Back to MAAP Navigator

Jump to

Choose Place Abolitionist Place Abyssinian Baptist Church African Burial Ground African Free School African Grove Theater African Society for Mutual Relief Audubon Ballroom Bedford-Stuyvesant Bethel AME Church of Amityville Black Brigades Booker T. Washington House Bridge Street AWME Church Catherine Ferguson Colored Orphan Asylum David Ruggles Home Downing's Oyster House Duke Ellington Eastville Community Ebbets Field Execution Grounds Five Points Fort Amsterdam Fraunces Tavern Frederick Douglass Freedom's Journal Freetown Gideon and the Great Dock Harlem Harlem Children's Zone Harlem Community Art Center Harlem Hellfighters Harriet Tubman Hofstra University Hughson's Tavern James McCune Smith Pharmacy John Street Church Joseph Lloyd Manor Lakeville Land of the Blacks Langston Hughes Latting's Hundred Lewis H. Latimer Louis Armstrong Manhattan Company Marcus Garvey Minton's Playhouse Mother AME Zion Church New York City Draft Riots 1863 Pierre Toussaint Ralph Ellison Rikers Island Rocky Point Samuel Ballton House Sandy Ground Schomburg Library Seneca Village Setauket Shiloh Presbyterian Church Slave Market Slave Revolt of 1712 Sojourner Truth St. Philip's Episcopalian Church Studio Museum in Harlem Tappan Brothers Theodore Wright House Tontine Coffeehouse Wall Street Weeksville West Indian Day Parade William Floyd Estate

Print This View

Place Detail

William Floyd Estate

William Floyd, the first son of Nicoll and Tabitha Floyd, was born on the south shore of Long Island in 1734. His father purchased the Mastic Beach property in 1724 and built the Old Mastic house to serve as the family's home.

The Floyds were a prominent family and William quickly developed a successful career in politics at national, state, and local levels while maintaining the family plantation. Labor-intensive agricultural crops as well as cattle, sheep, hogs, and fowl all required tending. Floyd relied on both free and enslaved labor on the farm and domestic help in the manor house. The Federal Census of 1790 records that the William Floyd household held 14 people as slaves, and five free people of color. Over the next 20 years the Floyds owned fewer people of African descent and employed more, keeping the number of people of color roughly the same on the estate.

Many other people lived in the vicinity of the estate and found work with the Floyds. Native Americans from the Unkechaug tribe were settled on the nearby Poosepatuck Indian Reservation as early as 1700. Unkechaug peoples married with free and enslaved African Americans, and their descendants remain in the area.

Today, the William Floyd Estate is owned and operated by the National Park Service. Memories and histories captured in paintings and writings by members of the Floyd family reflect African American and Native American laborers at the farm. A cemetery on the estate is preserved and remembers those enslaved for their labor, many owned by William Floyd whose signature appears on the Declaration of Independence.

This entry contributed by the Center for Public Archaeology at Hofstra University

Related Media

Video

Lynda Day discusses the William Floyd Estate Lynda Day, Brooklyn College Professor of Africana Studies, describes the African American community, enslaved and free, that existed in relation to one of several large plantation-like estates on Long Island.

Images

	1797, Map of the Town of Brookhaven A View of the town of Brookhaven in 1797, drawn by the cartographer Isaac Hulse.
	Current view of the Old Mastic House at the William Floyd Estate The William Floyd Estate is owned and operated by the National Park Service and can be visited by the public during hours of operation.
	Old Mastic House at the William Floyd Estate, ca. 1792 Free and enslaved laborers worked in both the house and fields and a community sprung up around this Mastic, Long Island estate.