Slaves in the Attic: The Extraordinary Story of a Northern Plantation

by Mac Griswold

The immensely rich biography of a house—Sylvester Manor, on Shelter Island, New York—and of the unknown Colonial way of life it reveals The acclaimed author and landscape historian Mac Griswold brings alive the story both of the seventeenth-century provisioning plantation for the West Indies and of its English-Dutch founders—the existence of which Griswold uncovered in her ten years of research in the secret family vault, beautiful Georgian house, gardens, and burial grounds. Nathaniel Sylvester and his seventeen-year-old bride, Grizzell, converted Quakers, were at the center of early New England radicalism. And yet they owned twenty-four African slaves, who lived in intimate connection with the family. On-site archeological excavations illuminating 350 years of habitation—the longest span one family has continuously occupied the same property north of the Mason-Dixon line—are themselves a fascinating subtext of Griswold’s story. The digs reveal, astonishingly, a Manhansett encampment less than a hundred yards from the house. A number of these people, too, labored on the plantation. The book’s story of this forced merger of three cultures, fused in an extraordinary way of life, has never before been so powerfully documented.

352 pages, Hardcover

First published October 6, 2011