Sylvester Manor Partners w/ Univ. of West Indies to Research Sugar Production

SYLVESTER MANOR PARTNERS WITH

UNIVERSITY OF WEST INDIES IN BARBADOS

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Historic Research Project

Connects Sugar Production, Trade and Enslavement

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Sylvester Manor is proud to announce a collaboration with the University of the West Indies (UWI), Cave Hill, Barbados, on a three-year research project exploring the historical and economic ties between Barbados and Shelter Island. Supported by a $1M grant from the Mellon Foundation awarded to UWI, the project aims to uncover the complex legacy of sugar production, trade, and enslavement.

Sylvester Manor stands on land that was originally the ancestral home of the indigenous Manhansett People of Shelter Island. The Island was established as a provisioning plantation in 1652 when it was purchased by a group of four business partners and Barbados sugar plantation owners including the Anglo-Dutch brothers Nathaniel and Constant Sylvester. This northern plantation supplied foodstuffs and materials to their Barbadian sugar operations at Constant and Carmichael plantations. The Manor’s history is inextricably tied to the larger Atlantic World, shaped by the labor and lives of Enslaved Africans and Free People of Color who worked the land from the 17th through the 19th centuries. The Sylvesters’ plantations in Barbados thrived on the brutal sugar economy, and the provisioning plantation at Shelter Island played a critical role in sustaining that system, supplying essential goods like livestock, preserved meats, timber, and grains to support sugar production in the Caribbean.

This new collaboration with the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill marks a pivotal moment in Sylvester Manor’s evolution as a center for scholarship and public engagement. Over the next three years, this project will focus on the connections between Barbados and Shelter Island, exploring how the provisioning plantation at Sylvester Manor supported and sustained the sugar plantations in Barbados. The project will feature key project components including study tours for students from UWI and U.S. universities, fellowships for faculty and graduate students to advance research, academic conferences, and the creation of a documentary, podcasts, and a research collection at the UWI library housing records of the project.

Director of History and Heritage Donnamarie Barnes noted, “The partnership between Sylvester Manor and UWI, Cave Hill presents a unique opportunity to bridge academic scholarship and public history, connecting the histories of Northern Slavery and the Caribbean economy through the lived experiences of those who labored under these systems. By examining Sylvester Manor’s role in Barbados and within the broader Atlantic World, we aim to foster a more comprehensive and inclusive understanding of the transatlantic slave economy and its lasting legacies.”

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Sylvester Manor: 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 provisioning 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. 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.

For more information, visit www.sylvestermanor.org

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AAQ / Resouce

Araiys Design Landscape Architects

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