Dobbin House Tavern

Dobbin House was old before Gettysburg was a battle. Reverend Alexander Dobbin — the Irish Presbyterian who settled the town — built the stone house in 1776 as his home and his Classical School, the first academy of its kind west of the Susquehanna. When Lincoln came to dedicate the cemetery eighty-seven years later, the residents could have watched from the balcony; when the armies came in 1863, the house that predated the nation became a hospital for both sides' wounded.

The crawl space is the file's hidden register — a secret compartment under the floor where the Underground Railroad's passengers hid on the run north, the house standing just above the Mason-Dixon line as possibly the first station in free territory. National Geographic photographed it; the mannequins in the hiding place now show visitors what freedom looked like from inside a wall.

The house never stopped working — colonial tavern, restaurant, the oldest building in Gettysburg still doing what it was built to do. The file keeps the triple register: the frontier minister's school, the station where fugitives hid in the walls, and the field hospital where the battle's casualties were carried when the fighting moved on. The ghost stories the house attracts sit on top of all three.

Dobbin House Tavern is the archive's oldest-house file — Reverend Dobbin's 1776 stone academy, the Underground Railroad crawl space in its walls, and the hospital it became after the battle that made the town's name.