The Manor

by Mac Griswold

  For me, as a landscape historian, the most interesting and understandable results were produced by electrical resistance testing, which “reads” what’s underground via probes set at one-meter intervals that inject a current into the soil. This detects subsurface soil compaction and porosity, as well as the presence of brick or stone. Kvamme came up with a startling alternative to Alice Fiske’s vision of a substantial “first house”: two possible “first houses”! His experienced eyes organized the blots and dots of electric resistance images of the area immediately around the manor house into two sets of parallel lines and right angles. “Nature doesn’t generally make square corners,” Kvamme said. He read them as the remains of two sets of rectangular structures that crossed under the existing house, and he tentatively suggested that a major change in plantation layout had occurred in the early years. It’s an idea that remains to be “shovel-tested,” as archaeologists call it, meaning excavated for confirmation.

  It quickly became apparent that the scale of the site and the mingled evidence of three cultures made it impossible to excavate fully in brief summer sessions. At the manor, untrained undergraduates worked for four to five weeks under the direction of a PI—a principal investigator, Steve Mrozowski; a field superintendent, Kat Hayes; and trained graduate students. (Almost all field schools are made up of undergraduates: some just want a fun summer, others are already hooked on archaeology as a discipline.) Each summer, the results were taken back to the lab in Boston, and for up to five additional weeks, with support from the National Science Foundation, the field school participants would get a taste of analysis and cataloguing procedures.

  The white space at the lower right of the map indicates the existing c.1737 house onsite, whose presence eliminates any possible archaeological testing. But at left and above, two alignments of subsurface rectangles and straight lines point in different directions. The dark set (A) points right (northeast), the lighter set (B) to the left (northwest). Since both apparently date to the manor’s first period of settlement (1651–80), they may indicate two different plans for a first house complex, built successively by Nathaniel Sylvester.

  Kvamme’s electric resistance readings of the north and west slopes running down to the creek, also as yet unexcavated, revealed a landscape totally different from today’s green and blue stillness. He found “a plethora,” as his otherwise unemphatic report puts it, of straight lines and right angles beneath the slightly lumpy lawn that stretches to the water. They produced strong signals, evidence that suggested stone—walls, footings, or foundations, or the compacted soil surfaces of floors, lanes, and paths—the possible remains of as many as eighty buildings. Thinking about even half that number of structures (all doubtless did not exist at the same time) made the work of “provisioning” visible, as it had been to me in the historical display on Texel Island. On Shelter Island, gangs of skilled workers—slaves, indentured servants, local natives, the Sylvesters themselves—loaded skittery little boats to ferry cargoes to a ship waiting in the deepwater harbor outside quiet Gardiners Creek, returning with sugar, salt, and rum, or with European goods. Nathaniel or his brothers stored everything for safekeeping in the buildings whose shadowy footprints were partially sensed by Kvamme’s electric probes.

  A dowser’s divining rod supposedly senses underground water or minerals. Some say a rod held by a dowser can also detect differences in soil texture and compaction, such as those left by wall foundations. On the flat lawn near the garden where Dr. David Jacques conducted his dowsing procedure, a crude outline was revealed where traditional accounts placed a “first house.”

  Steve’s reports and analyses confirm the existence of an all-purpose outpost that served as both family living quarters and a trading post for transactions with the Indians and with Europeans from other colonies who heard news of the Sylvesters’ abundant imported goods. It included an ad hoc “first house” and several other structures, all located inside the present driveway circle or under the existing manor house. The first buildings had no footings, but were “earth fast” structures, meaning rough timber poles were rammed into the ground and the framing rested on hewn wooden sills laid on the ground between the posts. Indoors, a hearth and perhaps a threshold, such as the long shaped stone by the water landing, would have constituted the only masonry. After a building was demolished, the valuable hewn timbers were often lifted out of the ground and reused, leaving their faint traces in the soil. Stones and bricks were also salvaged, leaving compacted areas that archaeologists call “robbed” foundations, which also have geophysical testing signatures. Of the possible eighty structural remains Kvamme estimated were under the west and north lawns, many may have been robbed for reuse.

