Small opening cut into floor at Merchant’s House Museum indicates site was probably used as ‘safe house’, experts say
A landmark house in Manhattan preserved as a museum to New York’s 19th-century history has revealed an even more intriguing secret: its previously unknown status as a refuge for people who escaped slavery before and during the civil war.
The Merchant’s House Museum’s link to the Underground Railroad, a network of abolitionists who secured the safe passage of enslaved people to freedom, was discovered when archaeologists looked beneath the drawers of a built-in dresser in the wall of a hallway leading to bedrooms on the building’s second floor.
They found a small rectangular opening cut into the floorboards, an enclosed space about 2ft by 2ft, and a ladder leading to the ground floor.
Experts told NY1, which first reported the find, that it was an indication that the house, in Manhattan’s residential NoHo (north of Houston) neighborhood, was probably used as a “safe house” for enslaved people who had fled bondage in the south. They said the space and ladder would have provided an emergency hideout and quick escape.
