History has a way of silently hiding in the corners of a room before being uncovered. At the Merchant\u2019s House Museum in Manhattan, it was hiding behind a bottom drawer.<\/p>\n
Surprisingly, a fully intact \u201cUnderground Railroad\u201d activity site has been uncovered at the 1832 Merchant\u2019s House Museum.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It stands as Manhattan\u2019s lone 19th-century home with its facade and floor plan entirely intact. This discovery marks the house as the earliest known site of abolitionist activity in New York City.<\/p>\n
\u201cMany New Yorkers forget that we were a part of the abolitionist movement, part of the Civil Rights movement. This hidden passageway is physical evidence of New York City\u2019s connection to what happened in the South during the Civil War, and what\u2019s still happening today. \u2026 It has to be protected,\u201d\u00a0stated\u00a0Council Member Chris Marte.<\/p>\n
Manhattan\u2019s oldest safe house<\/p>\n
Despite its name, this was not a literal railroad but a massive act of organized defiance. The underground Railroad<\/a>\u00a0was a clandestine, loose-knit network of activists, safe houses, and secret routes used by enslaved African Americans<\/a> to escape to free states.<\/p>\n For nearly a century, visitors at 29 East Fourth Street marveled at the heavy mahogany furniture and the preserved lifestyle of a 19th-century merchant family.\u00a0<\/p>\n They walked past a built-in chest of drawers on the second floor, never suspecting that the wood paneling concealed a gateway to freedom.\u00a0<\/p>\n Recently, researchers pulled back that drawer to reveal a two-foot-square opening \u2014 a vertical shaft dropping 15 feet into the darkness of the ground floor.<\/p>\n While the museum is famous for the Tredwell family, who lived there for 100 years, the discovery points back to the man who built it: Joseph Brewster<\/a>.<\/p>\n Brewster was a hatter and a staunch abolitionist. In 1832, New York was a city divided.\u00a0<\/p>\n Though slavery had been abolished in the state in 1827, the city\u2019s economy was a titan fed by Southern cotton.\u00a0<\/p>\n To be an abolitionist in 1830s Manhattan was to be a target. Mobs roamed the streets. Safe houses had to be invisible.<\/p>\n It was within this climate of intense danger that Brewster engineered the Merchant\u2019s House with its secret<\/a> passageway.\u00a0<\/p>\n The shaft exists as an architectural phantom, devoid of any domestic purpose \u2014 offering neither ventilation, storage, nor utility. It is what preservation attorney Michael Hiller calls a \u201cgenerational find.<\/a>\u201c<\/p>\n The narrow, 15-foot drop reminds one of the literal tight spots freedom seekers endured to escape slave hunters and local marshals.<\/p>\n Most destroyed <\/p>\n The Merchant\u2019s House told a story of wealth and Irish domestic service. Now, it tells a story of resistance.<\/p>\n Most Underground Railroad sites were destroyed by urban development. This site remains fully intact.<\/p>\n Architectural historian Patrick Ciccone stated<\/a>: \u201cGiven how very, very few physical traces of the Underground Railroad survive anywhere in the U.S., the existence and physical integrity of this space give the 1832 landmark Merchant\u2019s House additional magnitudes of incalculable historic significance.\u201d<\/p>\n