The Manor

by Mac Griswold

  I break off a branch of frilly, shiny, two-and-a-half-inch-long deeply lobed leaves and serious two-inch thorns to take home for conclusive identification. Michael Dirr’s Manual of Woody Landscape Plants confirms my guess: Crataegus monogyna, singleseed hawthorn, one of the two most common English hedging plants, originally used to keep livestock out of cultivated fields and imported into America in the seventeenth century. Peter Banks, a professional plowman and trainer of “heavy horses” (draft breeds such as Shires and Percherons), has told me that hawthorn hedge is still used today in England for livestock fencing and is sometimes interplanted with alder, holly, and blackthorn for additional strength. Could these really be Horsford’s hawthorns? Could they indicate for us, at last, the site of the Negro Garden?

  I must check out other parts of the property while the trees are still in flower, to see if this is the only place on the 243 acres where singleseed hawthorns grow in quantities large enough to sustain the memory of a hedge. Feeling the slow crawl of ticks, less sluggish in the warmer weather, I head through the manor woods and along field edges adjacent to the home grounds. I find only one large hawthorn, by the cattail spring at the top of the Upper Inlet. But on the North Peninsula, 142 specimens stand in a broad, ragged line stretching from the south-facing slope of the Upper Inlet north toward the mouth of Gardiners Creek. I mark each tree with a pink plastic bellyband. Some trunks are less than three inches in diameter, some more than eighteen.

  Using a laser beam shot from a transit atop a surveyor’s tripod to a reflector set at the base of each hawthorn tree, the UMass graduate students input the location of every trunk as part of a GIS (Geographic Information System) program. The program is one of the many that digitally record all the excavated units that were first drawn painstakingly to scale by hand, then backfilled, and then input, throughout all the years of the dig. The GIS program also holds information about each unit in what are called geodatabases, which provide such information as the area of each individual rock or root. Such maps can be seen on a computer screen in sequence (in time) or in layers (in spatial depths).

  This particular map includes rough outlines of all the blocks the archaeologists have excavated so far, the existing features of the man-made landscape—house, drives, outbuildings, garden, and the enormous boxwoods that were my first key to the age of the manor—and, within the outline of the North Peninsula, shown in bright green, one hundred and forty-three little light brown specks—the hawthorn trunks—in a wide, curving constellation.

  A photograph taken around 1900, after Cornelia Horsford had rebuilt the land bridge, shows her proudly atop it. Behind her is the North Peninsula, a startlingly bald hump cleared of all vegetation but closely cropped grass; apparently it was being used as a pasture. Maddeningly, the photographer has framed out of the picture the rest of what we want to see: the westward portion of the peninsula that presumably—wishfully—contained the Negro Garden, and the area Horsford described as the site of the Indian burial ground. But in the left corner of the picture a few small trees stand in a straight line exactly where the thickest clump of present-day hawthorns is flowering.

  In the fall of 2000, the New York Botanical Garden sent two experts from the Bronx to “core” the hawthorns—to determine their age by measuring annual growth rings—and to “observe the landforms,” which is more or less what the Sylvester brothers and their partners did when they first scouted Shelter Island as a provisioning plantation. Long, lean men of a recognizable arborist type, dressed in NYBG dark green, arrived at the manor on a bright sunny day. From a small case they pulled out a Matson increment borer, a simple corkscrewlike device that, without harming the trees, produces five-millimeter-thick, multicolored corings that document the growth of each trunk, from the pinkish heartwood out to the dark bark. The corings of several ancient-looking hawthorns were carefully transferred to soda straws and taken back to the lab to be dried, dissected, and analyzed. These trees in fact proved too young to be Eben Horsford’s hedge, but the scientists concluded they are very probably descendants of the original hawthorns that have grown up on or close to the site of that planting. Nearby terrain provides confirming evidence about the possible sites of the Indian cemetery and garden.

