The Manor

by Mac Griswold

the census: See “Shelter Island notes re slaves and freed blacks,” comp. Mac Griswold, 2004, SIHS. By 1818 Fanning owned a small piece of land; his name appears in the assessments list of that year, Helen Zunzer Wortis, A Woman Named Matilda (Shelter Island: SIHS, 1978), 31.

  Sylvester Dering sold Comus: For a full property description see an indenture dated September 30, 1828. The record dated Oct. 20, 1827, of the property sale by New York Chancery to Samuel Gardiner had described Comus’s property as “exclusive of the part sold to Comus Fanning which … contains twenty acres and three quarters of land or thereabouts.” The 1828 document was recorded in Suffolk County Deeds, Liber G: 340.1–4, July 29, 1837; the 1827 document in Liber K Ass’t Clerk’s Book, pp. 144–47, Riverhead, NY. SMA, NYU III/A/4/144/16.

  signed another document: This confirming deed between “Esther Sarah Dering widow … and executrix … of the first part [and] the only heirs at law of the said Sylvester Dering deceased, of the second part, and of Comus Fanning of Shelter Island farmer of the third part” includes Widow Dering’s indenture to Fanning, Aug. 21, 1821 (the document that omitted mention of the dollar amount Fanning paid). Confirmation, September 30, 1828, and recorded Suffolk County Deeds, Liber G: 340.1,2.3.4, 29 July 1837.

  badly torn hand-colored map: 1867 Map and Survey of “The Farm Late of Samuel S. Gardiner, Esq.” SIHS: 1867 Map, 2002.1.

  Comus’s will: Will of Comus Fanning, Suffolk County Records, Liber F, 299–301.

  “my wife the woman I now live with”: Will of Comus Fanning. The phrase “the woman I now live with” may have been used to indicate that Dido was Comus’s second wife. Included in Comus’s probate file are names of heirs-at-law and next of kin: an ex-wife, Jennie, remarried before his death; a daughter Ruth, of Boston (no surname given, presumably Fanning); a daughter Hepsibah, wife of Elimas Derby, of Sag Harbor.

  the largest freehold: In 1831 Comus’s property, listed as twenty-five acres, was assessed at $350.00. In Brookhaven, Long Island (a much larger township of 340,165 acres compared to Shelter Island’s 7,676.5 acres), by April 1, 1815 tax receipts list seven black landowners with properties ranging from a quarter acre to two hundred and seventy acres, with property values from $100.00 to $515.00. “Assessment of the town of Sheltr [sic] Island made by Lodowick Havens includes acreage, real and personal property, 73 taxables.” (1831) Dinkel Coll; Fire Island National Seashore, William Floyd Estate, Mastic Beach, NY, FIIS 9669, Box 3.

  only two black families: Crank (no last name given), with a family of five, and Cade Moore, with a family of nine. Lamont, The Story of Shelter Island in the Revolution, 61, and see Griffin, Diaries, 218.

  restricted voting rights: To vote, 1811 state legislation required black men (no women yet had suffrage) to present an endorsed certificate of freedom. In 1822, when property requirements were abolished for white men who had served in the militia or paid taxes, the requirement for blacks was increased from $100 to $250. See Patrick Rael, “The Long Death of Slavery,” in Berlin and Harris, Slavery in New York, 113–46, 131–33; Higginbotham, In the Matter of Color, 146–47.

  “the said Matilda”: “Henry Dering’s Accounts of Dealings with ‘Matilda, A Free Black Woman,’” East Hampton Library; Wortis, A Woman Named Matilda, 48–58.

  “In them days”: Havens, Journal.

  a Dido, aged sixty-two: Church Records 1806–65.

  Julia was known as Julia Dyd: The matronymic persisted in the name of the creek: “Dyd’s Creek” and in the church records for 1838 where “Julia Dido” is named as the mother of a child who died in infancy, no father listed. One later document uses two different surnames: Julia is first “Julia A. Johnson” (she married a Morris Johnson at an unknown date and gave birth to a son named Manford), then “Julia Johnson,” then elsewhere “Julia Havens.” Church Records 1806–65; “Statement as to the Comus Fanning (or Julia Havens’s) property on Shelter Island,” land sales recitation, Davis & Worth for Charles Eustis Hubbard, from “Prof. Horsford,” July 5, 1836–Nov. 8, 1865. SMA NYU IV/A/3/76/23, 29, 38; Suffolk County Deeds, Liber 134, 66.

  her grave in 1834: A copy of Dido’s will, in which she is named as “Dido Fanning,” using Comus’s last name, was apparently drawn up by Samuel S. Gardiner. It may be the original, as it appears never to have been filed officially but was retained by Gardiner in his papers. SMA, NYU III/A/4/46/5.

