Ignored, Forgotten, Slavery Leaves Clues It Was Ubiquitous Across the East End

There’s a reckoning underway on the East End about a fact of life that was forgotten if not willfully ignored. It’s about people named Cato, Crank, Luce, Drusilla, Nab, Ned, Plato, Abel, Ginna, Sarah, Keturah and hundreds more.

Two teams of volunteer researchers, one on the North Fork and one on the South Fork, have been poring through inventories, last wills and testaments, deeds, letters, diaries, bills of sale, account books, church records, and ads in newspapers for runaways for the last few years. They have been gathering evidence to show — “remind” us is perhaps the more accurate term — that slavery was not just about Southern cotton plantations. It was ubiquitous in the North, too, including the North and South Forks.

People held in bondage in East Hampton included “Colonel Mulford’s colored girl Nab”; Cato and Luce, two enslaved people owned by the Coopers; and Drusilla Crook, a Black girl bound to Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher in the early 19th century.

Last names were rarely listed for the enslaved. But just before the American Revolution, there were two men from Drusilla Crook’s family — Plato, 35, and Abel, 8 — listed as the possessions of David Gardiner, proprietor of Gardiners Island. Drusilla was taken into servitude by the Beechers at age 5.

On the North Fork, one resurrected name among the estimated 550 enslaved people who lived there between the 1600s and the end of slavery in New York in 1827 comes from the will of Zerubabel Hallock II, who died in 1800. Its few words prove the cold reality of what slavery meant:

“I give and bequeath to my wife Elizabeth Hallock two cows and horse and my riding chase and my Negro winch Ginna and six sheep and also to keep her [Elizabeth] a good hog yearly.”

These names and many others are remembered thanks to two independent but cooperating research efforts, the one on the South Fork called the Plain Sight Project, and the one covering Southold and Riverhead towns called the North Fork Project. Coincidentally, each was inspired by a local newspaperman.

East Hampton Star editor and publisher David Rattray started what became the Plain Sight Project in 2017. He soon asked Donnamarie Barnes, the curator of Shelter Island’s Sylvester Manor — the only intact remnant of a slave plantation surviving in the North, with a 1743 manor house brimming with family records and letters — to join him in the effort.

Barnes, a former photo editor at People magazine and other publications, grew up as a summer kid with a family house in the historically Black Ninevah community in Sag Harbor, where she now lives full time. She had volunteered in 2014 as a researcher and docent at Sylvester Manor, joined the staff in 2016 and went on to become the full-time archivist and curator.

Working in a house brimming with generations of the Sylvester family’s art, account books, receipts, dairies and letters, she said in an interview, “these stories and information just started rising to the top for me.”

When Rattray met with her at Sylvester Manor to talk about joining his effort, she recalled, he “told me the story of what he was doing and its potential and what did I think … and I burst into tears and said ‘yes.’”

Working with Georgette Grier-Key, the executive director of the Eastville Community Historical Society of Sag Harbor, and Brenda Simmons, of the Southampton African American Museum, Rattray and Barnes delved into records that were literally “in plain sight,” Barnes said. “As we found more revelations, we became really good friends and partners and decided to create a not-for-profit, the Plain Sight Project.”

They were first invited to speak publicly about their work the summer of 2020 at the Arts Center at Duck Creek in East Hampton. “We did three talks that summer and realized we had a lot to say, and that we were really good at presenting it together.”

One striking truth revealed to them was Sag Harbor’s importance not as a whaling port but — long before whaling’s heyday — as a hub for provisioning the sugar islands of the Caribbean. The East End helped feed the slaves who toiled in the cane fields there.

Rattray talks about the origins of the project in a documentary by local filmmakers Sam Hamilton and Julian Alvarez titled “Forgotten Founders” that premiered at the Sag Harbor Cinema in February this year and was screened again in July. By way of an interview with Rattray and through an evocative and stirring narration by Barnes, it tells the story one of the Plain Sight Project’s resurrected people and his family, the formerly enslaved David Hempstead Sr.

Born in slavery in Southold in 1774, he was taught to read and write by his owner, Thomas Hempstead, who freed him in his 1804 will with a gift of $10. Hempstead raised a family on Shelter Island, where he became farm manager at Sylvester Manor. His son David Jr. bought land in Sag Harbor and became a founder of the Eastville community, where Hempstead Street is named for him.

“I had this idea if there was slavery here on eastern Long Island, it would be limited to a handful of the wealthiest families,” Rattray says in the film. His reeducation started in 2016, after he wrote a column in The Star about the gravestone of a freed slave named Ned who died in 1817, the “faithful manservant” of Jeremiah Osborne. It is one of only two headstones of freed slaves known to exist in the town; the other belongs to a Gardiner family servant woman. (Tellingly, there are no known graves on either the North or South Fork of people who died enslaved.)

In his column, Rattray “lamented very publicly that nothing more would ever be known about Ned,” he recalls in the film. The column quickly triggered “a phone call from a local historian” who told him he was wrong: “Ned is all over” the town records, he recalls her telling him.

There was, in fact, “a lot about Ned” in the books, Rattray found, including the fact that Ned, for decades, rang the bell and swept the floor at the Presbyterian Church. Intrigued and angry with himself for his lack of local knowledge — his grandmother, legendary Star editor Jeanette Edwards Rattray, wrote nothing about the slave record in her own histories of the town, he notes in the film — he assigned an intern to look further into it the records. In about a week, she found 330 names and references to people that were obviously slaves or former slaves.

