A Celebration of Black and Indigenous History Is the Focus at Sylvester Manor

Donnamarie Barnes is the director of history and heritage for Sylvester Manor, a 236-acre site on Shelter Island that is the most intact remnant of a former slave-holding plantation north of Virginia.

The manor was given a new life and purpose a decade ago, when the Sylvester family, which had held the land for generations dating back to 1652, gifted it to a nonprofit of the same name, and it became a multi-faceted educational and historic resource, while also being designated a historic district of national significance on the National Register of Historic Places.

Since then, Barnes and others who lead the nonprofit hear the same question come up repeatedly during lectures, tours and other events held at the manor, as well as outreach efforts farther afield: “How come I didn’t know this?”

Telling the untold stories of the Black and Indigenous peoples who lived, worked and were enslaved at the manor for generations, bringing that underrepresented history to life and ensuring it receives the attention it deserves, is at the heart of what Barnes and the rest of the team at Sylvester Manor have been doing for the past 10 years.

Making sure those stories are told is the main focus, but both Barnes and Sylvester Manor’s executive director, Stephen Searl, are acutely aware of the power and significance of the place where those stories are told, which is what makes the manor so special.

Grant funding and donations have enabled Barnes and Searl to get into that history and share it with visitors from across the East End, as well as the country. It’s an exciting time for them, because they feel they are just at the precipice of what’s possible.

“We have this long history of a place that descended through the same family, and it was a place of enslavement and of displacement of Indigenous people,” Barnes said, summing up the long arc of the manor’s history. “In our telling of our stories, we’re not only telling the stories of this house but the land and all the people who lived there.”

Through research undertaken by the nonprofit in recent years, much of which was funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, Barnes said she and her colleagues have “really been able to uncover the lives and identities of people of color, enslaved and free, and tell their multi-generational stories,” which, she said, parallel the stories of the Sylvester family descendants.

“The land plays such a big role in that,” Barnes added. “We are this microcosm of an environment that has been diminished, but still the core has been intact since 1651, and part of our mission is to sustain the land and use the landscape to tell the stories.”

Thousands of years before the Sylvester family arrived, from the Netherlands, the Indigenous Manhansett people called the land that became the manor home, until the colonization period, which led to their displacement. For more than 350 years, Sylvester Manor had many iterations: It was a provisioning plantation, then an Enlightenment-era farm, and then a food industrialist’s summer estate.

Currently, the site includes a manor house, built in 1737, as well as an Afro-Indigenous burial ground, and a restored 19th century windmill.

Farming is still happening on the land as well, which is another key element in the storytelling effort.

“We have a lot of land and a lot we can interpret and share with the community,” Searl said. “It’s the perfect landscape to tell these kinds of stories.”

One of the first and most important of all the untold narratives that Barnes is helping bring to light is the fact that slavery was never a strictly Southern phenomenon, but rather that many landowners on Long Island and throughout the Northeast relied on enslaved people for labor and to power the local economy.

She’s dug into this history extensively with her work on the Plain Sight Project, which she started with David Rattray in 2016. Pointing that out is just the beginning, though. Revealing the names of those who were enslaved, and sharing what they endured, what their daily lives were like — how they cared for their families, the hardships they faced but also the people they loved, the ways they found joy — are all part of the equation.

Uncovering all of that isn’t necessarily hard, Barnes said.

“We always hear people say, ‘How come I was never taught this? I grew up here — how come I never knew there were enslaved people here?’” Barnes said. “Doing this history, finding the stories and the individuals and the names and records, it’s not really that difficult — it really is right there. All you have to do is look and you’ll find it.

“We’ve taken on this responsibility to do the looking, to start doing the research, to start telling the stories, to say the names of the individuals we uncover, and restoring their place in history. Then, the community, as we moved forward, makes the decision of what to do with that.”

Incorporating the discoveries that Barnes and her team have made and continue to make into local communities and schools, and even farther out across the country, is a big part of what the Sylvester Manor mission is now focused on, and Barnes spoke more about why it’s so important, and the questions they ask themselves as they continue to engage in that effort.

