Long Lost Secret Revealed at Merchant’s House Museum
By Brian J Pape, AIA
The Merchant’s House Museum’s remarkable new discovery tells a critically important and long-overlooked story: New York City’s early abolitionist movement and the beginnings of the Underground Railroad when Joseph Brewster built the house in 1832. The museum staff member demonstrates how a person could enter the secret passage in a set of drawers. Photo credit: Merchant’s House Museum.
On Feb.11, the Merchant’s House Museum issued a press release announcing that a previously unknown, fully intact Underground Railroad stop has been discovered at the landmark 1832 museum. The secret passage, a shaft in the wall between the two first-floor parlors, leads up to a bureau between the second-story bedrooms. Located along the western side of the house, the shaft measures 2 by 2 feet and has a ladder.
Let’s go back and imagine New York City in 1831: only a couple generations since the Revolutionary War with Britain ended in 1783, the city was growing by leaps and bounds with the increasing trade with Europe and the emerging west territories.
According to Britannica records, the intensification of slavery as a system, which followed Portuguese trafficking of enslaved Africans beginning in the 15th century, was driven by the European colonies in North America, South America, and the West Indies, where the plantation economy generated an immense demand for low-cost labor. Between the 16th and 19th centuries an estimated 12 million enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas. The brutality of slavery, made increasingly visible by the scale of its practice, sparked a reaction that demanded its complete abolition. The abolition movement began with criticism by Enlightenment rationalist thinkers who said slavery was a violation of the “rights of man.” Quaker and other evangelical religious groups condemned it for its un-Christian qualities.
The Underground Railroad was a pre-Civil War network where escaped slaves from the South were secretly helped by sympathetic Northerners, in defiance of the Fugitive Slave Acts to reach places of safety in the free states or Canada. Though neither underground nor a railroad, it was thus named because its activities had to be carried out in secret, using darkness or disguise, and because railway terms were used in reference to the system. Various routes were lines, stopping places were called stations, those who aided along the way were conductors, and their charges were known as packages or freight.
The network of routes extended in all directions across 14 Northern states and into Canada, “the promised land” beyond the reach of fugitive-slave hunters. Those who most actively assisted slaves to escape by way of the “railroad” were members of the free Black community ─ including former slaves such as Harriet Tubman after 1849 ─ as well as Northern abolitionists, philanthropists, and church leaders. Estimates of the number of Black people who reached freedom vary greatly, from 40,000 to 100,000.
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Although only a small minority of Northerners participated in the Underground Railroad, its existence did much to arouse their sympathy for the plight of slaves in the antebellum period. At the same time, it convinced many Southerners that the North would never peaceably allow the institution of slavery to remain unchallenged.
In 1831 Joseph Brewster, a New York City hatter, built six townhouses on two lots he acquired for a combined $6,550 (equivalent to $198,000 in 2025). In 1832 Brewster finished building 29 East 4th Street, a four-story Federal-style brick facade with a Greek Revival interior, where he lived for three years. While slavery had been largely abolished in New York by 1831, pro-slavery New Yorkers were still working to kidnap escaped enslaved laborers (as well as free Black people) and return or sell them to Southern slaveowners.
According to the merchantshouse.org website, the building was sold in 1835 to Seabury Tredwell and it remained in his family for nearly a century. George Chapman, a distant Tredwell relative, purchased the building and transformed it into a historic house museum in 1936. It has been called the Old Merchants’ House by the Historic Landmark Society, the Merchant’s House Museum (MHM), and the Seabury Tredwell House. Over the next three decades, the museum’s operators struggled to obtain funds to restore the deteriorating house. The architect Joseph Roberto completely renovated the building from 1970 to 1980, donating about $500,000 worth of services. The museum underwent further restoration in the early 1990s after it was damaged during the demolition of nearby buildings. Now, abutting the eastern side, is Manuel Plaza, a public park built atop a construction shaft for New York City Water Tunnel No. 3. It was named in honor of five African-born slaves who received land in the neighborhood from the Dutch West India Company.
Ann Haddad, the museum’s historian, wrote in a Feb. 27, 2023 MHM newsletter about learning that Brewster had been an abolitionist. The discovery triggered a research project focused on Brewster’s activities in New York City. At a church located a few blocks from the Merchant’s House, records show, he’d ordered workers to build a false floor. The fact that Brewster left evidence of his mission in architectural records struck Haddad as especially notable: “In my mind, that indicates a dedicated and ardent abolitionist” if “you’re going to put your signature onto something that could blow you right out of the water in terms of your business, your safety, your security.”
A Feb. 27, 2023, MHM press release noted that historians concluded that there was nothing humane or “benign” about the treatment of the enslaved who toiled in New York City. They were subjected to as much abuse and mistreatment as those in the Southern plantations. They were prohibited from trade, forbidden to gather, and were segregated within houses of worship. Many endured terrible punishment and death ─ as a result, slave laws were tightened. On July 5, 1827, slavery was finally outlawed in New York State, but the struggle for equality for Black Americans continued.
To quote architectural historian Patrick Ciccone, “Given 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’s House additional magnitudes of incalculable historic significance.” Since 1936, the Merchant’s House Museum has told the story of the domestic life of a wealthy merchant-class family and their Irish servants in the mid-19th century. This remarkable new discovery now allows the museum to tell a critically important and long-overlooked story: New York City’s early abolitionist movement and the beginnings of the Underground Railroad.
In October 1965, the new Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) designated the Merchant’s House Museum as one of the first-ever official city landmarks. The LPC designated the Seabury Tredwell House’s basement, first floor, and second floor as an interior landmark in 1981. The museum is the only 19th-century residence in Manhattan with its original exterior and interior intact. Its collection has over 4,500 items owned by the Tredwell family, including pieces of furniture, clothing, household items, and personal items. The only other existing intact shelter point of the Underground Railroad left in Manhattan is the Hopper-Gibbons House in Chelsea. It was built in 1840s and is not open to the public.