  “But I Am a Dowser”

  Family and local lore contradict archaeology, clinging tightly to the idea that the first house stood on the lawn south of the great boxwoods, near Alice’s modern garden on the southeast lawn, not inside the drive circle. In his unfinished manuscript, Professor Horsford wrote that the edge of a foundation could be seen skimming the green grass beneath a pear tree. A standing stone marked the spot, he added. A tall stone still stands on the southeast lawn, and eureka: a photograph from the vault showed the vanished pear tree—but nothing else. Reading Horsford’s account, I found myself in sympathy with the storytellers and wanted the foundation to be there. I understood that this was a “feature fantasy” we shared. The very least we wanted was a single grounded certainty about this vanished house and life.

  Before UMass excavated on the southeast lawn, I had the chance to try another, very alternative testing method, hoping to locate a building that matched Alice’s expectations for Nathaniel Sylvester’s “mansion house.” Alice and I invited my colleague, the eminent British landscape historian David Jacques, an expert in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century landscape design, to visit Sylvester Manor. He arrived one snowy February day in 2003. I asked if his knowledge of small English manor complexes could offer clues to the possible layout and functions of a colonial counterpart: house, garden, courtyard, workspaces, and outbuildings. He politely replied that the commercial aspect of the site—the warehouse, the salt house, the considerable provisioning operation, and the landing—made such comparisons dicey. A brief silence followed.

  Then, to my surprise, Jacques said, “But I am a dowser.” The best case for dowsing, an ancient but often disparaged practice of divination, is that a successful response can depend on the human diviner’s personal sensitivity to a magnetic field as it is transmitted to the divining rod (just an ordinary stick) through his or her hands. The procedure, according to Jacques, who admits it is hardly foolproof, is a kind of natural “geophysical testing.” He believes that the stick supposedly reacts to different densities in the soil, so it can detect the presence of compaction, water, or stone. (Like most dowsers, Jacques had simply tried it one day as a kid, was successful, and got hooked.)

  Before I could begin to tell him what we were looking for, Jacques quickly said, “Don’t tell me anything about what you want to find—or where.” We ripped a flexible forked branch from the nearest tree, and off he walked, this don in a gray cardigan with elbow patches and drooping pockets, holding one of the two branching ends of his divining rod loosely in each hand and pointing the “nose” directly ahead. Back and forth he went, across a stretch of the southeast lawn that I told him I had randomly selected. Slowly, as I poked pink plastic gas-line marker flags through the snow and into the ground wherever Jacques’s stick dipped decisively, a bulky outline emerged.

  The line that Jacques roughly plotted out had a bend or bulge in it about midway along its length. In her will, Grizzell mentioned a “closet or porchamber,” indicating that by 1685 her house had evolved into one of the few domestic buildings in the colonies built on what the Field Guide to American Houses calls a Jacobean cross-plan with a shallow two-story bay, or “porch tower,” projecting from the entrance façade. Whether the ground floor “porch” was an open space with corner
columns or a fully enclosed room, it would have served as a vestibule. The room overhead—the “closet,” then a term for a small private room for reading, correspondence, and prayer—was clearly Nathaniel’s domain because Grizzell in her will noted that it contained a cabinet, maybe the same one salvaged from the wreck on Conanicutt’s shore. Could the bulge Jacques divined be where a south-facing front porch once stuck out, I asked myself? Cross-plan houses often had a rear projection corresponding to the porch. As Jacques moved north, his pointer nosed downward repeatedly, sketching out what appeared to be precisely that: a narrow perpendicular ell.

