The Manor

by Mac Griswold

  “Madam Sylvester”

  When sixteen-year-old Mary married her handsome Brinley in 1718, she presented him with a magnificent covered silver porringer made for her father, the New York City pewterer Thomas Burroughs, in the 1690s. Its old-fashioned baroque heaviness contrasts with the later refinements of the offerings for his bride that Brinley purchased from the famed Newport silversmith Samuel Vernon three decades later. Vernon’s two porringers and a tankard display linear dash and nervy delicacy that foreshadow the parlor paneling Brinley would later order. The provenance of these two wedding gifts, New York and Newport, are symbolic of the trajectory of Brinley’s life: always in heart and style “of Newport” in New England, he now would become—at least as far as his commercial circles extended—a colonial New Yorker as well.

  Porringers, small handled bowls for porridge, were often exchanged as wedding gifts. Later generations of Sylvester descendants had their names engraved on the bowl to celebrate their own marriages. (Covered Porringer, made in United States, New York City, 1680–1700, silver. Gift of Sylvester Dering, 1915. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY)

  The Nicoll lawsuit shadowed the young couple’s lives. As they moved into Nathaniel and Grizzell’s dilapidated house with their year-old daughter, Brinley had his dog shipped to him from Newport, along with a muff and gloves for Mary. Although the little family sounds cozily settled, their situation was tenuous because of the ongoing lawsuit with William Nicoll: neither the house nor a square inch of island soil belonged to Mary’s husband. This would be the reality of her life for the next sixteen years.

  “To be lawfully evictd out of the said estate” was the operative clause in Brinley’s 1719 agreement with Nicoll. Mary had been reared to be lifelong mistress of a family domain, but instead she found herself the temporary manager of a house and haunted by the possibility of eviction. As Brinley’s relations produced affidavits and quitclaims to support their kinsman in his fight, the long, costly, disruptive struggle to hang on to the place continued and must have taken its toll on Mary as well as her husband. The hefty payments Brinley made to successfully defend himself against ejectment (eviction) proceedings brought by Nicoll in 1727 and 1736 reflect the effort required. The latter was a large sum—£182 sterling.

  After Brinley won his case and had evicted Nicoll’s tenants, and while demolition of the old mansion and construction of Mary’s future home took place, she evidently went to stay with her family on Long Island until the house was finished. But the day the new timber frame was raised—always a moment of celebration—“Mrs. Sylvester came from the west end to see the raising and a great feast was given on the occasion,” wrote the later island chronicler Lodowick Havens.

  For all its sunny gentility, the manor house conceals very dark spaces. The front, or south, four-room “box” exists much as originally built, despite a string of later northern extensions. Facing south, so as to get plenty of light and sun, were the family’s handsome living hall, now the “paneled parlor,” and what today is called the “landscape parlor,” because of the nineteenth-century scenic wallpaper that replaced its original paneling. The kitchen and downstairs bedroom, which today have been rejiggered as parts of the dining room and the library respectively, broke the force of the north wind and faced the Upper Inlet. Running the north-south length of the house, just as it does today, a central entry hall enclosed the main staircase. Two six-foot-thick brick chimney stacks, opening into fireplaces north and south, heated all four major rooms, an arrangement that would have satisfied any eighteenth-century standard of comfort. The depth of the stacks creates extra rooms between the north and south ranges of chambers, and the spaces to either side of each chimney accommodate the winding slave staircase and two closets.

  A conjectural restoration of the first-floor plan c.1737 is based on examination of the building itself and on the contents of each room as the appraisers found them after Brinley Sylvester’s death. The circular structure in the kitchen was an oven built into the chimney. The “dark room,” described below, is at right.