  At the far left of this detail of a c.1900 photograph stands a line of small trees, possibly a remnant of the hawthorn hedge mentioned by E. N. Horsford that “formed the limit of the Negro Garden.” It is just east of the UMass African Garden excavation. The land bridge in the center of the picture was built or reconstructed at this time by Horsford’s daughter Cornelia, perhaps the unidentified figure standing on the bridge.

  Any farmer knows that a gentle south-facing slope, favored by early spring warming and abundant exposure to sun, is a good place for agriculture. Erosion patterns suggest that the area south and east of the hawthorns was kept cleared and cultivated for a long time, but the linear imprints of cultivation have been softly etched away.

  In order to place the hawthorns in context, more corings were taken from trees on the northwest side of the wagon road: two large native hardwoods, a black walnut and a red oak. Both are too young for Horsford to have seen them in the 1880s when he wrote his description. Walnut and oak are forest trees; the trees on the southeast side of the track, where the arborists cored the hawthorns, are smaller in stature and mostly varieties that colonize previously disturbed soil. So the vegetation distinctly differs from one side of the track to the other. The NYBG researchers were confident in saying that the soil surrounding the oak and walnut “has not been used for some time for agriculture.”

  We walked farther north and west, toward the top of the hill and the mouth of Gardiners Creek. The trees, almost all natives—oaks, maples, and walnuts—grow taller here. They are the guardians of this site. Maybe the scientists are right: no one dug or plowed this higher ground. Was it perhaps because tradition said “Do not dig here,” even if the reasons behind the warning had been long forgotten?

  The UMass team opened units down along the south shore of the creek to seek evidence of the Negro Garden. In the steamy summer days, shrieking with mosquitoes, Craig Cipolla led a team that cautiously cleared the thick brambles, bittersweet, saplings, and poison ivy and then even more cautiously lifted dense matted roots and topsoil. Faint traces of cultivation can be as powdery as moths’ wings—the marks of wooden plows or hoes are far less stable than those left by stone foundations. When Craig found long, shallow, crumbly scratches in the earth—“plow scars”—he called me away from the workroom to come see. They resembled the lines of a child’s secret letter written in lemon juice, whose invisible script appears only when the paper is held over heat—except here it was Craig telling me what I was looking at that made me see it. The team went on to uncover possible planting pits or fence postholes and a larger pit containing ceramics dating to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, but not a trace of food waste—a good sign, since they were looking for a garden rather than a dwelling where people cooked and ate what they grew. A second season of excavation produced more inconclusive yet tantalizing evidence: a few more lines in the soil that were tentatively identified as plow scars, as well as finds ranging from pre-contact lithics (chipped stone artifacts) to antebellum ceramics from the era when Samuel Gardiner planted his “six rows of corn in the Negro garden.”

  On September 22, 1680, after Nathaniel’s death, appraisers came to assess the value of his estate, including the women and men, the boys and girls, who had contributed to his wealth with their labor. The nine listed here were held “in partnership,” meaning they were nominally owned by the heirs of Nathaniel’s brother Constant and Thomas Middleton. (The other fifteen people are noted elsewhere in the probate as Nathaniel’s or Grizzell’s property.) The partners were dead, but their claim of ownership of people as chattel lived on.

  Work and Wealth

  By 1664, when Great Britain conquered New Netherland, enslaved and free blacks already accounted for about 5 percent of the colony
’s overall population; in New York City, they comprised 10 percent of the total. The Dutch West India Company had begun to import slaves to New Netherland as early as the 1630s, laying the basis of what would become the largest African population of any Northern colony. Only in the mid-eighteenth century would the proportion of blacks (then almost all enslaved) in Charleston surpass the percentage of blacks in New York City’s population.

  A fair number of free blacks and mulattoes lived in seventeenth-century New York under Dutch rule. And, despite the passage in 1665 of English legislation dubbed the Duke’s Laws, which imposed harsher versions of Dutch precedents, a handful of people of African descent continued to marry whites, own land, and enjoy some of the privileges New Netherland had granted them. Over the decades that followed, a few slaves were freed, almost always by the terms of their owners’ wills after a lifetime of service, or they managed to buy their way out of bondage. A scant number even became landholders and employed white labor.

