The Manor

by Mac Griswold

  9

  WHERE THEY LIVED

  “A Comfort unto Each Other”

  “Sir … it hath pleased god to change my Condition by mariage,” Nathaniel wrote to John Winthrop Jr. “In which, praysed be his name, I finde myselfe very happie, and hope in god we may be a Comfort unto Each Other.” By early August 1653, about a month after the wedding, Nathaniel and Grizzell had sailed over from Newport to Shelter Island—and into their new life. He sent his letter from the island, where the time of the Manhansetts’ green corn festival had just ended. As I read through the faded nineteenth-century transcription in the vault, Nathaniel’s happiness overflows the page; he spreads his wings with wishes; he is transformed into a whole man. He wishes Winthrop would come visit—“Worthey sir, I should be very Glad if it might be my happines onc to see you here on our small spot of ground”—and he proposes a return visit to the Winthrops in New London as soon as his new “bote of 3 ton” is finished.

  Grizzell lived in a time when women gained most of their daily support and comfort from the company of other women neighbors—female relatives and friends. On Shelter Island she would not enjoy that sociable community life, which included everything from lending a helping hand or a kettle to overcoming melancholy (depression) and anger. Once she became a Quaker (probably as early as 1657), she would be further separated from the women of East Hampton, Southold, and Southampton, the nearest towns, by her radical beliefs as well as by a boat ride. Her children were apparently not baptized: early Friends believed that all infants are baptized with the Holy Spirit, simply by being born. On the island, few of the female Africans or Indians, if any, spoke more than a smattering of English or shared her Christian beliefs. Nothing in her life so far (except practice in Christian fortitude) would have prepared her for this particular solitude.

  In her other roles as consort, mother, and mistress of a household, and even sometimes as what the historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich calls a “deputy husband” when Nathaniel traveled, Grizzell must have found recompense. She also effectively became the young matriarch of her family, since no top-dog mother-in-law lived with her, or nearby. Like other first-generation colonial women, she successfully adapted to new foods, new ways of cooking, and other major changes in hallowed routines. Besides the everyday work she and her domestics did together, such as baking, pickling, and preserving, churning butter, spinning, weaving, and sewing, there were other tasks: preparing medicines, tending the sick, solemnly closing the eyes of the dead and washing their bodies for burial. But other New England women, unlike Grizzell, as the historian Carol Berkin notes, “moved freely among their neighbors’ homes. They borrowed and they lent; they kept each other company while going about their chores; they assisted at the birth of one another’s children; and they disciplined their neighbors’ sons and daughters as if they were their own.”

  An entire community of women could gather to assist at a childbirth, an exclusively female ritual. “A New England woman often gave birth sitting in another woman’s lap, or supported by the steady arms of friends as she squatted on the midwife’s low, open-seated birthing stool.” Given the short intervals between the births of Grizzell’s babies (often less than two years), as well as the upper-class reliance on wet nurses, it’s probable that another woman on the island—perhaps a Manhansett or an African—breast-fed at least some of her children. The first baby, also named Grizzell, arrived on August 12, 1654, thirteen months into the Sylvesters’ marriage. The size of their family—eleven surviving children out of twelve born between 1654 and 1675—was not unusual in seventeenth-century English culture on either side of the Atlantic, but the rate of survival was much higher in New England than elsewhere, thanks to a bracing climate, clean water, and an absence of most epidemic diseases.