  In the 1752 inventory, one of these closets—a cubbyhole barely four and a half feet by six feet, opened off the ground-floor bedroom. Accurately labeled “dark room,” this cramped, gloomy space was also unventilated. (A bookcase-lined alcove today, it has a door opening toward the garden.) The inventory itemizes “a bed … valued at £6” in the dark room. Ordinarily, a slave’s straw mattress would have cost less, so this may have been a feather bed; whoever slept here had at some point received exceptional kindness. Even if the Sylvesters treated their human property with consideration—which the scant information available suggests that they did—the dark room and other coffinlike chambers deprived the people who slept in them of more than light and air. Every day, they rose earliest to silently and invisibly do their slumbering masters’ bidding. On waking, whoever slept in the dark room glanced at the bedskirts and curtains housing the sleeping body of a captor. Even if Mary knew little about New York City’s repressive Black Code, she would have remembered an incident that had jolted the entire colony. As a six-year-old in the town of Jamaica, she heard the story of how the Halletts and their five children in next-door Newton had been murdered by two household slaves as they slept.

  Dear Daughter

  Against such menacing shadows, some thirty humdrum letters—sent from the manor between 1718 and 1750—stand out for their wonderful domestic ordinariness. Mary tells her older daughter, Margaret (nicknamed Molly), who is staying with Boston cousins, that a harp is on its way to her. Mary prays that as Molly acquires a ladylike polish she will not forget to “be Dilgent in Making & Mending your Cloaths” and “Consider of the Things that belong to your Souls Peace.” The enslaved people of the household figure casually in this correspondence: Reuben is “very Ill with a fevour & swelling,” reports Mary to Molly, and Brinley writes, “we are all concerned for poor Chlo” and wonders “Wheather she is Living,” since “Our Negros has got a notion she is ded, which I hope will not prove so.” When the “dredful Surprise” of an earthquake shakes the house and rattles the “Cobard of Linnen,” Mary mentions that “our Negrows … Say that both the kitchen doors flew open & put them in a great fright.”

  Death is ever present. As smallpox stalks Boston, Mary fears “what God is a bout to doe unto a World of Sinners.” When Brinley’s sister Grizzell Cotton expires after years of illness, he accepts “the Melancholy tidings” as almost everyone in his world greets death, with Christian resignation and a prayer that “God may be Sanctified to us all.” Reports of smallpox, pirates, and blockades on the Sound periodically interrupt the years, while births and marriages thicken the ties of blood from Shelter Island to Oyster Bay, back to Newport, and north to Boston.

  An account book records cheeses, tallow, lard, and candles produced for sale under Mary’s supervision. Outgoing shipments of oats and live turkeys are balanced by incoming garden seeds (£4.10s. worth—a lot of seeds), two and a half yards of expensive lutestring silk for a dress, and coarse osnaburg linen for slave clothing. Mary longs to send Molly “a Jugg of Sweet Cream” from the farm. Drinking chocolate, “Butter Cups,” and a breadbasket arrive, and a nephew searches for just the right new wig for the Rev. Adams. As a gift, Brinley orders “as good a white damask mantle lined with a white pealing as could be got in the City [New York],” but when the cloak is pronounced unfashionably short, he adds (ever the adoring father), “I am very sorry if it is not a good one, for I spared no cost to have it as Genteel & handsome as any could be had.”

  Tranquillity fills the place on a summer afternoon in 1740. A little dog barks and leaps—probably not Brinley’s old dog from Newport, long dead, but another dog, one of many. (Alice’s small black poodle is named Ezra L’Hommedieu, or ZuZu, after Andy’s famous eighteenth-century forebear.) In the new house, Molly, sixteen, plays her harp and its notes carry on the little cool breeze that today still rises and crosses the creek on every hot evening as the temperature drops. The ai
r blows through the west windows and the entire house and on toward the garden. A “linnen wheel” (Brinley has hired a weaver) whirs slowly to a stop somewhere in the background. Someone is sailing to the town harbor in the “Dorey,” but the breeze has already carried the boat past the Negro Garden on the point, where a woman is weeding the rows; only the stern is visible now.