  Only a few houses were built in the American colonies on this elaborate Jacobean cross plan. (From Virginia and Lee McAlester, A Field Guide to American Houses [New York, 1984])

  That June, although strongly disinclined to regard the results of Jacques’s foray as scientific findings, the UMass team obligingly recorded the dowser points on their official grid and opened a few units. In 2005 they excavated the area more fully and indeed found two huge postholes and a quantity of shell-plaster debris, indicating a sizable building with some finished interior walls. They also unearthed a pair of large boulders—possibly cornerstones, they said. A line of smaller postholes crossed the site. But absent the footprint of a hearth or much domestic debris in the surrounding area, the archaeologists were inclined to interpret the large structure as a barn or other farm building.

  Later in that summer of 2005, however, before the field school ended, Steve walked me through the freshly exposed area and floated a new hypothesis. As is standard archaeological practice once a feature has been fully excavated, the exposed surface is swept as clean as a kitchen floor in preparation for the official field photographs. The smooth, sandy area had been bleached pale by the sun. The big postholes cast ochre shadows into their deep interiors. The two boulders sat exactly where they had been found.

  Steve’s new proposal comfortably fits into the swirl of continual building and rebuilding that characterizes the seventeenth-century site. The first area of European occupation appeared to have been in front of the existing house and probably extended under Alice’s dwelling, Steve said, but another structure, where Jacques’s stick had outlined a building, was built sometime later. Steve referred to it as a “manor house,” and he interpreted the line of smaller holes that crossed the space as evidence of later fence lines erected after that “manor house” was taken down. I wondered if that had happened when Brinley Sylvester tore down his grandfather’s house and built his own.

  Archaeologists are more comfortable with open questions than laymen are, and the question “Where was the first house?” will probably remain unanswered even if and when digging resumes. (The last field school took place in 2006.) The solid reality of the present manor house sits squarely atop the intersection of Kvamme’s two visionary electrical resistance grids. In 1908, Cornelia Horsford, the tenth family proprietor, further complicated matters by having the notable American architect Henry Bacon totally revamp the existing manor house cellar and solidly reinforce every surface with concrete. No one was willing to suggest to Alice that the concrete that coats—and probably by now partially supports—her cellar walls be torn off to check for the possibility of earlier material evidence of the “first house.” She might have agreed!

  10

  HOW THEY LIVED

  A Stone Carpet

  The archaeologists and I agreed that the original house was splendid by the time Nathaniel died. But the handsome porch and luxurious interiors that his inventory lists—ten beds complete with “furnishings,” or hangings; a couch and a dozen chairs upholstered in English “turkey work,” floral embroidery in the manner of Turkish or other oriental carpets—were not all that signaled wealth and status. An amazing fragment of pavement was excavated in 1999 on the south lawn. Alternating squares of large and small rounded cobblestones made from local quartz are bordered neatly with narrower stones. Invasive tree roots and Victorian driveway builders had destroyed the short ends of the pavement, so we don’t know the original length, but an impressive thirty-one-foot section remains. Judging from the intact edges on the long sides, which are finished with rows of slightly larger cobbles, the pavement was originally eleven and a half feet wide. The craftsman who laid the stones followed the standard European method of setting tapered cobbles point-down, burying most of the stone for stability and leaving only a single face visible.

  From the Middle Ages on, cobbled paving existed throughout Britain and Europe on roads, in city squares, and in courtyards both urban and rural. Cobbles supported heavy wheeled traffic, channeled drainage, and kept feet off muddy ground. Pavings were sometimes set in squares outlined with edging stones for additional strength. But at Sylvester Manor, where the squares are set in a pattern of large and small cobbles, the decorative effect is startling, and clearly intentional. Whatever useful purpose it served—a dooryard? a courtyard? a road to somewhere?—this baroque stone carpet also reflects the ambitions of a man who knew it would proclaim the skill, sophistication, and costly labor required to make it. The variation in cobble size from square to square produces a tonal contrast, as if mimicking the black-and-white paving depicted in Dutch genre scenes and church interior views. Certainly on Long Island, the pavement must have been a wonder in its day. No comparable example from that period is known to survive in New England.