  The challenges of isolated island living for young parents became alarmingly clear a year after little Grizzell’s birth, when a frantic Nathaniel dashed off a note to Winthrop. His “Yongest Child,” Nathaniel wrote, had been “taken with an Extream stoppinge in ye Nose in so much as that it is Not able to fetch its breth through ye nostrils wch dooth disinable ye poor infant to suck and is Not able to Eat without great payne wch causes the child to falle away exceedingly; and beinge ignorent in givinge of it anything wch may cause comfort unto ye child I have made bould humbly to crave your advise, with such means as yu in your discretion may think most fitting.” The baby, Grizzell and Nathaniel’s second, was two months old. Nathaniel begged his friend, the region’s leading physician, to rush advice and medicine across the Sound: “Our Greif is Great to see the Child lay in ye sadd Condition … and heer wee are quite out of ye Ways of help.” At the earliest, Winthrop’s advice and medicine could only have arrived some three days after Nathaniel sent his plea. The baby must have died, apparently the only one of the Sylvester brood not to survive infancy. The historian Martha Saxton writes that the women of early New England were “strong, self-contained, emotionally subdued, literate and sometimes well-educated women who … considered themselves equal to men in the eyes of God and in their chance for salvation.” Grizzell would have gathered some grim strength from the constant self-examination and strenuous battles for belief and humility expected of every good Christian—and solace from her confidence that such infant deaths were the Lord’s will.

  “The Children of my Brother Nathaniell Sylvester when they were Borne” may have been penned on Shelter Island by Nathaniel’s brother, Joshua Sylvester. Three children are missing from the list: Mercie (born c.1673), Benjamin (born c.1675), and an unnamed infant who probably died in 1655, the only one not to survive to maturity.

  It appears that in 1655, Grizzell put little trust in her female domestics, including Hannah and Hope, “to doe any busenes about ye house.” In the same urgent plea for medical help, Nathaniel inquired about an “Irish wooman” living in his friend’s household. (Cromwell’s subjugation of Ireland in 1641, and the brutal “Irish clearances” that followed, during which “troublemakers” were evicted and English tenants were settled on Irish land, meant that thousands of Irish men and women were sold as slaves and shipped to the colonies in the following decades.) Assuming she was competent, and Winthrop willing to part with her services, would he, Nathaniel asked, “lett me have her resonable?” If so, he added, “I would have her before winter.” On Shelter Island, the October cold was creeping indoors, a baby was crying, and little comfort was at hand.

  Where They Lived

  Nathaniel had been living aboard ship or elsewhere in the rough Atlantic World for a decade by 1653, but nothing, not even Grizzell’s brief years in Newport, could have prepared her for the accommodations that had probably been readied for her on Shelter Island. Where they lived in the first years is a matter for guesswork, even after nine summers of UMass excavations. The articles of agreement signed by the Shelter Island partners in September 1652 state only “That until such time as the place can and will board the charge nothing shall be done about building but what needs might be done for conveniency’s sake, to wit, a house with six or seven convenient rooms.” What a gigantic house for the period, when a one-room dwelling was the norm! There’s a conditional twist to the sentence, however: “nothing shall be done about building but what needs might be done for conveniency’s sake.” So who knows whether the proposed mansion actually could have been built less than a year after the signing? More likely, Grizzell and Nathaniel, and Francis Brinley, who came to visit for a year, along with whatever other (male) visitors or family such as Nathaniel’s brother Giles may have dropped in—and Jacquero, Hannah, and Hope, and indentured servants such as Stephen Daniel and Bernard Collins, all lived together in at most a two-room-over-two house with some crude outbuildings. Even for those used to a standard of privacy startlingly lower than today’s (many people, sometimes including unrelated men and women, slept together in one bed, for example), this “starter house” was a crowded domicile.

  Only from Nathaniel’s will, written in 1680, do we learn about the ful
l array of plantation buildings built and modified over time in addition to a dwelling: a warehouse, barn, tide mill, salt house (for storing enough of the precious substance to preserve meat and to sell), and even piles of bricks set aside for the chimneys of his sons’ future homes. What emerged from the archaeological evidence of the earliest days was not a house, but what Steve Mrozowski called “a dynamic, multi-cultural landscape,” by which he means a plantation employing people of different cultures and skills who lived, ate, and worked virtually on top of each other. We did not learn precisely where the Sylvesters and these dozens of other people lived, but we did get an unparalleled look at how they lived together from the beginning.

