The House & the People Who Worked & Lived In It

For centuries Algonquian-speaking peoples lived at this Philadelphia site, where a house built in 1767 by Mary Lawrence Masters later passed to her daughter Polly and son-in-law Richard Penn, served in 1778 as Major General Benedict Arnold's headquarters, and was rebuilt and enlarged by slaveholder Robert Morris after a major fire. When Philadelphia became the nation's temporary capital in 1790, George Washington enlarged the house for executive offices, his family, secretaries, and enslaved, indentured, and free household servants, and from 1790 to 1797 he lived and worked here with nine enslaved people brought from Mount Vernon. Pennsylvania's Gradual Abolition Act of 1780 allowed enslaved people held in the state for six months to claim freedom, but Washington secretly rotated some of his enslaved servants out of Pennsylvania to prevent that, while also signing the Fugitive Slave Act in 1793; during his presidency and retirement, four of the nine enslaved people who spent time in Philadelphia attempted escape, and Hercules and Oney Judge succeeded. From 1797 to 1800 John and Abigail Adams lived here with servants, none of whom was enslaved, while dignitaries, foreign emissaries, and Native American leaders visited. After the federal government moved to Washington, D.C., the building became a hotel, then shops and a boarding house, was largely demolished in 1832, and its remaining walls were removed in 1951. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, redesign of Independence Mall, debate over the Liberty Bell Center, public activism, and archaeology drew renewed attention to the site, especially to the lives of the enslaved people who lived here, and in 2010 an exhibit and memorial to the enslaved opened.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania · United States