  In Sickness and in Health

  The tranquil appearance of Brinley and Mary’s family life together as I first saw it differed from its reality. A shared tragedy begins to unfold for me from a single telling sentence in the Reverend William Throop’s 1752 “Sermon on the death of Brinley Sylvester, Esq.” Throop takes as his text “the merciful man” from the Book of Proverbs, eulogizing the departed in conventional terms as generous to the poor, “of an hospitable Temper … an indulgent father, a most compassionate Master, and an assured and faithful Friend.” But then the boilerplate shatters: “He was a most tender Husband, and gave flagrant Evidence of the same, thro’ a Scene of bitter Trial.” Mary had died the previous year, but “flagrant Evidence” coupled with “bitter Trial” does not sound like a reference to some terminal disease. Throop’s allusion to the “Trial” surely means that Mary’s ordeal—a long struggle with mental illness—was general knowledge. The Rev. Adams, whom Brinley called his “Soul Friend,” later remarked that the years he spent at the house of his “dear departed friend” had included “some of the most painful hours of my life.”

  As a conventional upper-class woman, Mary led a life of private domesticity. Her public appearances would have been at church in Southold, or at family events in Newport, Boston, and New York. Had a prominent man like Brinley undergone anything like Mary’s travails, his condition would have drawn public comment, and an appointed guardian would have taken over his affairs. As it is, reports of Mary’s psychotic breaks and treatment are confined to a few mentions in family correspondence, and two revealing letters from a doctor. The onset of her illness may have occurred in the summer of 1742. Mary had just turned forty. In a letter to Brinley freighted with news about a chaise and some chintz shipped to Shelter Island, and a promise of books and magazines to follow, his Boston cousin Thomas Hutchinson writes, “We are sorry Aunt Silvester does not enjoy her health better.” He also politely inquires why no letter has come from Cousin Molly, who seems to have visited Boston a short time before. (My guess is that the news from Shelter Island may have been too painful for a young woman to tell even her relatives.) Only in hindsight does either of these circumspect remarks have any bearing on the struggle for sanity that would rule the rest of Mary’s life.

  In early April 1744, Brinley took his wife to see a Dr. John Smith of Rye, New York, a clergyman as well as a physician. Dr. Smith was, by his own account, “possessed of a Piece of Skill for the help of Distracted Persons,” that is, the insane. It is unlikely that Mary would have had to travel far from home and enter a doctor’s care unless her mental state had reached some crisis. But by the spring of 1744 Brinley and his daughters could no longer manage Mary’s derangement at home, where most “madness” was still treated. Dr. Smith wrote that Mary agreed to treatment in his private asylum—“She is with us [as a patient] and chose after your departure to be so.” What a parting from her husband that must have been.

  At the end of May, Dr. Smith wrote, “My long Silence has been occasioned by the slow advances in Your Spouse’s Case, not having much to write that was encouraging.” He has had “uncommon difficulty in her Case; and tho She be now vastly beter than when She came here; yet such is the temper of her Mind, that when her case will be perfected is very uncertain.” He goes on to acknowledge that “her Case I have never mett with,” but notes that “her countenance is much altered for the better,” and that “she grows very fleshy, looks well to what she did at her first coming hither.” Although Mary has periods “of talking & acting very rationally … when she is more yeildable in her temper to my advices,” she is, Dr. Smith concludes, “being very untractable.” He advises that “of necessity [she] stay here longer … You may expect to hear … when I have anything … to write … Till then [I hope you will] wait with patience.”

  Dr. Smith, who was also the parson in Rye, was caring for the insane just at the end of the period when madness was considered an incurable “manifestation of a supernatural drama, with God, the devil, and the distracted person as the principal characters.” Until the mid-eighteenth century, prayer and fasting were considered as efficacious as medical treatment or folk remedies. Before housing “the distracted” in asylums became accepted practice, living with them at large on the streets and at home appears to have been commonplace, although the violent and suicidal were sometimes chained in barns and outbuildings. Mental illness was just beginning to be associated with physical or psychological conditions that might respond to more specific and intensive medical treatments. If Mary wasn’t so agitated as to require fetters, there’s a chance that Smith’s methods were relatively humane. As a specialist, Smith probably kept abreast of the latest procedures, which included bloodletting, purges, and forced vomiting to mitigate extreme “passions.” Other therapies called for a “low diet”—virtual starvation. On doctor’s orders, Mary may have had a piece of tape, or “seton,” sewn through a fold of skin in her neck with a red-hot needle (to cauterize the wound), and left in place like a wick to drain away whatever poisoned her sanity. The father of Mary Sewall of Maine had a “bunk made for M. to sleep in, with a lid to shut down.”

