Sylvester Manor, c. 1737, Shelter Island

 

Our Mission

 

Our mission is to cultivate, preserve, and share these lands, buildings, and stories — inviting new thought about the importance of food, culture and place in our daily lives.

Once a Native American hunting and fishing ground, Sylvester Manor has since 1652 been home to eleven generations of its original European settler family. It reflects a remarkably intact history of America’s evolving tastes, economies and landscapes.

Over time, the place has been transformed from a slaveholding provisioning plantation to an Enlightenment-era farm, then to a pioneering food industrialist’s estate and today to an organic educational farm responsive to, and supported by, our neighbors and friends worldwide.

In light of this history, we envision a farm, a community, and a world where people celebrate food, arts, and inventiveness in the everyday, with a spirit of fairness and joy.

 Sylvester Manor

The Sylvester Manor house is in fact a collection of several building and remodeling efforts spanning several hundred years, responding to the changing tastes and needs of its many descendant residents. The original c. 1652 house, to be built of “six or seven convenient rooms” served the corporate needs of the four sugar partners and provided a home for Nathaniel and Grizzell Sylvester, their eleven children and most likely several slaves and indentured servants. Aside from a brief reference to a second floor porch chamber mentioned in Grizzell’s 1685 will, there are no known descriptions of the 17th century plantation-era residence.

As far as we know, the original house remained intact until c. 1737, when Nathaniel’s grandson, Brinley Sylvester, who waged a long legal battle to claim his inheritance, built a new residence close to the original home site. Though the new construction repurposed several beams, doors and other architectural elements from the original dwelling, Brinley’s was a new, fashionable Georgian residence that cast off the family’s hybrid Dutch, new-arrival roots in favor of a style that firmly reflected the sophistication and prosperity of the English leisure class in North America.

Visitors to the Manor will still see in the south-facing front elevation of the current house the symmetrically placed “six-over-six” windows, central doorway, hipped roof and dormers and, inside, the interior features of the Georgian-period residence. Brinley repeated the rigid geometrical design of his house in the 2-acre adjoining garden, where the orchard, axial boxwood paths and formal rectangular garden beds of herbs, vegetables and flowers were laid out in a combination of kitchen and commercial use and aesthetic delight.

The house remained relatively unchanged until the mid-1830s, when proprietor Samuel Smith Gardiner and his wife, Sylvester descendant Mary Catherine L’Hommedieu Gardiner, made several modifications. Gardiner, a lawyer, adapted the house to serve the needs of his busy law practice: a first floor bedroom was remade into a study, with the addition of an eastern exterior side door and inner vestibule to accommodate waiting clients. The kitchen, currently the dining room, was expanded in an “El” to the north, and a cream-colored paint was applied over the Prussian blue and white lead pigment first applied by Brinley Sylvester in c. 1737. To this day, these are the only two coats of paint to cover the Manor’s wainscot paneling in the parlor and the paneled upstairs bedroom.

Two Gardiner daughters, first Mary, then Phoebe, married Harvard professor Eben Norton Horsford and the house, called Abbey Manor by the family, became a summer residence. Life in Cambridge placed the family in the inner circle of the American cultural and intellectual elite, many of whom were frequent Manor guests. During the late-19th century, Shelter Island became a summer salon of sorts as H.W. Longfellow, Asa Gray, Sara Orne Jewitt, John Whittier Greenleaf and other friends spent summer vacations with the family.

Cornelia Horsford, daughter of Eben and Phoebe, had been mistress of the Manor’s gardens for many years before inheriting the property in 1903. Like Brinley Sylvester before her, Cornelia wanted a home that confirmed her place in society and her times; the Colonial Revival movement, a celebration of traditional American roots and values, suited the pedigree-conscious Cornelia perfectly. In 1908, with resources left from her father’s successful food patents, she hired Henry Bacon, architect of the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington, to design a large Colonial Revival addition to the existing house and adapt its older interiors. Bacon widened the central hall and main staircase, installed a new kitchen in the basement, added symmetrical covered side-porches to the east and west, and more than doubled the size of the house with a significant addition to the back. In a nod to the Sylvester’s Dutch origins, Bacon included picturesque blue and brown Delft tiles in his fireplace redesign scheme.

The last resident “Lord of the Manor” was Andrew Fiske, Cornelia’s nephew. Inheriting the Manor from his aunt in 1944, He began a program of modernization that brought the house fully into the twentieth century. Cornelia’s first floor butler’s pantry was replaced with a modern kitchen, with its basement predecessor reinvented as a flower room for his wife, Alice Hench Fiske. The antique coal-burning furnace was replaced by a contemporary gas burner, though the last Sylvester Manor coal delivery, made over a half-century ago, still rests where it was delivered in the southwest corner of the basement. And in the early 1950s, the Fiskes installed a swimming pool near the garden, where it is flanked by the same boxwoods planted by Brinley centuries ago.

The Grounds

The 1651 purchase of Shelter Island included all of its 8,000 acres. Over time, as land was distributed to heirs, sold to newcomers, and needs shifted, the property gradually diminished in size and scope. What now remains is the 243-acre former plantation core, encompassing farm fields, wet and wood lands, formal gardens and grass lawns, numerous barns and buildings, and the Manor house.