“We just sort of fainted,” Rattray says in a live presentation he made with Barnes at the Sag Harbor Cinema in 2021, “and the hard work began to figure out who they were.” (A video of that presentation, one of several they have made, can be viewed on YouTube. Search for “Forgetting to Remember: A Discussion of the Plain Sight Project.”)

“Slavery was not something unusual,” Rattray says, starting with East Hampton’s earliest years in the 17th century. “It began at the beginning, with native people in East Hampton the earliest” enslaved people. A 1679 Loper family dowry listing, he notes, refers to “Hope, my Indian girl.”

Slavery and indentured servitude would continue in East Hampton into the 19th century, when New York State abolished it in 1827. Interestingly, Rattray and Barnes found records showing a wave of manumissions in the years following the American Revolution but well before abolition took effect in New York.

The Plain Sight team has found evidence of some freed people who thrived, like David Hempstead Sr. and his son. Others must have struggled, like the freed woman who had to pay off a loan from her former enslaver to build a house and then pay rent for the land where she built it.

The Plain Sight Project is now a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, with Barnes the chair of its board and co-director with Rattray of the organization with Rattray. Its mission, as described on its website, is “to comprehensively identify enslaved persons and free Blacks from the 1600s to the mid-19th century, locate and preserve burial grounds, habitations, and work sites” and “create a template for other communities.”

But there were already parallel and coincidental stirrings on the North Fork, where journalist Steve Wick has spearheaded a collaboration similar to the Plain Sight Project. The Pulitzer-Prize winning former reporter for Newsday and author of the book “Heaven and Earth: The Last Farmers of the North Fork,” he was executive editor of the Times Review Media Group in Mattituck when he launched a series of columns on local history.

Aware of Rattray’s and Barnes’s work, and the absence of any real history on the region’s slave past, he urged local historian Richard Wines and Southold Town historian Amy Folk — and later Sandi Brewster Walker, an author, historian and genealogist who is executive director of the Montauket Nation — to work with him beginning in 2020 on what they dubbed the North Fork Project.

“For generations,” Wick said in an interview, “the story was told from the point of view of the English settlers who arrived in let’s say 1640.” When he had his “conversations” with historian Wines, Folk and Brewster Walker, “I had known about what David was doing in East Hampton and I really respected what he was doing.”

Today the two teams of researchers, and a spin-off collaboration between the Plain Sight Project and the Sag Harbor Cinema called the “Forgetting to Remember” project, funded by a $200,000 federal grant — are building a combined database that will have more than 700 names of enslaved people from the East End.

The grant, obtained through U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer’s office, also funded the “Forgotten Founders” documentary and an associated exhibit featuring paintings by Michael A. Butler that was put up first at the Sag Harbor Cinema in February and more recently at Heritage House, the headquarters of the Eastville Community Historical Society, in July.

The merging of all the data is a work in progress, with some formatting issues still to be resolved, according to the North Fork Project’s Richard Wines, a descendant of two early Southold farm families and an authority on the history of the Hallockville Museum Farm and the Jamesport Meeting House. Wines worked on Wall Street for 20 years managing data to assist with investor relations; he also has a master’s degree in teaching from Harvard and Ph.D. in history from Brown.

“Ultimately what we’ll have is a database of the five East End towns and a history that’s never been told,” Wick said of the work. “I’ve come to believe it’s not just that this story was never told. It was ignored [by] the early town historians and the early researchers on the so-called founding families.”

Curiously, researchers on neither fork have found any descendants of the once enslaved still living on the East End. “I’ve exhaustively tried to trace families into the 20th century but I’ve always run into dead ends,” Wines said. “Basically, they all moved away.”

In addition to economic forces, Wines believes “how they were treated” may have been a reason for a migration of the East End’s Black population to western Long Island and New York City, where there were established communities of color for them. “As slaves, they lived very individual lives,” he noted. “The typical pattern was one of two enslaved people” in a household.

The only exceptions in the region in the mid-19th century were Eastville in Sag Harbor and the Shinnecock Indian Reservation in Southampton.

Wines’s work for the North Fork Project has jarred his thinking about slavery on the East End. “Clearly as a trained historian, I knew about slavery,” he said, “but it has definitely made me think more about how permeated enslavement was in the local culture. Even more, I’m thinking about how did it happen, why did it happen? Why were these people, who were Puritans, who read the Bible thoroughly and were concerned about moral issues, how could they be enslavers?”

There may be no answers for the moral questions, but Wick thinks progress has been made toward a greater the truth. “The study of history on the North Fork is in a fundamental change right now,” he said.

In the last few years, history has begun to be told “in a far bigger way,” Wick said, “and the best proof of that is the Old House in Cutchogue, which once was said to the oldest English-built house in New York State.

That turned out to be untrue. Dendrochronological studies proved the house is about half century too “new” to hold that distinction. But what particularly pleases Wick is a 5-foot silhouette of the enslaved woman, Keturah, who was owned by the house’s owner Jared Landon and lived in the attic.

Mark MacNish, the executive director of the Cutchogue New Suffolk Historical Council, which owns the house, put up the silhouette in February during Black History Month. Keturah’s story is now part of the narrative that visitors hear when they tour the house.

Keturah died in 1867 at age 76, according to her tombstone in the Cutchogue Burial Ground. It is inscribed “Aunt Tura,” which is “likely what she was known as to the children of her enslavers for whom she cared,” MacNish writes.