Significance of the Afro-Indigenous Cemetery at Sylvester Manor

A gathering at the burial ground site.

From the 17th to 21st century, the Afro-Indigenous Burial Ground at Sylvester Manor has been a sacred space for the people of color connected to the manor. Up until the beginning of the 20th century, both the black and indigenous communities with ties to the manor have used the cemetery as place to memorialize their loved ones. Even those who left the manor and Shelter Island completely often requested to be taken back and buried there upon their deaths. The fact of this longstanding practice is evidence for the immense cultural significance of the burial ground to the manor’s present and past communities of color.

A stone boulder marking the burial ground’s location, placed in the later 19th-century.

Today the cemetery is covered in pine forest, but that is a recent alteration to the landscape. Prior to the early 20th century, the burial ground would have appeared as an open field, “nestled behind a small knoll under the shade of a century old oak” (Woltz 2020). It is in this past landscape that free and enslaved black inhabitants of Sylvester Manor and the surrounding area returned to again and again to bury and remember their dead. This was probably also the state of the landscape when the cemetery was first established by the enslaved Africans brought to Shelter island in the late 17th century.

By establishing their own place of memorialization, the enslaved community at Sylvester Manor left their mark both on the landscape and the cultural memory of Sylvester Manor. For this reason, the continued study of the Afro-Indigenous Cemetery and its past landscape is an essential part of illuminating the lives and experiences of the manor's earliest black inhabitants and their descendants.

Images:

A gathering at the burial ground site.

A stone boulder marking the burial ground’s location, placed in the later 19th-century.