  Before archaeologists put a shovel in the ground, they are prone to have what the UMass field school dig supervisor, Katherine Howlett Hayes, a graduate student who became the “memory” of the project over the years, once called “feature fantasies.” (Features are what remain of man-made structures and contain artifacts that give context or indicate use.) In 1998, to establish the datum, or base, for the project grid—a map of the landscape from which all findings would be plotted throughout the full nine summers of excavation—Steve picked a corner of a four-foot-long stone half buried in the lawn by the plantation landing. We fantasized that it had been a threshold for the door of one of the dozen buildings mentioned in Nathaniel’s will. They set up a handsome yellow-legged surveyor’s tripod with an electronic distance measuring instrument (EDM) that captured locations of any points on the site in three-dimensional coordinate space relative to the location of the instrument via infrared beams. From their “datum stone,” across which I imagined Nathaniel may have stepped, the small advance team of archaeologists and students thus shot their digital coordinates to create the first computerized map that would eventually orient the grid excavation structure for the entire dig.

  Steve then sank a first shovel test pit right in front of the house. Such a pit, the standard investigative unit for the first phase of archaeology, usually measures about sixteen inches square and deep, and when it is freshly cut, the vertical interior faces of the hole are layered like a cake. Archaeologists descend through time in the soil via the stratigraphic differences, which they call “horizons,” from each level into the next below.

  When a larger area is opened up, excavators follow across a single horizon, noting the soil’s color and consistency as well as its contents, before exposing the next layer. “Don’t assume any information is trivial when you write up field notes,” Steve cautioned his students. “Record everything, even the weather.” In order to avoid subjective color identification such as “chocolate” or “cream,” diggers keep a set of colored tags handy. Called a Munsell Soil Color Chart, they are “paint chips for dirt,” explained the UMass archaeologist David Landon, who joined the field team in 2000. Each plastic chip has a little hole above the color sample: a fingertip mounded with earth and poked carefully through the hole will tell the truth about the color match.

  None of us could have dreamed up the abundance Steve instantly found in that first shovel test pit. Under the rich black loam—which Nathaniel and Grizzell’s grandson Brinley Sylvester had spread to make smooth green lawns around the house he built after tearing down his grandparents’ dwelling around 1737—Steve had hit the center of a midden, or trash heap. Used by the first two generations of Sylvesters, it was also the repository for piles of building materials that Brinley salvaged from the outmoded original house but never reused. Like privy deposits, middens are archaeological bonanzas, revealing much about cultural as well as physical life.

  Steve’s upbeat mantra about middens—and about archaeology in general—is that nothing is ever lost. As the midden excavation broadened, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tumbled out of the ground from a roughly 120-square-foot rectangle on the lawn facing the front door: 158 clay tobacco pipes, many of them Dutch; coins of five nations; upholstery tacks; brass harness ornaments; ceramics from as far off as Turkey; fragments of a redware candlestick; and a Spanish “cob,” a roughly milled bit of silver, typically South American, with a Manhansett thunderbird image scratched on it. One afternoon, Alice Fiske returned home from her errands in her white Cadillac at the very moment when a giant key (some six inches long) emerged from the soil, which Alice, today’s householder and lady of the manor, took as a salute directly from Grizzell, that “first lady,” who would have held all the keys to her supplies and stores as well as to the house itself.

  Further digging revealed that the midden thinned out as it stretched out over traces of some of the manor’s earliest European buildings and fences, an area later used mostly for work and storage. Shattered ceramic fragments that had been smeared as much as six yards apart from each other by subsequent landscaping efforts were patiently “mended” by Steve and his crew. Scraps of narrow wrought-iron window muntins and bits of the panes they held prove that the Sylvesters had glazed casements, like all those of the middle class and above who could afford more than shutters. Some ground-level floors were laid with terra-cotta pavers. Fragments of red roofing pantiles have turned up by the thousands. Shaped differently from English or Dutch tiles, they may have been made nearby or shipped from Barbados. Everything dug up inside the nineteenth-century driveway that circles the lawn in front of the extant manor house confirmed a fury of building and rebuilding during the first eighty years of settlement.