  19. SUMMER COLONY

  a woman’s hair: As late as 1937, a Dr. M. Kershaw declared that “When the hair grows long the general capacity to endure is weakened … It has been definitely shown that long hair saps strength. Hair drains vital material from the body in the form of oil.” “U.S.C. Psychologist Poohs Idea of Strength in Lengthy Locks,” The News and Courier, June 6, 1937, p. 10, http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2506&dat=19370606&id=zztJAAAAIBAJ&sjid=oggNAAAAIBAJ&pg=3749,4563533.

  postmortem list of her clothes: SMA, NYU II/C/2/30/3.

  his attire: Horsford, “Memories of Samuel Smith Gardiner.”

  his academic career: Samuel Rezneck, “The European Education of an American Chemist and Its Influence in 19th-Century America: Eben Norton Horsford,” Technology and Culture 11, no. 3 (June 1970): 366–88; Pat Munday, “Horsford, Eben Norton,” ANB, http://www.anb.org/articles/13/13-00791.html; Robert V. Bruce, The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846–76 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).

  three years before: Mallman, Historical Papers, 251, 265.

  the nineteenth-century mind: To date (2012), 3,150 books have been inventoried, along with some 500 journals, diaries, portfolios, and scrapbooks previously shelved with the books. Email, Cara Loriz, Executive Director of Sylvester Manor Educational Farm, Sept. 26, 2012.

  Eben’s thin notebooks: The current count (2012) for these notebooks is “around twenty-five.” Cara Loriz, Sept. 26, 2012.

  launching business ventures: George F. Wilson and Eben Horsford incorporated the Rumford Chemical Works on May 31, 1859, with an authorized capital of $10,000. History of Rumford Chemical Works, Weaver Memorial Library, East Providence, RI, n.d., but after 1977.

  private railroad car: The railroad car party in 1880–81 included H. F. Durant, Julian Taylor, Annie Longfellow, and Lilian and Cornelia Horsford. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Institute Archives and Special Collections, Troy, NY, Horsford Family Papers.

  Helen Hunt Jackson: Jackson (1835–85), née Fiske (a relation of Andrew Fiske, m. Gertrude Horsford 1878), lived in Colorado. In 1881, after publishing A Century of Dishonor, an exposé of Indian mistreatment, she was appointed special commissioner for the Mission Indians of California, http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-00836.html?a=1&n=Helen%20Hunt%20Jackson&d=10&ss=0&q=1; SMA NYU IV/A/1/63/34, IV/B/1/94/13, IV/E/1/100/6 and 7; for travels to the West, IV/H/5/107.

  new entrance gates: In 1915, the estate landscape designer and civil engineer James Greenleaf designed for Cornelia Horsford the manor gates and the water gate at the land bridge, which also exists today. Landscape plans and detailed construction plans, SMA, NYU, IV/H/7.

  the Cambridge intelligentsia: A manor guestbook recorded summer visitors’ names between 1872 and 1891. SMA, NYU IV/A/3/97/13.

  Horsford, the president of the Board of Visitors: Horsford persuaded former Harvard colleagues to teach at Wellesley and gave funds, advice, and rare books, including more than two hundred dictionaries, grammars, and translations of the Bible into North American Indian languages. President’s Report, Wellesley College 1888, 4; www.Wellesley.edu/Library.

  a mantelpiece to Shelter Island: Both armchair and mantel remain at the manor today.

  Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic series: His first successful serial photographs of fast motion were taken in 1877 in California.

  “El Dorado”: Zuber Cie, the French wallpaper manufacturer, first blocked “El Dorado,” a view of the snowy peaks of the Andes above a wide band of tropical flowers, in 1848. Eben Horsford invested in Mexican gold mines and Peruvian guano mines, so the choice of “El Dorado” seemed appropriate. See Catherine
Lynn, Wallpaper in America: From the Seventeenth Century to World War I (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), 196.

  Isaac Pharaoh, a Montauket: Indenture, Isaac Pharaoh to Sam’l S. Gardiner, Shelter Island, November 10, 1829. A Shelter Island binding certificate for both Isaac and eight-year-old William, his older brother (who, according to local tradition, ran away and whose later whereabouts remain unknown), was issued to Gardiner by local official Caleb Loper on November 18, 1829. Neither indenture states provisions for education or skills, which were standard clauses in white servants’ indentures. Indenture, SMA, NYU III/A/4/46/14; Binding Certificate, SIHS Acc.#3/Location Ledger Box #3; Strong, “Indian Labor,” 19.

  In winter he lived: Lilian Horsford Farlow, “Memories of Samuel Smith Gardiner.”

