Corbit-Sharp House

The Corbit-Sharp House hid a man behind a door too small to check. In 1845, a fugitive named Sam came out of Maryland to the Odessa house of Quakers Daniel and Mary Corbit — a town on the line between slave Delaware and free Pennsylvania, thick with Quaker agents. When the sheriff's posse searched the house, Mary Corbit had Sam behind a tiny attic door; they didn't think to look behind it. At dusk Daniel gave him food and money and sent him north to Philadelphia.

The house itself is Delaware's finest pre-Revolutionary survivor — the twenty-two-room Philadelphia-Georgian mansion William Corbit built in 1772-74 from his tannery fortune on the Appoquinimink. The Corbitt family held it until 1938; H. Rodney Sharp restored it in the Colonial Revival era with Marian Cruger Coffin gardens. The whole Odessa streetscape — the Corbit-Sharp, the Wilson-Warner, the Collins-Sharp — survives because Sharp's preservation bought the town.

The Sam story is the house's documented heart — recounted by the Corbits' daughter Mary in 1914 from family memory, confirmed by the Network to Freedom designation on the Harriet Tubman Byway. In a slave state that never seceded, the Quaker crossroads town kept its agents: the attic door, the dusk departure, the one man who made Philadelphia because Mary Corbit thought of the space behind the door.

The Corbit-Sharp House is the archive's attic-door file — the 1772 Georgian mansion in Odessa where Mary Corbit hid the fugitive Sam behind a door the posse never checked, Delaware's documented Underground Railroad station.