M'Clintock House

The Declaration of Sentiments was drafted on a mahogany table in this house's front parlor. On July 16, 1848 — three days before the Seneca Falls Convention — Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Ann M'Clintock, Lucretia Mott, Martha Wright, and Jane Hunt gathered at 14 East Williams Street in Waterloo and wrote the document that opened the women's rights movement. Stanton remembered the scene: 'We looked over the declarations of societies we could find, but none touched our case, until at last, someone suggested our Fathers of 1776.' So they modeled it on Jefferson — 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.'

The M'Clintocks were the house behind the movement — radical Quakers who'd come to Waterloo from Philadelphia, ran a drugstore and school on Main Street, led the local Monthly Meeting, and ran a station on the Underground Railroad besides. In the same summer of 1848 they helped found the Yearly Meeting of Congregational Friends — the 'Progressive Friends' who broke with the Hicksite Quakers over giving women equal voice. Three days after the parlor drafting, Thomas M'Clintock presided over the Seneca Falls Convention and their daughter Elizabeth served as secretary; at least half the Declaration's hundred signers were from Waterloo.

The mahogany center table where the women wrote survives — it's in the Smithsonian. The house is part of Women's Rights National Historical Park, restored to its 1848 parlor — the room where five women decided the Declaration of Independence needed a sequel.

The M'Clintock House is the archive's parlor file — the Waterloo house where the Declaration of Sentiments was written in the front room on July 16, 1848, by the Quaker abolitionist family who ran an Underground Railroad station in the same building.