Stephen and Harriet Myers Residence

The Myers Residence was the Vigilance Committee's office — the Greek Revival row house at 194 Livingston Avenue in Albany where Stephen and Harriet Myers, Black abolitionists both born into slavery, ran the committee that assisted hundreds of freedom seekers through the 1850s. The documentation is exceptional: a surviving Vigilance Committee flyer records assistance to 287 people in a ten-month period — including sixteen who passed through on a single day, July 13, 1856 — and gives the address as the Myers house.

Sydney Howard Gay's Record of Fugitives — the Manhattan editor's ledger of the escapees he forwarded north — lists fifty people directed to Stephen Myers by name. Benjamin Wilson got money and instructions to find Myers; Catherine Brice's story passed through William Still's records. The Jay family — John Jay's descendants — corresponded with the Myerses and sent them both fugitives and money. Stephen Myers was also a newspaper editor, a suffrage activist, and a man who sued the Albany school district — the Underground Railroad's chairman ran a full civil-rights portfolio.

The house itself was built by an African American shipowner, John Johnson, in 1847 — Black capital funding the building that became the Black committee's headquarters. It survived a century and a half of private ownership and neglect before the Underground Railroad Education Center bought it in 2004 and began restoring it to its 1850s state — the most intact Vigilance Committee office left in the country.

The Myers Residence is the archive's headquarters file — the Albany house where the Vigilance Committee met and 287 documented assists were recorded, run by a Black abolitionist couple on a street less than a mile from the Hudson.