Frederick Douglass National Historic Site | |
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Location | Washington, D.C., U.S. |
Nearest city | Washington, D.C. |
Coordinates | 38°51′48″N76°59′07″W / 38.86333°N 76.98528°W |
Area | 9 acres (3.6 ha) |
Established | February 12, 1988 |
Visitors | 23,226(in 2005) |
Governing body | National Park Service |
Website | Frederick Douglass National Historic Site |
The Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, administered by the National Park Service, is located at 1411 W Street, SE, in Anacostia, a neighborhood east of the Anacostia River in Southeast Washington, D.C. United States. Established in 1988 as a National Historic Site, the site preserves the home and estate of Frederick Douglass, one of the most prominent African Americans of the 19th century. Douglass lived in this house, which he named Cedar Hill, from 1877–1878 until his death in 1895. Perched on a hilltop, the site offers a sweeping view of the U.S. Capitol and the Washington, D.C., skyline.
In 2017 the site was used to represent Washington, D.C., on its America the Beautiful quarter.
The site of the Frederick Douglass home originally was purchased by John Van Hook in about 1855. Van Hook built the main portion of the present house soon after taking possession of the property. For a portion of 1877, the house was owned by the Freedom Savings and Trust Company. Later that year, Douglass purchased the home and expanded its 14 rooms to 21, including two-story library and kitchen wings. The house has an L shape, and its plan is reminiscent of the design of Andrew Jackson Downing. [1]
With the election of President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Douglass hoped for a political appointment, likely postmaster for Rochester, New York, or ambassador to Haiti. Instead, he was appointed marshal for the District of Columbia, a role which he accepted. [2] His appointment to this highly visible position marked the first time a black man successfully received a federal appointment requiring Senate approval. [3] Douglass, however, was not asked to fill many of the roles expected of a marshal. Typically, the marshal would attend formal White House gatherings and directly introduce guests to the President. Douglass, excused from this role, later complained that he should have resigned because of the slight. [4] Still, the job brought him financial stability, and in 1877, with a $6,000 (~$158,449 in 2023) loan from his black friend and former abolitionist Robert Purvis, he purchased the 14-room Victorian home on nine acres (3.6 ha) and named it Cedar Hill. He bought an additional 15 acres (6.1 ha) around the property the following year. [5]
In the home, Douglass became a cultivated member of high society. He and his grandson Joseph played the music of Franz Schubert in the west parlor, which served as the music room. [6]
After moving to his new house, Frederick Douglass read and also wrote his books in the studio that is located in the yard of the house, one of them was his last autobiographical book, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass , first published in 1881 and reissued 10 years later. [2] His wife Anna had a stroke in 1882 which left her partially paralyzed; she died on August 4 and Douglass became depressed. [7] "The main pillar of my house has fallen", he wrote to a friend. [8]
In 1886, Douglass published the book Three Addresses on the Relations Subsisting between the White and Colored People of the United States, and in 1895 completed his book Why is the Negro lynched?
In January 1884, Douglass applied for a marriage license at District of Columbia City Hall before heading to the home of Reverend Francis James Grimké and Charlotte Forten Grimké, where he married a white woman named Helen Pitts. [9] The marriage, held January 2, [10] was not approved by most members of either family. Helen's father, an abolitionist who was previously proud to know Douglass personally, never offered his blessing and refused to visit Washington unless he knew his daughter and her husband were out of town. [11] Douglass had hired Pitts as a clerk in 1882. She was a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and had been a teacher of freed blacks in Virginia and Indiana. [10] Interviewed about her marriage, she responded, "Love came to me and I was not afraid to marry the man I loved because of his color." [9] One newspaper article noted, "Goodbye, black blood in that family. We have no further use for him. His picture hangs in our parlor, we will hang it in the stables." [11]
On February 20, 1895, Douglass attended a women's rights rally in Washington and was escorted to the platform by Anna Howard Shaw and Susan B. Anthony. He returned to Cedar Hill for an early supper and intended to attend a neighborhood black church. As he was telling his second wife Helen about one of the day's speakers, he suddenly collapsed. [12]
After Douglass's death, his widow, Helen Pitts Douglass, founded the Frederick Douglass Memorial and Historical Association in 1900. In 1916, the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs joined with the association. In the 1920s, Black architect William Augustus Hazel was commissioned to restore the house. [13] The restoration was completed in 1922, and is believed to have been the first historic architectural preservation project by a Black architect in the United States. [13]
These two groups owned the house until 1962, when the federal government took the deed to the house through the National Park Service, with the intent of restoring and preserving it. [14] Also on site are an interpretive visitor center and a reconstruction [15] of Douglass's "Growlery", a small stone building in which he secluded himself while writing and studying. In 2017, the site was featured on the 37th quarter in the America the Beautiful Quarters series. [16]
The Frederick Douglass National Historic Site is located about a 10-minute walk from the Anacostia Metro station.
Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. He became the most important leader of the movement for African-American civil rights in the 19th century.
Anacostia is a historic neighborhood in Southeast Washington, D.C. Its downtown is located at the intersection of Good Hope Road and Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue. It is located east of the Anacostia River, after which the neighborhood is named.
Cedar Hill may refer to:
Charlotte Louise Bridges Grimké was an African American anti-slavery activist, poet, and educator. She grew up in a prominent abolitionist family in Philadelphia. She taught school for years, including during the Civil War, to freedmen in South Carolina. Later in life she married Francis James Grimké, a Presbyterian minister who led a major church in Washington, DC, for decades. He was a nephew of the abolitionist Grimké sisters and was active in civil rights.
Anna Julia Cooper was an American author, educator, sociologist, speaker, Black liberation activist, Black feminist leader, and one of the most prominent African-American scholars in United States history.
Helen Pitts Douglass (1838–1903) was an American suffragist, known for being the second wife of Frederick Douglass. She also created the Frederick Douglass Memorial and Historical Association, which became the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site.
William Shield McFeely was an American historian known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1981 biography of Ulysses S. Grant, as well as his contributions to a reevaluation of the Reconstruction era, and for advancing the field of African-American history. He retired as the Abraham Baldwin Professor of the Humanities emeritus at the University of Georgia in 1997, and was affiliated with Harvard University since 2006.
David William Blight is the Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Previously, Blight was a professor of History at Amherst College, where he taught for 13 years. He has won several awards, including the Bancroft Prize and Frederick Douglass Prize for Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, and the Pulitzer Prize and Lincoln Prize for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. In 2021, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Ottilie Davida Assing was a 19th-century German-American feminist, freethinker, and abolitionist.
David Ruggles was an African-American abolitionist in New York who resisted slavery by his participation in a Committee of Vigilance and the Underground Railroad to help fugitive slaves reach free states. He was a printer in New York City during the 1830s, who also wrote numerous articles, and "was the prototype for black activist journalists of his time." He claimed to have led more than 600 fugitive slaves to freedom in the North, including Frederick Douglass, who became a friend and fellow activist. Ruggles opened the first African-American bookstore in 1834.
James Oakes is an American historian, and is a Distinguished Professor of History and Graduate School Humanities Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York where he teaches courses on the American Civil War and Reconstruction, Slavery, the Old South, Abolitionism, and U.S. and World History. He taught previously at Princeton University and Northwestern University.
The Anacostia Historic District is a historic district in the city of Washington, D.C., comprising approximately 20 squares and about 550 buildings built between 1854 and 1930. The Anacostia Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. "The architectural character of the Anacostia area is unique in Washington. Nowhere else in the District of Columbia does there exist such a collection of late-19th and early-20th century small-scale frame and brick working-class housing."
Joseph Henry Douglass was an American concert violinist, the son of Charles Remond Douglass and Mary Elizabeth Murphy, and grandson of abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
Anna Murray Douglass was an American abolitionist, member of the Underground Railroad, and the first wife of American social reformer and statesman Frederick Douglass, from 1838 to her death.
A statue of Frederick Douglass sculpted by Sidney W. Edwards, sometimes called the Frederick Douglass Monument, was installed in Rochester, New York in 1899 after it was commissioned by the African-American activist John W. Thompson. According to Visualising Slavery: Art Across the African Diaspora, it was the first statue in the United States that memorialized a specific African-American person.
Corinthian Hall was a meeting hall in Rochester, New York, that was the site of significant speeches and other events. It was built in 1849 and was destroyed by a fire in 1898.
The Reynolds Arcade (1829–1932) was a commercial building constructed by Abelard Reynolds in 1829 on Buffalo Street in Rochester, New York. According to Joseph W. Barnes, a Rochester City Historian, it was, "the center of Rochester downtown life for more than a century." After it was demolished, an office building with the same name was constructed on the same site.
William Augustus Hazel (1854–1929) was an American architect, stained glass artist, educator, academic administrator, and civil rights activist. He was the first dean of the Howard University School of Architecture in 1919. He is considered an important figure in the architectural history of the Twin Cities in Minnesota; and was one of the first Black stained glass artists in the United States.
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