Belmont Mansion

Belmont is the Fairmount Park mansion where the founders dined and freedom seekers hid. William Peters — the Penn family's land agent — built the house in 1745 on the estate above the Schuylkill, with the formal gardens that Pierre du Simitière drew, cherry trees and gravel walks and a Chinese temple. His son Richard inherited it — the judge who served as Washington's secretary, who hosted Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Lafayette at the table above the river.

The house's second history is the one the museum now centers. Richard Peters was an abolitionist — the first non-Quaker in the movement — in a family that had also held enslaved people. Cornelia Wells, whom Peters purchased in 1811, bought her own freedom and her daughter Jane's; she was given Boelson Cottage on the estate, and the cottage became a station — freedom seekers coming up the river were brought from the boats to Boelson, and from Boelson up to Belmont, where they were hidden in the attic of the house where the nation's founders had dined.

The mansion became part of Fairmount Park in 1869, hosted Centennial entertaining in 1876, and was nearly demolished before Audrey Johnson-Thornton's research revealed the Underground Railroad history that saved it. The American Women's Heritage Society has run it since 1986 — the house museum that tells both stories: the founders at the table and the fugitives in the attic.

Belmont is the archive's two-histories file — the mansion where Washington dined and where the people Washington's nation enslaved were hidden in the attic, in the house that held both the republic's architects and its fugitives.