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A landmark house in Manhattan preserved as a museum to New York’s 19th-century history has revealed an even more intriguing secret: its previously unknown status as a refuge for people who escaped slavery before and during the civil war.
The Merchant’s House Museum’s link to the Underground Railroad, a network of abolitionists who secured the safe passage of enslaved people to freedom, was discovered when archaeologists looked beneath the drawers of a built-in dresser in the wall of a hallway leading to bedrooms on the building’s second floor.
They found a small rectangular opening cut into the floorboards, an enclosed space about 2ft by 2ft, and a ladder leading to the ground floor.
Experts told NY1, which first reported the find, that it was an indication that the house, in Manhattan’s residential NoHo (north of Houston) neighborhood, was probably used as a “safe house” for enslaved people who had fled bondage in the south. They said the space and ladder would have provided an emergency hideout and quick escape.
In the run up to the civil war, gangs of slave hunters, assisted by sympathetic local residents and law enforcement, would seek bounties for capturing people who fled their enslavers authorized by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
“We knew it was here, but didn’t really know what we were looking at,” Camille Czerkowicz, the museum’s curator, told the outlet.
Michael Hiller, a preservation attorney and professor at Pratt Institute, said it was the most remarkable discovery he had seen in more than 30 years. “This is a generational find. This is the most significant find in historic preservation in my career, and it’s very important that we preserve this,” he said.
Merchant’s House was built in 1832 by a tradesman called Joseph Brewster, and sold three years later to the Tredwell family, who lived there for a century until it became a museum after it was sold at auction.
Architectural historian Patrick Ciccone said the space would have been installed by Brewster, whom he said was almost certainly an abolitionist, and the extent to which the Tredwells were aware of it, or used it, was unclear.
“Being an abolitionist was incredibly rare among white New Yorkers, especially wealthy white New Yorkers,” he said. “[Brewster] was the builder of the house, and he was able to make these choices and design it.”
The building was recognized as a National Historic Landmark in 1966, a year after it became the first building designated in the borough of Manhattan under the Landmarks Preservation law. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977.
More recently, it has suffered financial difficulties and faced a fight for its survival, not least from city-approved development plans for an eight-storey building on an adjacent vacant lot.
Christopher Marte, a New York councilman, said the building represented a crucial part of the city’s history.
“Many New Yorkers forget that we were part of the abolitionist movement, but this is physical evidence of what happened in the south [during] the civil war, and what’s happening today,” he told NY1.
