Oswego Market House

Oswego's Market House was where abolition nominated a president. The Federal-style building went up in 1835-36 on the Market Ground — village offices upstairs, a post office, a jail, market stalls below, Jacob Bonesteel building it on the model of Philip Hooker's Washington Market in Albany. When Oswego incorporated as a city in 1848 it became the first City Hall. And in 1850 it hosted the National Liberty Party convention — the abolitionist party nominating Gerrit Smith for president and, for vice president, Samuel Ringgold Ward: a man born enslaved in Maryland, standing for national office on American soil a decade before the Civil War.

Ward's nomination is the detail that marks the building — an abolitionist party putting a formerly enslaved man on a presidential ticket in a lake city that was the Underground Railroad's last American port, where the Black barbers and sailors of Oswego ran the boats to Kingston. The Market House sat at the center of that city — the municipal building where commerce, courts, jail, and the antislavery politics that defied the Fugitive Slave Act all operated under one roof.

The building outlived its city-hall role — sold to the railroad in 1864, used for commerce and entertainment for another century and a half, and still standing on Water Street, the Federal facade facing the river where the boats left for Canada.

The Market House is the archive's nomination file — Oswego's first city hall, where the Liberty Party put a formerly enslaved man on a presidential ticket in 1850, in the lake port that was the last American stop before Canada.