Shelter Island, New York

The Sylvester Manor collection is a legacy collection that has been at UMass Boston for over 20 years. Starting in 1998, faculty and students from the University of Massachusetts Boston began an extensive program of excavation and analysis that continues to unfold. Excavations were carried out every summer between 1998 and 2005 with subsequent, more limited excavations carried out in 2006, 2007, 2019, and 2024. ​Sylvester Manor, established in 1651, lies on Shelter Island, the Ancestral homelands of the Manhansett tribe. This site originally functioned as a slaveholding provisioning plantation that shipped goods to two sugar plantations in Barbados that were owned by the same family for whom the Manor is named. Sylvester Manor is an important location for understanding Black History and the history of slavery and freedom in the Northeast because of the central role that African American occupants played in the long history and memory of the Manor over 370 years.  ​Recent work on this collection has aimed to organize and account for the extensive physical collection and paperwork, as well as study the 19th century on the landscape and learn more about the lives of the free black people who lived and worked on the property at this time. Surveys of the Afro-Indigenous cemetery on the site are currently underway, in order to understand the extent of the cemetery’s boundaries.