  Aware that darkness and isolation were standard remedies for “untractable” patients like Mary Sylvester, her family may have locked her in “the dark room.” Was that £6 bed Mary’s “bunk to sleep in”? Or would she have been housed in the equally dark “clossitt” adjoining an upstairs bedroom that also contained bedding? Either way, it seems hideously ironic that the proper place to confine a madwoman was an airless box otherwise deemed perfectly adequate for a slave.

  Throughout Mary’s progressive, chronic illness, Brinley appears to have tried hard to keep her in the life she had known. How long she remained with Smith, or whether she returned to him for further treatment, is unclear, but by 1749 she was back on Shelter Island. A brief respite occurred now and then, as when Brinley wrote to Molly, “Your poor mother has been with me … to wait upon her friends … & behaved very well.” But more often it was, “Through the Goodness of God we are all well Except your poor mother, and she is much as She was when you left … She is often inquiring of me if I have hear’d anything of her Children, and now desires to be remembred to you.”

  The woman who had once penned such long, affectionate letters to her daughters was gone, had been long gone by the time Brinley wrote. I knew nothing of Mary’s secret until my research was well under way; the worst I had imagined was that she had died of some common illness, at forty-nine, in 1751.

  Brinley survived her by only two years. But he must have expected that he would have a long life in front of him: after Mary’s death, he had written to a cousin in Boston to look out for a second wife for him. “I was in hopes and dreams to meet with an agreeable woman of about fourty of a good carector & family … for I find it very lonesome and uncomfortable to live as I do without a companion.” Even though he was a methodical man (to judge from his detailed account books), he didn’t make a will and expired intestate at the age of fifty-eight on Christmas Eve in 1752, only four months after he wrote that letter.

  The manor house was left to tenants yet again, as it had been between 1693 and 1719. Ten years passed. Young Mary was not expected to remain alone without family on the island; she left for Newport, to visit her married sister, Molly, now Mrs. David Chesebrough.

  Alice and I often talk of what went on in the beautiful house in those years, and of the furniture that remained there, and of how undusted and unpolished and uncared for things become in tenants’ hands. If we are in the dining room, our eyes automatically go to the glittering gilded phoenix crowning the fine mahogany mirror that Brinley’s
son-in-law, Thomas Dering, brought to the house in 1762 when he moved to Shelter Island from Boston.

  Thomas Dering, who married Mary Sylvester and moved to the manor in 1762, commissioned a sophisticated rococo bookplate for his library from Boston’s finest engraver (Nathaniel Hurd. Bookplate of Thomas Dering. 1749. Engraving. Gift of William E. Baillie, 1920 [20.90.11(72)]. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY)

  17

  THE DOORS

  Thomas and Mary

  From the mid-eighteenth century onward, in relating the history of the manor, I can turn to portraits, drawings, photographs, keepsakes—and this c.1737 house itself, the earliest Georgian house on Long Island. For the first time, faces survive to match the voices in Sylvester letters. English artists arrived to capture the colonial aristocracy in silk and lace. The English painter Joseph Blackburn, fresh off the boat, painted both of Brinley and Mary’s daughters. Molly wears light blue with pink bows and a demure expression. Her younger sister, Mary, on the other hand, black-browed and black-haired, looks down knowingly from the tower of her long white neck. She is clearly as forward as they get, despite a dainty shepherdess’s crook clasped lightly in one hand and a white lamb nestling in the folds of her blue satin skirt. Carrie Barratt, associate director for collections and administration at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, says: “The image itself is conflicted in a profound way: the lamb is virginal, but Mary is not, despite her white and blue. This dress never existed; there is a complete misunderstanding of female anatomy and of English costume as constructed and sewn. No corset, no fichu; dress apparently held together only with pearls; breast just about falling out of her bodice, hand cocked on her hip, elbow akimbo—altogether a very saucy, bold girl.” (The frock is the kind of garment that the English aesthete Horace Walpole, writing about similar images by Lely and Kneller, called “fantastic nightgowns, fastened with a single pin.”)