  “figures in literary aspic”: “Interview with a Friend … Meet Marilyn Richardson,” Longfellow House Bulletin 5, no. 1 (June 2001): 3, http://www.longfellowfriends.org/bulletins/Vol5No1.pdf.

  “savage fellows”: H. W. Longfellow, Cambridge, to Margaret Potter, October 29, 1837, in “Longfellow’s Early Interest in Indians,” Longfellow House Bulletin 5, no. 1 (June 2001): 4.

  “last of his royal race”: Eben Horsford, “Song of Shelter Island,” August 28, 1872, Bulletin of the Shelter Island Historical Society 1, no. 1 (June 1924): 5–6.

  Frank Hamilton Cushing: Jesse D. Green, “The Man Who Became an Indian,” a review of Cushing’s seminal work, Zuni Breadstuff, republished by the Museum of the American Indian and the Heye Foundation, 1974. New York Review of Books, May 1975, 31–32, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1975/may/29/the-man-who-became-an-indian.

  “participant observer”: Participant observation is “a method of qualitative research in which the researcher understands the contextual meanings of an event or events through participating and observing as a subject in the research.” Wayne B. Jonas, Dictionary of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (St. Louis: Elsevier Mosby, 2005).

  Cushing whetted Horsford’s interest: Cushing correspondence in the Bureau of American Ethnology in Washington, DC, is datelined from Shelter Island and from 27 Craigie Street in Cambridge. He stayed four months in one of the resort cottages on Shelter Island in the summer of 1885, courtesy of Eben Horsford, and then traveled to Boston to stay with the family. Horsford’s manuscript history of the family and of Shelter Island describes Cushing’s visit to the North Peninsula. SMA, NYU IV/A/11/111/20, 21 and 112/1–6, and Cushing letters, IV/A/1/a/58/54.

  issued publications: Eben Norton Horsford, The Problem of the Northmen: A Letter to Judge Daly, the President of the American Geographical Society, on the Opinion of Justice Winsor, that “Though Scandinavians may have reached the Shores of Labrador, the Soil of the United States has not one Vestige of their Presence” (Cambridge: John Wilson and Son, 1889); Julius E. Olson, Review of the Problem of the Northmen and the Site of Norumbega by Professor Olson of Madison University, Wisconsin [sic] and a Reply by Eben Norton Horsford [privately pub., 1891?]. The Boston Transcript, Jan. 2, 1893, 4, published a separate article on Horsford and the Norse hypothesis the same day that his obituary was printed, stating, “With that fervent ‘scientific imagination’ which marks all leaders in research he may have taken some eager strides beyond solid ground.”

  the Senecas: Rev. Epher Whitaker, “Sketch of the late Prof. Eben N. Horsford,” The Traveler, Southold, NY, March 10, 1893; Richard R. John, “Brief Life of an Enterprising Antiquarian, 1818–93: Eben Norton Horsford,” Harvard Magazine (Sept.–Oct. 1988), 44.

  “the father of modern food technology”: Carl Westerdahl, “Honoring Achievement: Rensselaer Alumni Hall of Fame Announces New Honorees,” Rensselaer Alumni Magazine, 2001, 3, unattributed quotation as “the father of American food technology.”

  Asa Gray: For Gray’s life and his struggle with Agassiz, see A. Hunter Dupree, Asa Gray: American Botanist, Friend of Darwin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).

  Agassiz: My description of Agassiz and the debate over evolution owes much to Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club: The Story of an American Idea (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001); also see Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 63–70, and Christoph Irmscher, The Poetics of Natural History: From John Bartram to William James (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 236–82.

  “Lieber Herr Kollege”: Louis Agassiz, Cambridge, to Eben Norton Horsford, n.d., Horsford Family Papers, Agassiz, 1:12. RPI.

  “Time,” he wrote: Louis Agassiz, Contribution to the Natural History of the United States of America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1857–62), 1:25, quoted in Menand, Metaphysical Club, 106.

  “personally thrilling”: For this quote and quotes in the following paragraph, see Menand, Metaphysical Club, 98–101.

  Samuel Morton: Stephen Jay Gould, “Morton’s Ranking of Races by Cranial Capacity,” Science 200 (1978): 503–9.

  Agassiz wrote to Samuel Gridley Howe: Louis Agassiz to Samuel Howe, August 9, 1863. Agassiz letter quoted in Menand, Metaphysical Club, 114–15; writer Henry Wiencek stated that by 1863, mulattoes already made up the majority of people of color. Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 404.

  Owners and backers of mills: New England was the American cotton milling center; New York’s merchants dominated the export trade. Southern publisher James DeBow wrote in 1860 that New York was “almost as dependent upon Southern slavery as Charleston itself.” David Quigley, “Southern Slavery in a Free City: Economy, Politics and Culture,” in Slavery in New York, 283.

