For the third week, I have had an article in the paper about East Hampton’s history of slavery. This is part of a much larger project started about three years ago to identify every enslaved person who ever lived in the town.
I, with my eldest daughter, Adelia, and Donnamarie Barnes, the curator at Sylvester Manor on Shelter Island, have begun to expand what we call the Plain Sight Project into other communities. And a high school volunteer, Jon Kuperschmid, is preparing to take our message to East Hampton Middle School students this spring.
The message is that not only did slavery exist in New England and on Long Island, it was inseparable from the region’s early economy. As I have said, this project was born in ignorance.
Going into it, I knew there had been at least a handful of enslaved people in East Hampton, but thought — wrongly — that they had more or less all been on Gardiner’s Island. As we learned more, it became clear that just about every family of means had owned other human beings.
One afternoon, walking into the village, it hit me that nearly every street was named for a slave owner — Huntting, Buell, Dayton, Osborne, Mulford, Hedges, and so on.
The earliest reference we have seen to an enslaved person in East Hampton comes from 1654. The earliest free black in the area may have been a man named Peter, who in 1659 had already been living in Southampton for some time and moved to a new home plot at Mecox.
The articles we are running this month are only a few, small parts of a much larger and more complicated story. I invite anyone interested in learning more to visit our website, plainsightproject.org, or get in touch with me at The Star.