The lands of Shelter Island’s Sylvester Manor were home for millennia to indigenous Manhansett People. The 236-acre site is the most intact remnant of a former slaveholding plantation north of Virginia. Known today as Sylvester Manor, the site was home to eleven generations of Sylvester descendants, from 1652 until 2014, when it was gifted to the nonprofit organization Sylvester Manor Educational Farm.
Over the past 370 years, Sylvester Manor has been a provisioning plantation, an Enlightenment-era farm, and a pioneering food industrialist’s summer estate; and today includes the 1737 Manor House, a restored 19th-century windmill, an Afro-Indigenous Burial Ground, a working farm, and educational and cultural arts programs open to all.
Sylvester Manor was designated a Historic District of national significance on the National Register of Historic Places in 2015.
At Sylvester Manor, we believe that Language Matters, therefore in our written materials, our speech and tour narratives we do not refer to an individual as “a slave” as that designation does not describe the individuals personhood. We say, a person was “enslaved,” “born into slavery” or “was living in slavery.” We use the terms “enslaver” or “slaveholder” not owner or master. Sylvester Manor was a provisioning plantation, “a place of enslavement” not a “slave plantation.”
