Sylvester Manor

Sylvester Manor, located on Shelter Island, today is a multi-faceted educational, agricultural, natural, and historic property. 

Sylvester Manor’s mission today is to cultivate, preserve, and share the Manor’s history, telling the stories of all people who lived, worked, and died there.  

In the mid-2000s, the Trust began working with the property's owner, Eben Fiske Ostby and his nephew, Bennett Konesni, to develop a conservation plan for the historic 240-acre property, which had been in continuous ownership by the family since 1651. Mr. Ostby and Mr. Konesni co-founded the Sylvester Manor Educational Farm. 

In December 2009, Mr. Ostby donated a perpetual easement on 22 acres along Gardiners Creek to Peconic Land Trust; and in August 2012, Mr. Ostby donated 26 acres of farmland to the recently created non-profit, the Sylvester Manor Educational Farm, allowing the nonprofit to sell the associated development rights to the County and Town, with additional funding from the Federal Farm and Ranchlands Protection Program. 

In November 2012, Mr. Ostby donated to the non-profit a further 57acres along the eastern boundary of Sylvester Manor on Manhanset Road, from which Suffolk County and the Town of Shelter Island purchased the development rights. The purchase was funded with dedicated land protection funds: 70 percent by the County from its quarter percent Bonded Drinking Water Protection Farmland Preservation Program and 30% by the Town from its Community Preservation Fund, a 2% tax on real estate transactions. The development rights sale increased the permanently protected land at the Manor to more than 105 acres. 

In 2014, Mr. Ostby donated the circa 1737 manor house, its grounds, barns, the 1810 windmill, farm fields, woodlands, wetlands and shorefront—a total of about 142 acres—to Sylvester Manor Educational Farm. This is in addition to the 83.5 acres previously donated to the educational farm in 2012. The family retains an 11- acre parcel along Gardiners Creek.