“How do we honor these individuals as founders of the community? How do we get these names as known as the families who have streets named after them, who were mostly slave owners?” she said. “This was always a place of three ethnicities: Indigenous people displaced from the land, the English and other settlers displacing them to take their land, and the African descendants they brought here who did the labor, who were the workforce. And, hopefully, what we wish for is that we’ll make discoveries of descendants of enslaved African people.”

It’s important work, but it requires money, and that’s why continued funding is key.

Searl described the Mellon grant funding as “transformational.” Sylvester Manor received two separate grants from the foundation, one from its “Humanities in Place” department. Of the $3.75 million awarded in that grant, $2.5 million will be put toward an overall $13 million capital campaign to renovate and rehabilitate the manor house, and to establish a center for history and heritage in the “newer” part of the house. Adaptive reuse for programming offices, and making space for artists in residence and research students to come and have a place to stay are part of the plans as well.

The remaining $1.25 million will go toward boosting programming as well as growing and expanding the history and heritage department, allowing Barnes to share what has been a heavy research workload.

Another $1 million in grant funding from the Higher Learning Program at the Mellon Foundation will allow the manor to expand its partnerships with universities and colleges such as New York University and Bard College.

“For example, we have a lot of archaeology done here, and we want that to continue at our Afro-Indigenous burial ground,” Searl said. “There’s a lot of work to do, and that will fund that.”

Sylvester Manor has also received generous financial support from the Fisk Center for Archaeological Research, which also helps extend Sylvester Manor’s reach, and ensures the stories and important history that are being uncovered and brought to light can be shared beyond the East End.

“It’s really pushing us beyond the limitations of just the East End,” Barnes said. “So we can be known statewide, regionally and nationally, even internationally, as a place for place-based learning that studies the history of slavery in the North. It’s been a great opportunity and experience to go out and tell our story and spread the message, and have people respond.”

As the saying goes, time is money, and that adage is certainly applicable to the work being done by Barnes and her team, and why the funding is so key.

“It’s not so much that it allows us to do the research, but it allows us to be able to really dedicate the time for it,” she explained. “It’s become a major component of my job and my research associate Alice Clerk’s job, to read documents including church records, inventories, personal letters between family members. We really glean a lot of information.

“They were very chatty, and the Sylvesters never threw anything away,” Barnes continued. “They mention enslaved people by name: Judah sends her love, Violet is doing such and such. It’s even gossipy. So on that level you have to sort of just read everything and live it.”

Doing all the research and uncovering those untold and underrepresented stories is only part of Barnes’s work. There is, of course, the matter of what to do with all that research in a modern world, for a modern audience. In many ways, that’s the part that matters most.

“It’s very easy to go down a rabbit hole of research and live in a bubble, but I try to contextualize what we do,” she explained. “How do we interpret it for a tour narrative or summarize it for a web page or social media post, or what we call a porch talk, where we give a lecture to the community. It’s taking all of that and figuring out how to use it, how to market it and brand it, and make it work for us.”

Disseminating all the information they’ve gathered, and packaging it for different audiences, is the work that will be a big focus going forward. In a few years’ time, when the renovation and revamping of the manor house is done, it will become even more a key component of bringing that history to life and sharing it in new and exciting ways.

Barnes added that continued collaboration with other like-minded nonprofits and cultural institutions in the area will be key as well. Joining forces with the Plain Sight Project, Eastville Community Historical Society in Sag Harbor, the Southampton African American Museum in Southampton, and with members of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, as well as historical societies in East Hampton, Sag Harbor and more remains key.

“We’re all doing connected work,” Barnes said. “This is not just the history of Sylvester Manor but of the East End of Long Island, New York, the U.S. It becomes this much bigger thing.”

As Sylvester Manor expands its reach and its ability to do even more to bring to light the history and forgotten stories of Black and Indigenous residents in the area, Searl and Barnes say their hope for what kind of experience visitors to the manor will have remains the same.

“We want them to take away a sense that history is alive on the East End of Long Island,” Barnes said. “And it’s diverse and inclusive, and it can be celebrated. Despite the fact that we’re talking about slavery, in uncovering the people who were enslaved and their descendants, we’re talking about founding fathers, mothers, families, founders of the community, and acknowledging the diversity that’s always been here, and the individuals who were involved in the history making of the place.

“And that is a celebration.”