Plain Sight Project — a collaboration of the East Hampton Star and East Hampton Public Library — is working to comprehensively identify, enumerate and restore the stories of enslaved individuals of African descent to their essential place in American history.
The project began with a local focus and spread throughout the East End. A chief ambition: create a template that’s useful anywhere. Sylvester Manor Educational Farm is onboard. So how can you help?
Find out at a socially distanced gathering on the back porch of the 1737 Manor House. It takes place Saturday, September 26 at 4 PM. To ensure the health and safety of all, only 45 guests may attend. Seating will accord with federal and state pandemic guidelines. Attendees must wear masks at all times. Reserve your free tickets at sylvestermanor.org.
You’ll hear from David Rattray, editor-in-chief and owner of the East Hampton Star. He created and is a director of Plain Sight Project. And also from Donnamarie Barnes. She’s curator/archivist at the nonprofit Sylvester Manor Educational Farm and chairwoman of the Plain Sight Project board.
Hidden in plain sight
Enslaved people likely built and certainly worked and lived in the Manor House. It’s a significant local example of slavery hidden in plain sight. Work is underway to improve visitor access to a burial ground nearby where the remains of some 200 enslaved and indentured workers lie.
Slavery was part of Shelter Island’s history from 1652 when a European syndicate established a provisioning plantation here to support its sugar operations in Barbados.
Rattray and Barnes will talk about the role of slavery in the earliest days of Long Island Colonial life. It was a time when people of African heritage were present on farms and in the homes of nearly every European family of means. But we know very little about them.
“We want to be able to say something, however simple, about every single individual whose identity we find,” Plain Sight Project says on its website. “We study account books, church birth and death records, wills and probate records, and a range of other primary sources to find individual enslaved persons and to be able to learn something about them.”
Plain Sight Project is identifying, locating, and preserving burial grounds, habitations, and worksites. What’s more, it is working with individuals and organizations to share the methods it has developed.
About David Rattray
David is the owner and editor of The East Hampton Star. He’s the fifth member of the Rattray family over three generations to hold the post. He attended the Hampton Day School in Bridgehampton and is a graduate of East Hampton High School and Dartmouth College.
David was a field archaeologist for the American Museum of Natural History and was an associate producer for documentary television programs. For Design Division, a museum design firm in Manhattan, he worked on projects for the Catawba and Mashantucket Pequot Nations.
He returned to East Hampton in 1998 to work at The Star, becoming editor in 2003, succeeding his mother, Helen S. Rattray.
About Donnamarie Barnes
Donnamarie began working at Sylvester Manor Educational Farm in 2014 as a volunteer and history docent. In 2016, she joined the staff as curator/archivist. Over the next three years drew from Manor collections to present annual exhibitions — “Women of the Manor”, “A Place in Pictures”, and “All That Has Been: Our Roots Revealed”.
Her work uncovering the lives and identities of the enslaved and indigenous people of Sylvester Manor is an integral part of the nonprofit’s history and heritage mission.
Donnamarie spent over 30 years working in the editorial photography field. She was a photographer and photo editor for People and Essence magazines. And, she was an editor at the Gamma Liaison photo agency.
A life-long resident of Ninevah Beach in Sag Habor’s historic SANS community, she grew up photographing the community and the beach landscape and curated “Collective Identity”, a highly-acclaimed tintype exhibition in 2015 at the Eastville Community Historical Society.
Sylvester Manor Educational Farm
Once Native American hunting, fishing, and farming ground, Sylvester Manor originally encompassed all of Shelter Island. From 1652 to 2006 it was home to 11 generations of the original European settler family.
Over time, the Town of Shelter Island was established. The estate grew smaller as parcels were sold or given away, and was transformed into an Enlightenment Era farm. Later it became a pioneering food industrialist’s summer home.
Gifted to the Shelter Island community in 2014, the 235-acre historic site is the most intact slaveholding plantation remnant north of Virginia. Today Sylvester Manor Educational Farm cultivates organic produce and offers arts and educational programming.
The property occupies the entire eastern bank of Gardiners Creek. Features include the Manor House, a 19th-century windmill, a rustic farmstand, and acres of forests and fields with public trails open from dawn to dusk.
