About Sylvester Manor
The lands known today as Sylvester Manor were home to the indigenous Manhansett People for thousands of years, on the island they called Manhansack-aha-quash-awamock, the “Island Sheltered by Islands.” In the early 1650s Dutch-English colonists, Nathaniel Sylvester and three partners, established Shelter Island as a provisioning plantation for sugarcane operations in Barbados. Consisting today of 236 acres, Sylvester Manor is the most intact plantation remnant and former place of enslavement north of Virginia.

Sylvester Manor was owned continuously by one family, Sylvesters and their descendants, from 1652 until 2010 when Eben Fiske Ostby, and his nephew Bennett Konesni, gifted the historic site to the nonprofit organization they established. Over the past 370 years, Sylvester Manor has been a provisioning plantation, an 18th-century Enlightenment-era farm, a pioneering food industrialist’s summer estate, and today includes the 1737 built Manor House, a 19th-century restored windmill, an Afro-Indigenous Burial Ground and family cemetery, a working farm, and educational and cultural arts programs open to all. Sylvester Manor was designated a Historic District of national significance on the National Register of Historic Places in 2015.

Our mission is to preserve, cultivate and share historic Sylvester Manor, and the Farm is a critical part of this mission and our work as a community based non-profit.