Annual Meeting 2021

Members attended the Order’s annual meeting, featuring Lloyd Manor. Lloyd Manor of Lloyd Harbor, Suffolk County, New York was originally known as the Manor of Queens Village, a 3,000-acre provisioning plantation founded in 1660 on Lloyd’s Neck on the former ancestral lands of the Matinecock Nation. This property and surrounding area was purchased by Peter Wright, Samuel Mayo, and Reverend William Leverege in 1653 from Chief Mohannes, also known as Assiapum/Assiapumor.

Nathaniel Sylvester, Latimer Sampson, and Thomas Hart later bought the land for £450. Nathaniel Sylvester, Lord of Sylvester Manor on Long Island’s Shelter Island, was the father of Grissel Sylvester, the fiancée of Latimer Sampson, his business partner. Sampson died shortly before they were to be married, and left her his interest in the property. She then married James Lloyd and together they bought out the rest of the partners of the property. In 1685, James Lloyd was granted “The Lordship of Queens Village” by Thomas Dongan, the Governor of New York and the Second Earl of Limerick.

James Lloyd and his wife Grissel never resided on the Manor of Queens Village, but lived in Boston. Their son Henry Lloyd built the original manor house in 1711, a red saltbox now located on the grounds of Caumsett State Historic Park Preserve. The second Lloyd house, a white Georgian structure known as the Joseph Lloyd manor house, was built between 1766 and 1767, and is currently managed by Preservation Long Island.

The manor’s most famous resident was Jupiter Hammon (1711 – ca. 1806). Born into slavery, he became the first African-American poet published in North America (1761), and a founder of African-American literature.

The Collected Works of Jupiter Hammon are available at the website of Preservation Long Island.

Lauren Brincat discussed Jupiter Hammon’s significance and how Joseph Lloyd Manor became a Literary Landmark. She is the curator of Preservation Long Island where she oversees a collection of over 3,000 objects, 185 cubic feet of archival materials, and three historic houses. Lauren has worked in museums and historical societies for over a decade, specializing in curation, exhibition and program development, and collections management. She has held positions at the Museum of the City of New York and the New-York Historical Society, where she co-curated the redesigned Luce Center for the Study of American Culture. Lauren holds a B.A. in History and Anthropology from the College of William and Mary and an M.A. in American Material Culture with a certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Delaware.

Alexandra Parsons Wolfe, Executive Director of Preservation Long Island, will talk on the recent gift of a group of important early American portraits from descendants of the Nelson and Lloyd families of Boston and Long Island and how these will be contextualized with the storied history of the Joseph Lloyd Manor house. Preservation Long Island is a non-profit organization dedicated to understanding, preserving, and celebrating Long Island’s cultural heritage. Ms. Wolfe has a Master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and a Bachelor’s from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Previously Alexandra Wolfe was the Executive Director of the Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum in Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, New York and as an independent preservation consultant.

David Hackett Fischer, the winner of the 2021 Timothy Field Beard Award for Historical Excellence, is the Earl Warren Professor of History at Brandeis University and author of numerous award winning books: “Washington’s Crossing,” which earned him his Pulitzer in 2005; “Champlain’s Dream”; “Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America”; “Liberty and Freedom”; and “Fairness and Freedom.” Fischer received the 2006 Irving Kristol Award from the American Enterprise Institute and In 2015 he received the Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing. Fischer won the 1990 Carnegie Prize as Massachusetts Professor of the Year and the Louis Dembitz Brandeis Prize for Excellence in Teaching. He is an honorary member of The Society of the Cincinnati, and a member of the board of College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine.