Sylvester Manor, located on Shelter Island on the East End of Long Island, New York, is the most intact plantation remnant north of Virginia with ownership that had passed through eleven generations of Sylvester descendants for almost 400 years. Operating as a nonprofit organization since 2009, their mission is to cultivate, preserve, and share historic Sylvester Manor, telling the stories of all the people who lived, worked, and died there and sustaining the land for generations to come.

Donnamarie Barnes, Director of History & Heritage at Sylvester Manor, joined the Simmons Center for a talk to explain the various ways history narratives and stories are discovered and interpreted through storytelling and image-making. Using photographs from the archive at Sylvester Manor and her own present-day images of the place, she presented examples of history stories from Sylvester Manor.