The Reed Foundation, Inc. ($35,000) and The Moore Charitable Foundation ($10,000). For more information, call Paula Jennings at 212-998-6909 or email paula.jennings@nyu.edu.

Below, the Horsford family, descendants of the Sylvesters, on the manor’s lawn in the 1880s.