  By 1698, Suffolk County’s census listed 558 blacks in a total population of 2,679, or about 20 percent. (Among them were Shelter Islanders Tony and Maria; the two Semnies; Hope, Jacquero and Hannah’s daughter; and two other women named in Nathaniel’s will as girls, Prescilla and Grace, all now listed as in Southold.) By the end of the seventeenth century, Long Islanders owned half the slaves in New York Colony, and slave ownership was widely dispersed throughout all levels of society. It remained rare to find establishments on Long Island like that of the first-generation Sylvesters (the region’s largest seventeenth-century slave holding) because the average smaller farm required fewer slaves. When more slave children were born than were needed, it was profitable to sell them, or hire them out, with the master pocketing the profits as a matter of course.

  Nathaniel’s estate, valued in probate in 1680 at almost £1,560, was colossal by East End standards. He carefully specified in his will (as the appraisers would also do in the probate) what didn’t belong solely to him on the island, the biggest divisions being the land (4,000 acres at £700), half the value of the slaves (£113, or nine people), and half the livestock (£207).

  Shelter Island had been held in common since 1651, when the four merchants initially signed their contract. One of the original partners, Thomas Rous, sold out quickly to a John Booth (whose descendants still live in Southold today); Booth then ran into debt and sold his share to Nathaniel and Constant, meaning that by 1660 the brothers owned three-quarters of the island between them, with Middleton retaining his quarter share. In 1680, when Nathaniel wrote his will, the claims of the heirs of Constant and Thomas Middleton had to be respected—at least on paper—which was what happened. Even as Nathaniel described the partners’ legal claims (“the said Moyetie or halfe part of Shelter Island … and of the Stock Negroes horses, Mares Cattle, Sheep, etc.”), in the next breath he disputed them. He complained that he had made “great disbursments” to improve the partners’ half as well as his own; that Constant owed him “great sums of Money”; and that he had been forced to pay to the Dutch a £500 penalty on his partners’ shares, thereby extinguishing his partners’ claims. The only resident partner who had worked for thirty years to create the island’s wealth and stability as a provisioning plantation, Nathaniel was, in fact, claiming the entire place, which, it appears, he loved. None of the rightful heirs turned up to dispute his ownership until 1733, when Grace Sylvester renounced her claim on behalf of young Henry Lloyd, her first cousin once removed, who conveyed it to Brinley Sylvester.

  Using a price index adjusted for inflation, the inventoried items would now be worth $311,817, but the buying power of Nathaniel’s estate in 1680 would have been several times greater than this indicates. Consider, for example, the true worth of the Sylvesters’ clock (an expensive, almost certainly imported rarity in a seventeenth-century colonial household), listed at £3. That amount equaled 2 percent of the appraised value of all manor housing, a ridiculously disproportionate amount by modern standards.

  If we include Nathaniel’s partners’ shares in the value of his estate, bringing it to £2,426.4.4, a comparison with the estates of roughly contemporaneous merchants and planters will illustrate his financial standing among his peers. William Brenton of Rhode Island, a merchant and farmer in the same livestock and provisioning business as Nathaniel, inventoried his estate at £10,768.13.4 a year before his death in 1673. In 1691, Nathaniel’s friend and fellow Quaker Colonel Lewis Morris, of Barbados, New Jersey, and New York, left an estate valued at £4,915, excluding his considerable landholdings. Barbadian sugar merchants like Constant and Thomas Middleton had accumulated still larger estates and enjoyed more lavish incomes. I don’t think Nathaniel made such comparisons; he had started off as the junior partner on a remote island, and he died feeling sure—if no one came along to challenge him, at any rate—that he had become master of all he surveyed, as he expected his children would be after him.