  Fugitive Slave Act: Passed by Congress on September 18, 1850, the act made federal marshals liable for a $1,000 fine for not arresting an alleged runaway slave; a claimant’s sworn testimony was all that was needed to make an arrest; the suspect could not ask for a jury trial or testify on his or her own behalf; those who helped a runaway were subject to six months’ imprisonment and a $1,000 fine; and officers who captured fugitives were entitled to a promotion or a bonus. Many free blacks were enslaved since they had no rights in court. For the impact of the act in New York, see Graham Russell Hodges, Root & Branch: African Americans in New York & East Jersey, 1613–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 256–57; for Massachusetts, see Menand, Metaphysical Club, 9–11, and Albert J. von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

  Cornelia Conway Felton Horsford: The Horsford, Agassiz, and Felton families were close. Felton’s second wife, Mary Louisa Cary, was the sister of Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz (Agassiz’s second wife), the founder of Radcliffe College and a close friend of Lilian Horsford, who gave money to and worked tirelessly for Radcliffe from its founding until her death in 1927.

  Northerners into warriors: See Menand, Metaphysical Club, 27–29.

  formulated and manufactured rations: See Horsford Family Papers, Series 2A, and E. N. Horsford to Brigadier General Amos B. Eaton, Commissary General of Subsistence, United States Army, New York, March 15, 1865, SMA, NYU IV/A/1d/74/3.

  a letter to his mother: Horsford, “President Tyler’s Sherwood Forest,” to Maria Chary Horsford, Feb. 14, 1852, Rensselaer, Horsford Family Papers 1:6.

  the moral ambiguities: William Still, a freeborn black who in the 1840s–50s spent fourteen years in the Underground Railroad Service, viewed Tyler’s plantation differently. Edward P. Crapol, John Tyler: The Accidental President (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 249–53; E. N. Horsford to Maria Chary Horsford; source unknown of the quote “a minority that never terminates.”

  “Our walks”: Lilian (b. 1848) remembered her grandfather (d. 1859) during his last years. Farlow, “Memories of Samuel Smith Gardiner.”

  the land she had inherited: The first sale was to Samuel Gardiner in 1836: “Julia A Johnson cash paid you on a/c of land to be conveyed to me having contracted with her for 2 acres more at $2
0 per acre, $20 per acre, $5.00” (October 15, 1836). SMA, NYU, III/A/44/5.

  a summer resort: In his prospectus, Horsford paints the locals as a historical tourist attraction. The wooded “shore of Havens Creek [Julia Dyd’s Creek] … would provide grand views of land and water scenery” for the planned 170-lot development. The open area north of Havens Creek woods comprised some sixty acres. Part of the hotel development parcel, Horsford valued it at $40,000, or $666.66 per acre, with $20,000 for development cost. “Shelter Island Parks: A New Watering Place, On Shelter Island in Gardiners Bay, Opposite Greenport the Terminus of the Long Island Railroad, 94 Miles from New York and 130 from Boston,” n.d. but probably 1867, the date of a map that includes development plats and roads. SMA, NYU IV/A/3/76/47.

  careful pencil sketch: SMA, NYU IV/D/3/99/22.

  Julia’s son, Manford: Manford Johnson, no age given, is first noted in 1842 in Samuel Gardiner’s Daybook 1836–44, in which Gardiner charges Julia Johnson board “for your boy” while Julia is nursing Gardiner’s mother-in-law. In the 1850 census, mother and son are listed in the household of Purple Jennings: “Julia Johnson, black, aged 35, & Manford Johnson, black, age 17, seaman.” Gardiner Daybook, SMA, NYU III/A/3/44/5; Shelter Island Census 1850.

  eighteen half-acre village sites: SMA, NYU IV/A/3/76/47.

  a cautious estimate: Estimates of land prices according to location but without taking into account market fluctuations, including those of the Civil War, averaged $41 per acre between 1840 and 1872. Eben Horsford bought another vital link in his resort scheme in 1872: 18.75 acres “with dwelling house and other outbuildings” for $6,000, which included the area where Winthrop Road (one of the development roads) would cross the mouth of Dering Harbor. Winthrop Road eliminated a long detour to the south around Gardiners Creek for those arriving on the North Ferry from Greenport (the Long Island Railroad terminus). Edward Shillingberg, e-mail communication, October 26, 2009.

  20. LADIES OF THE MANOR

  daguerreotypes: While teaching at the Female Academy in Albany in 1841, Horsford established the first daguerreotype gallery there in partnership with Thomas Cushman. H. S. Van Klooster, “Liebig and His American Pupils,” Journal of Chemical Education 33, no. 10 (October 1956): 493–95.