Manor

In 1984 the landscape historian Mac Griswold was rowing along a Long Island creek when she came upon Sylvester Manor a stately mansion guarded by hulking boxwoods. When Griswold went inside she encountered a house full of revelations including a letter from Thomas Jefferson and―most remarkable and disturbing―what the aged owner Andrew Fiske casually called the slave staircase.This staircase would reveal the extensive but little-known story of Northern slavery and in 1997 Griswold returned with a team of archaeologists uncovering a landscape filled with stories. Based on years of research―and voyages that took her as far as West Africa―Griswold has given us both the biography of a place that has witnessed war and reversals in fortune and the riveting story of the family that has occupied it for three centuries. A fine-grained account and a sweeping drama The Manor captures American history in all its richness and contradictions.