  Nathaniel’s annual income, estimated at approximately £200 sterling (some £365,000, or $589,000 if valued today), which was derived from shipping ventures, the resale of sugar products, and the sale of farm goods, livestock, manufactured imports, and perhaps even slaves, was eight to ten times that of a skilled English craftsman in the building trades. Grizzell’s considerable jointure of one hundred pounds per annum also boosted the income stream indirectly. In 1658, Nathaniel sold a firkin (56 pounds) of butter, two gallons of cider, and a bushel of pears for twelve shillings, sixpence. Had he needed to purchase groceries to supply his own household, instead of producing food on Shelter Island, he would have run through his income fairly quickly. And even though he incurred initial capital costs—for importing cattle, say, or pear tree grafts—most of the labor was unpaid.

  Like every colonist, from the smallest smallholder to the largest landowners of New England or the South, Nathaniel kept much of what he owned in woodland (for timber and fuel) and in pasture (for animals he could sell on the hoof or as salt meat). Many acres lay in valuable salt marsh for hay; others in swamp, bog, and freshwater ponds. The economy of the plantation was a delicate balance between supply and demand for the staples the island produced and the sugar products and manufactured goods Nathaniel imported and resold. He could have purchased more slaves from the West Indies, had he thought he needed to in order to produce more for the market. He didn’t, so it seems the balance worked for him. He also planned that parts of the island were to be improved by his sons as their homesteads.

  Most property owners, when they had cash to spare, bought more land as investments. By 1665, Nathaniel was financially secure enough to option Hog Neck (now Lloyd Neck) in Oyster Bay, Long Island, for £400. By 1667 he owned the mill at Tom’s Creek (Hashamomack) in nearby Southold and had planted an orchard there. He possessed other lots on the North Fork and on Block Island, and he was one of the group (almost all of them religious dissenters of one sort or another) who bought miles of land in New Jersey in 1665. As of 1671 he was listed as a merchant of Newport as well as Shelter Island.

  Planting, harvesting, and threshing the sixty-five acres of “planting feelds,” and planting meadows and grazing land with English grasses, produced precious, sometimes irreplaceable crops. In the first week of April 1678, Nathaniel found his “meadows and mowing land” trampled and despoiled by “divers strange horses” that had “come over to his island” by swimming the narrow strait from North Haven. A peninsula barely attached to the mainland, and therefore desirable as common pasture once the “neck” was fenced and predators killed, North Haven belonged to the nearest town to the west, Southampton. Nathaniel politely notified the citizens of Southampton that “hee, being very desirous to still continue the good corespondence with this said town … and very loth to offer violence to any neighbors’ horses or horse kind that may at any time (unknown to them) make escape to his island, thought good to … procure the same to bee published.” Nathaniel wanted those horses off the island, but “in regard to the present busie time of sowing and planting hee yet giv
es liberty to the neighbors of Southampton … until the last day of the third month (called May) … to fetch off their horses from his said Island.” Otherwise, he said, he would have to destroy the animals, “the which he doth declare he is exceedingly loth to doe.” Nathaniel honored his neighbors “busie time,” but he also cared for his meadows and fields, probably sown with English grasses for summer grazing and winter hay to feed all his stock. A whole year’s worth of labor in the island fields may have been at stake.

  What meaning could their own labor have had for those who got no share of the profits? Tilling an acre of ground with a horse-drawn single-share moldboard plow means walking twenty-one miles, says Peter Banks. A seventeenth-century English field strip measured about five to six acres. (What’s called the “windmill field” at the manor today is four acres.) Because of the inexorable green logic of growth, Banks points out, “you wouldn’t want to take longer than a week to plow any field—you want to harvest it all at the same time.” A suitable “heavy” horse, such as Banks’s big, handsome Major, a registered Shire, who stands six feet four inches at the withers (the high point between a horse’s shoulders), has shod feet that weigh at least ten pounds apiece. When Banks drives this well-broken creature to the plow, he lengthens his own stride to keep up, holds the reins chest high, and is carried springily along the furrow by the powerful advance of his two-ton partner. “Steady, steady,” Banks practically whispers when they reach the end of a furrow. “A well-trained horse can turn around almost in his own tracks,” Banks explains, and Major does just that, his giant, shining haunches shifting steadily, almost in place, from side to side as he turns.