  Whether seen from the major excavation area on the front lawn or from the footprint of Jacques’s dowsed outline, the pavement’s strong diagonal movement comes across as a diamond or “diaper” pattern. The effect of that insistent geometry virtually reorients the site from north/south to northeast/southwest, making me wonder how it was originally intended to be viewed. I can’t help thinking of one of Kvamme’s two grids, which has the same orientation.

  Steve carefully lifted a few cobbles at one corner to confirm what we all hoped: this paving was laid very early in the manor’s development, since beneath it he found only pre-contact Indian ceramics. Steve recognized the pale brown low-fired clay sherds by the characteristic glint of “temper,” either crushed local shell or mineral, added to make raw clay stiffer when a pot is shaped and stronger after firing. For more than two centuries, the gleaming cobble pattern had been hidden under a scatter of trash from the nearby midden and a layer of landscape loam that was smoothed over the entire site when the new house went up.

  Once archaeologists have finished drawing and photographing a feature, they commonly rebury it. But the pavement was left exposed—like a trophy—because it was so beautiful and so rare. Weeds sprouted between the stones; frost and sun quickly began to do their damage. Everyone, including me, couldn’t resist stepping onto it, just to see what it felt like to time-travel to the seventeenth century. In 2008 this witness to past grandeur was again covered with a few inches of soil, to be revealed again only if some protective method of display can be found.

  It is an archaeologist’s article of faith that momentous events, such as dynastic succession, trigger major alterations in architecture and landscape. The creation of this extraordinary pavement probably marked some milestone—perhaps the birth of Nathaniel and Grizzell’s first son in 1657, or the Sylvesters’ attainment of the freedoms of a royal manor in 1666 (no military levy, no taxes, the right to appoint a magistrate), which essentially gave them the status of a little fiefdom. Just what Nathaniel wanted. Steve is equally speculative about the motives for laying the pavement. Once, thinking of all the colonists who returned to England or moved on, Steve said, “Maybe it’s when Nathaniel decided to stay.”

  The laborers who laid these beach cobbles gauged the size of each stone, had a geometric design in mind, and followed it to make this patterned pavement, which was concealed for centuries under a few inches of soil on the manor’s lawn.

  Most of the rest of this chapter is not about the Sylvesters; instead, it reveals the little we can learn about the character and lives of those who produced the Sylvesters’ wealth. North of the pavemen
t, and below the parlor windows, Kat Hayes found shell fragments left over from wampum production, rolled copper beads, European straight pins, and fish scales and bones mixed together in one archaeological stratum. So Kat was looking at events taking place in the same space and time. Kat deduced that this was one of the sites where Manhansetts worked for the Sylvesters, carving from shells what was common currency in the 1650s and ’60s. In other words, the Sylvesters had their own mint in their backyard, until inflation caught up with them. The amount of zinc and lead in the copper beads—half-inch to two-inch-long curled metal scraps, not solid beads as we think of them today—indicates that they were probably cut from European copper kettles (copper kettles figured in countless land deals between Indians and English settlers). Hundreds of pins have come to light. Both men and women used them to fasten clothing, even after buttons began to be used more frequently in the Renaissance. Pins also secured documents and shrouds, and they possessed a voodoolike power, it was said, to cast and ward off spells.

  The fish scales and bones in Kat’s excavation hole tell us what some people ate while others carved wampum, or perhaps cast a spell, or simply shed a pin from a doublet as they hurried about their daily rounds. Craig Cipolla, a graduate student with a profile like a Medici prince under a backward-facing baseball cap, once looked up from his work and mentioned that he was analyzing a vertebra as big as a silver dollar from a fish the size of a large tuna. That fish (which it may be impossible to identify) hurtled me back into the never-never New England of John Josselyn’s seventeenth-century oysters: “long shell’d … nine inches long from the joint to the toe … Oyster[s] … that were to be cut into three pieces before they could get them into their mouths, very fat and sweet.” Such riches from the sea must at first have been proof of a mythic world of plenty for the Sylvesters, as they were for Josselyn, before they became ordinary fare, as they were for the Manhansetts.