  That constant activity, and the many microlayers of soil, trash, and architectural debris deposited onsite made it hard to find what Alice wanted so badly to unearth: the “first house.” Not unreasonably, given traditional accounts of colonial settlement, she saw her husband’s ancestors as “first settlers” who built a fine homestead right away, set up housekeeping, and necessarily enlarged their dwelling over time: “So many children!” she exclaimed. She sometimes referred to the house where she lived as “the new house.”

  Alice had read the available histories and heard the many tales of the manor. She had visited the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, and “colonial villages” such as Old Sturbridge and Williamsburg, where every effort has been made to represent and explain the material culture of the past truthfully and to display its actual remnants. Andy Fiske had collected everything he could find about the manor in manuscript and print. From such sources, she could select elements and build Nathaniel and Grizzell’s house in her imagination in a minute. For her, and for me, too, until we bumped our noses against the hard facts, the “first house” had a tiled roof, massive brick chimneys, and window frames and doors imported from England. Inside—ah, inside—Alice and I both imagined the warm light of fires and candles flickering on plastered walls, on children’s faces, and against the crooked panes while snow and wind raged outside. In summer, in the tidy garden we dreamed up, sanded paths wound between the giant boxwoods, and the fragrance of herbs and flowers rose in the air. What we really wanted to know about wasn’t House and Garden but the inner life of the house. From various unreliable later descriptions—all of which had some truth to them—we made that life come alive for ourselves.

  Everyone who visits this marvel of a place is momentarily seduced by the urge to leap over the gaps, simplify, conjecture, or even make it all up. The first printed Long Island history appeared in 1824; by then “the manor of Shelter Island” was more than a century and a half old, and the existing house had stood for at least eighty years. “The twilight zone that lies between living memory and written history is one of the favorite breeding places of mythology,” writes the historian C. Vann Woodward. Such mythology has its uses. Family stories, so concentrated, potent, and clear, cluster around ancient places and make us want to preserve them. For that reason alone, we can take a group pass for our urge to mythologize, and not be too hard on ourselves about our willingness to reconstruct a past “as it ought to have been.”

  Testing the Myths

  By the end of the 1999 season, the midden had yielded some eye-popping treasures. To the southwest, but still with
in the drive circle, the archaeologists found trenches, possibly for posts for a fence or a small building, but no significant foundations for a “manor house.” Excavation slowed while procedures were evaluated. In 2000, they decided on smaller wire mesh to sieve the midden to make sure no pins, bones, or beads slipped through. Because the temporal aspects of different periods revealed by the dig as it continued downward through the soil seemed so jumbled and cryptic, Steve took to digging in hard-to-see spoil layers of five-centimeter increments, or about 2.5 inches, peeling back the strata patiently with a sharp trowel and a brush. We were joined in the field by David Landon, a zooarchaeologist (for faunal remains), and Heather Trigg, a paleobotanist (for plant remains), who also analyzed the findings at the Center for Archaeological Research that Alice had established at UMass in memory of Andy.

  A bare five weeks in the field each summer (followed by another five in the UMass lab in Boston) were proving too short to do what Steve wanted: broaden the search beyond the core area around the house. (On the North Peninsula, excavation also proceeded every year on prehistoric and pre-contact native sites.) Extra funding opened up a tempting possibility: that summer, Ken Kvamme, a geophysical testing expert from the University of Arkansas, arrived with what looked like large carpet sweepers and lawn trimmers to create noninvasive guides to future excavation. With the technologies of magnetometry, ground-penetrating radar, and electrical soil resistance, he would search delicately for signs of vanished structures at different depths underground. The spaces had to be smooth and uninterrupted by trees or shrubs. The locations were designed to tie into the UMass GPS survey. Kvamme tested not only the several acres of lawns surrounding the Fiskes’ house but also parts of the garden left uncovered by Alice’s extensive plantings, and an area that had been clear-cut and manicured on another peninsula jutting out into Gardiners Creek south of the manor house, where one traditional account had sited Nathaniel’s grave. He detected no human remains. Those who expect definitive results from archaeology come, over time, to learn how very difficult it is for an archaeologist to dig without expectations and to come to a single conclusion.