Mary Ann Shadd Cary House

The brick rowhouse at 1421 W Street NW was the last home of the woman who did everything first. Mary Ann Shadd Cary — born free in slave-state Delaware in 1823, raised in a household that hid fugitives — was the first Black newspaperwoman in North America, publishing Canada's anti-slavery Provincial Freeman from 1853 while hiding her editorship from a profession that wouldn't have credited a woman. Her own people called her 'the Rebel.'

Her life ran across every border the nineteenth century drew. The Fugitive Slave Act drove her to Canada in 1850, where she wrote the emigration pamphlet and ran the Freeman urging Black Americans north. She came back to recruit for the Union Army — one of the war's few Black recruiting officers — then settled in Washington, enrolled in Howard's first law class, taught by day and studied by night for sixteen years, and took her law degree in 1883 at the age of sixty.

In the W Street years — 1881 to 1885 — she was still working: writing for the New National Era, testifying before Congress on the 14th and 15th Amendments while objecting publicly that the text wasn't gender-neutral, and founding the Colored Women's Progressive Franchise Association when the suffrage movement wouldn't organize for Black women. She died in 1893 and was buried in Columbian Harmony Cemetery — a cemetery later paved over, her grave lost, her rowhouse the landmark that remains.

The Mary Ann Shadd Cary House is the archive's rebel file — the U Street rowhouse where the first Black woman editor, recruiter, and one of the first Black women lawyers spent her last working years between Howard and the Hill.