As the United States prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday next year, a small team of local historians is working to ensure that all aspects of the country’s history are acknowledged.
They are the North Fork Project, and they’ve made it their mission to uncover the names and lives of the enslaved Africans who were brought to Long Island. So far, the group of four has found at least the names of around 450 enslaved people on Long Island, out of what they believe to be at least 900.
While the discussion of slavery in America usually brings to mind the Southern states, the Northern states at one time also had their share of enslaved people. New York was the second-to-last Northern state to abolish slavery, freeing all enslaved people on July 4, 1827.
Steve Wick, one of the members of the group, said finding the names of so many enslaved people “really does fundamentally alter our view of this place.”
“Four hundred and fifty names of enslaved people are astonishing to me. Now we're going, let's say, from the 1630s, 1640s, 1650s up until 1827, or so. But that's a big number,” Wick added.
Most of the time, the group is unable to find more than just the name of an enslaved person due to a lack of record-keeping about their lives. However, there have been instances in which the project has been able to uncover a larger amount of information.
Such is the case with Brister Young, an enslaved man brought to Long Island by Reverend Daniel Youngs, but who eventually gained his freedom.
While it may seem hypocritical for a reverend, a title associated with holiness and spirituality, to own a slave, it wasn’t uncommon.
“Just about all of the reverends out here generally had an enslaved person. In the earlier period, it's more of a status symbol to have somebody who's enslaved. A terrible thing to say, but it wasn’t unusual,” described project member Amy Fish, who also serves as the Southold Town historian.
Both Brister Young and Daniel Youngs are buried in Aquebogue Cemetery, with their graves oriented west due to the belief that when they awoke for the second coming of Jesus Christ, they would be facing Jerusalem.
However, as North Fork Project member Richard Wines explained while at the cemetery, there is a noticeable difference between the two final resting places.
“This cemetery is all organized, with all the graves facing west. And so that was the front, which was the best part. This is the very back row of the cemetery, the way it's organized, and so that's where Brister ended up,” Wines said.
The North Fork Project believes that Brister Young gained his freedom by 1800, as that is when the census no longer recorded Daniel Youngs as owning any enslaved persons.
After being freed, Brister Young joined a fishing company comprised entirely of white farmers, an unusual move for a person of color.
“Whenever they got a sheepshead, which apparently was the really tastiest fish, Brister was the one who got to cook the chowder. And all the other members of the company would contribute milk and potatoes and whatever else went into the chowder. But Brister was known as the chef,” Wines explained.
Brister Young’s wife is most likely buried next to him in an unmarked grave.
The group said the information they find is usually “lying in plain sight,” describing how they’ll look through wills, diaries, newspapers, town records, and more for their research.
“They were ignored [by] those early town community historians and people interested in local history. They certainly knew that the early families here had enslaved people in their homes. They just ignored it,” Wick said. “So stories were written, history books were written, town histories were written that just didn't mention it.”
Living relatives of enslaved people are also hard to come by for the North Fork Project, with the group only ever coming in contact with one person.
“I had a woman email me looking for information on an enslaved man named Titus, from whom she was descended. And I was like, wait a second, that's one of our people. So we got to give her a little bit of information,” Fish said.
Titus left Long Island for Connecticut, where he had a family that, over the years, began passing as white. His living relative didn’t realize that she had African American blood.
The North Fork Project is working to get more historical markers put up to commemorate the forgotten lives and history of the enslaved population, especially as the 250th birthday of the United States quickly approaches.
“The 250th in New York is going to be more than just the American Revolution,” Fish said. “It's going to be the unfinished revolutions that the state wants to look at and be more inclusive. So we want to talk about suffragettes. We want to talk about LGBTQ+. We want to talk about the African American story. We want to talk about the Indian Nation story.”
The North Fork Project is applying for historic markers for Brister Young and Sarah Robbins, an enslaved Native American, through the William G. Pomeroy Foundation, a Syracuse-based organization that offers grants for historic markers.
“The point is, history is what happened,” Wick said. “It's not some silly putty you can shape into anything you want. We need the whole story. And to leave out 450 names, and Richard was talking about maybe out of 900 total, is just wrong. So we're telling the story here that happened.”