In addition to the central structures at the heart of the property, the extended Manor grounds hold a wealth of diverse cultural inventories that directly link the land with social and ethnic interactions, changes in agricultural and commercial use of the property, religious persecution and tolerance, racial inequities, and how these factors collectively impacted the lives of people living and working at the Manor. Their stories live in the land.

On these grounds are the remains of ancient hunter-gatherer Manhansett Indian settlements, predating European arrival by at least one thousand years. A short distance to the south of the residence is a small rises of land between the driveway forks, where by tradition as many as 200 servants and laborers of the Manor are interred. The burial ground lies amidst a huge stand of white pine trees that were planted at the turn of the last century, when it was believed that their clean scent filtered the air and protected against some diseases.

To the west near the creek lies another Manor cemetery, commemorated by Cornelia Horsford in 1884 to all residents of the property over the centuries, including several persecuted Quakers who found refuge with the Sylvesters in the 17th century. There are no headstones for any of the founding members of the Sylvester family here. Today, the site is the warm-weather meeting grounds for Shelter Island chapter of The Society of Friends.

The property has always revolved around food and land. The fields of the Manor have been in agricultural use for at least 360 years, cultivated for plantation, commercial and subsistence production. The “Watermelon Patch”, located to the north of the Manor House, is believed to be the first field put to culture in the 17th century. At one time, the Sylvester fields spread north toward Dering Harbor, east to Coecles Harbor, and south to the Menantic area.

The historic Windmill, in its former location in the center of town. Photo courtesy of Sylvester Manor. 

The Windmill

While the property was still in private ownership, the iconic Sylvester Manor windmill was the only Manor structure in full public view. Built in Southold c. 1810 by Nathaniel Dominy, an East Hampton carpenter and millwright of local renown, it is the only surviving windmill from the North Fork and one of the few left on the East End. The invoice Dominy submitted to the Southold millers reveals that the structure was built by hand in 186 days of labor.
In 1840, the mill was brought by barge to Shelter Island and installed near the site of the present school building in the center of town, replacing an older mill that had burned down. Operated by local miller Joseph Congdon until about 1855, it fell into gradual disuse before being purchased by Lillian Horsford in 1879, who wanted to see the old mill preserved and appreciated. Though owned by the Horsfords, the mill remained in the center of town for several decades more, and was even put back into service grinding meal and flour during a brief period of World War I food conservation initiatives.

It was not until 1926 that Cornelia Horsford had the mill moved to Sylvester Manor, where it has since presided from a rise in the 4-acre field overlooking Manwaring Road. The Windmill Field is the highest natural point on the property and was the first field returned to active agriculture by the Sylvester Manor Educational Farm.

Courtesy of Sylvester Manor (image cropped). Frances Benjamin Johnson Collection, Library of Congress. 

The Gardens at Sylvester Manor

As with the Manor house, the gardens at Sylvester Manor have seen great changes over the centuries as dictated by evolving tastes and needs. The garden planted by the Sylvesters in the 1650s would have included vegetables and herbs, and records show that an orchard of fruit trees was laid out at the NE corner of the current garden site. Though ornamentals would not have been a priority at a site so raw, remote and dedicated to commercial food production, Grissell Brinley Sylvester is credited with bringing cuttings with her from England in 1653 and establishing the first boxwood in America at the Manor. Several generations of Sylvester descendants have used box prominently in their garden redesigns, while other family members took cuttings home and spread new generations of Manor boxwood across Long Island and New England.

The current 2-acre garden is what remains of Cornelia Horsford’s grand 1908 reshaping of the property as a Colonial Revival showpiece. Over the 18th century axial plans laid out by Brinley Sylvester, who had planted the gardens for esthetic and commercial use, Cornelia cut back and transplanted the box hedges, built terraced and parterre flower beds, and, perhaps in homage of the Sylvester’s Amsterdam origins, included a sunken Dutch flower bed, accessed by a graceful staircase descending from the rose garden. In the NE corner of the former rose garden still stands the 18th century privy (or outhouse), painted the same soft yellow as the house, and paneled inside with wainscot removed from the Ladies parlor during a late 19th-century remodeling.

By 1950, Alice Hench was already a passionate gardener at her family’s Dering Harbor property when she met Andrew Fiske, and came to humorously credit their marriage on a shared love of tending plants: “Mr. Fiske came to visit one weekend and said, ‘You have some very fine boxwoods. Why don’t you bring them to Sylvester Manor?’ By Monday, we were engaged.” Thus Alice Fiske began a long and famous tenure as mistress of the manor gardens, often driving the tractor herself. She indelibly left her own mark on the Manor gardens with massive plantings of her signature daffodils and well-tended roses, while faithfully caring for the beds laid out by Cornelia in 1908.

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MAP OF SYLVESTER MANOR

Please call for access hours. Stay on paths. Do not litter. No pets except for service dogs. No smoking or open flames. Do not disturb wildlife or landscape.