Gerrit Smith Estate

Gerrit Smith was the richest man in the movement — New York's wealthiest landowner, who decided his fortune was a divine gift to give away. He gave away roughly a billion dollars in today's currency: he purchased enslaved people's freedom outright, gifted 120,000 acres of Adirondack land to free Black men to make them eligible voters, paid his neighbors' mortgages, and bankrolled the colleges, the Liberty Party, and John Brown. Henry Highland Garnet's line became the estate's epitaph: 'There are yet two places where slaveholders cannot come — Heaven and Peterboro.'

The mansion was the abolitionists' retreat — Garrison, Douglass, Stanton, John Brown, and Harriet Tubman all stayed there; Tubman called it 'The Big House' and relaxed there as nowhere else, and Smith accompanied her to Canada in 1861 when the threats on her life mounted. Her mother Rit recuperated in Peterboro. Elizabeth Cady Stanton described meeting Harriet Powell hiding on the mansion's third floor. Smith deeded Peterboro property to Black abolitionists — Allen, Garnet, Loguen, Ward — making the hamlet itself a settlement of the movement's leadership.

Smith was one of the Secret Six who funded Harpers Ferry, and the aftermath broke him — he spent weeks in an asylum after the raid, his nerves shattered by the catastrophe his money had helped buy. The estate at Peterboro kept its work anyway — the school he'd founded for Black students in 1834, the Free Church, the station that never stopped operating. The mansion is a National Historic Landmark; the National Abolition Hall of Fame stands where the 1835 antislavery convention met.

The Gerrit Smith Estate is the archive's benefactor file — the fortune spent on freedom by the man who made Peterboro the one place on earth slaveholders couldn't come, and paid for it with his money and eventually his peace.