The Manor

Three Centuries at a Slave Plantation on Long Island

The Manor book cover

Mac Griswold's book, The Manor: Three Centuries at a Slave Plantation on Long Island, is the biography of a uniquely American place that has endured through wars great and small, through fortunes won and lost, through histories bright and sinister—and of the family that has lived there since its founding as a New England slave plantation three and a half centuries ago. It is a historical narrative that tells the story of slavery, emancipation, racism, prejudice and silent prejudice in New England through a single piece of land.

“A transcendent saga about the power of history and place, about who we were as a people, centuries before, and how that identity is part of who we became.”
— The Christian Science Monitor

The Manor

In 1984, the landscape historian Mac Griswold was rowing along a Long Island creek when she came upon a stately yellow house and a garden guarded by looming boxwoods. She instantly knew that boxwoods that large—twelve feet tall, fifteen feet wide—had to be hundreds of years old. So, as it happened, was the house: Sylvester Manor had been held in the same family for eleven generations.

The Manor photo

Formerly encompassing all of Shelter Island, a pearl of 8,000 acres caught between the North and South Forks of Long Island, the manor had dwindled to 243 acres. Still, its hidden vault proved to be full of revelations and treasures, including the 1666 charter for the land, and correspondence from Thomas Jefferson. Most notable was the short and steep flight of steps the family had called the “slave staircase,” which would provide clues to the extensive but little-known story of Northern slavery. Alongside a team of archaeologists, Griswold began a dig that would uncover a landscape bursting with stories.

Based on years of archival and field research, as well as voyages to Africa, the West Indies, and Europe, The Manor is at once an investigation into forgotten lives and a sweeping drama that captures our history in all its richness and suffering. It is a monumental achievement.

Press for The Manor

Long Island's 110 libraries voted, naming 'The Manor' Book of the Year for their LONG ISLAND READS program!

“‘The Manor’ is strong in its vivid and compassionate description of the horrors of the slave trade...History buffs will love ‘The Manor,’ and it tells a story that needs to be told.”

— The Washington Post

“As the chairman of the East Hampton Library, I have read (and reprinted) dozens of local histories, and nothing compares to “The Manor,” published this summer. ..[it] is not a dry local history. It is not a historical memoir, nor an oral history. Nor is it historical fiction or biography. It is in a class all its own. Mac Griswold has created an exciting new style of historical writing, engaging the reader in her quest for what actually happened on the East End as it was settled by Europeans in the 17th century.”

— Tom Twomey, The East Hampton Star

“This ambitious narrative is well worth it... a transcendent saga about the power of history and place, about who we were as a people, centuries before, and how that identity is part of who we became.”

— The Christian Science Monitor

“Precise, beautiful....haunting”

— The Boston Globe

“...a step toward restoring these once-forgotten souls to a place in our shared history.”

— The Daily Beast

More Reviews & Press:

Book Excerpt

1. The Discovery

Boxwood

It has taken us about twenty minutes to get into Gardiners Creek from a mooring in the town harbor of Shelter Island, set snugly between two peninsulas, the North and South Forks of Long Island, New York, whose tips stretch out to touch the western edge of the Atlantic Ocean, where the Gulf Stream runs close to the continent as it flows north and east toward Europe.

The tide is full as we ease the dinghy through a big pipe that supports a bridge, a bridge so low to the water that we have to flatten ourselves on the thwarts to get through without banging our heads. The pipe acts as an echo chamber, even for a whisper. It is too narrow for us to use the oars, so we brace our hands on the curve of the low ceiling and push. A friend has brought me here to see “something,” but he won’t say what. It is a summer day in 1984.

Finally out in the light, we see nothing but woods looming down to the water. Then, about a half mile off, at what seems to be the end of the inlet we have found our way into, phragmites and cattails fringe the shore. On our right are a few roofs, half hidden in the trees. On our left, toward the east, lies only a salt marsh where white egrets stalk in the long grasses. No houses. Not even a dock, a boat, or a mooring. Gulls wheel above a low hill covered with large trees: oak, hickory, walnut. Turning east means seeing land set back in time, so far back it looks as if it had never been inhabited. We blink, feeling tension rise between the modern world we’ve left behind so abruptly and the past we are rowing into.

A mudbank lies ahead, lurking under shallow water, and we get stuck, briefly. It is only when we steer into the tide channel, stirring up silty brown clouds in the water as we pole ourselves with the oars, that we first see the big yellow house. From its hip roof and big brick chimneys to its well-proportioned bulk, the house quietly acknowledges its eighteenth-century origins. I’m in a time warp.