The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $150,000 to Sylvester Manor to support its 2022 history and heritage planning and partnership initiative.
Sylvester Manor Executive Director Stephen Searl said the officers planning grant funds a year-long initiative to engage with institutions of higher learning and other historical sites.
The foundation’s support enables Sylvester Manor to build “capacity as a place-based center of inquiry, scholarship, and public engagement.”
“Sylvester Manor has reached a point of national significance, institutionally and programmatically,” Searl said, “with a responsibility to share this place’s history of generational enslavement, indenture, and displacement with a broader constituency.”
“This project will build upon existing partnerships, introduce Sylvester Manor to new institutions of higher learning, and connect the organization to similar historical entities and projects that are working to advance more inclusive narratives,” he said.
Donnamarie Barnes is Sylvester Manor’s History and Heritage Director. “These partnerships will provide us with greater historical knowledge and enable broader interpretation of our programs, exhibitions, and tours,” she said.
“They will expand opportunities for scholars, universities, and organizations to use the Sylvester Manor property, collections, and stories to enhance studies and programs relating to the history of enslavement in the northern United States.”
Mellon Foundation funds ‘transformative’ project
The lands of Shelter Island’s Sylvester Manor were hunting, fishing, and farming grounds of the indigenous Manhasset people.
Sylvester Manor, which once encompassed Shelter Island and passed through 11 generations of the same family, is considered the most intact slaveholding plantation site north of Virigina. Now operated by a nonprofit, the property consists of 235 acres of cultivated farmland, fields, woods, wetlands, and gardens.
Historic assets include a 1737 Manor House, an Afro-Indigenous Burial Ground, and various onsite and offsite collections. These include hundreds of thousands of archaeological artifacts, as well as decorative arts, ephemera, and documents.
The Manor offers students and scholars first-hand access to primary sources, said Operations Director Tracy McCarthy.
The initiative will enable “a fuller, truer interpretation of our shared history and chart new paths toward reconciliation, healing, and transformation,” McCarthy said.
“We are excited and humbled to be partnering with The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation on this transformative project,” she said.
