What Happened to the President’s House in Philadelphia?

The President’s House in Philadelphia was the executive mansion of the United States from 1790 to 1800, where George Washington and John Adams lived while Philadelphia served as the nation’s capital. The three-story brick house at Sixth and Market Streets no longer stands, but its footprint is now an outdoor memorial to the nine people Washington held in bondage there. In January 2026, the Trump administration ordered the memorial’s interpretive panels removed, triggering a lawsuit by the City of Philadelphia, a federal injunction ordering restoration, and — in June 2026 — a Third Circuit ruling that allowed the administration to proceed with replacement panels.

The House Itself

When Philadelphia became the temporary national capital in 1790, the house at Sixth and Market became the executive mansion. Washington lived there from November 1790 to March 1797 and added a two-story bow window for formal receptions, a design feature later echoed in the oval rooms of the White House.¹ John and Abigail Adams followed, staying until May 1800, when the government moved to Washington, D.C.²

The building later became a hotel, then a boardinghouse, and was demolished in 1832. Four commercial buildings replaced it on the site.² On November 1, 1951, what remained of the original walls was torn down for the construction of Independence Mall.³ A public restroom built within the house’s footprint in 1954 likely damaged subsurface foundations and stood there until 2003.⁴ For about half a century, the exact location of the mansion was largely forgotten.

The Nine People Washington Enslaved There

Washington’s Philadelphia household included nine enslaved people at various times: Ona Judge, Hercules, Richmond, Christopher Sheels, Moll, Austin, Joe Richardson, Paris, and Giles.² They were among more than three hundred people Washington held in bondage at Mount Vernon.⁵

Pennsylvania’s 1780 Gradual Abolition Act freed any enslaved person who lived in the state for six consecutive months. Washington worked around the law by secretly rotating enslaved individuals between Philadelphia and Mount Vernon before the six-month mark, resetting the residency clock. He instructed his secretary Tobias Lear to carry out the rotations “under pretext that may deceive both them and the Public.” A 1788 amendment had specifically prohibited this maneuver, but Washington continued it anyway. He was particularly concerned about the “dower slaves” from Martha’s first marriage: if they gained freedom under Pennsylvania law, he would owe the Custis estate their value.⁶

Ona Judge

On May 21, 1796, Ona Judge, Martha Washington’s personal maidservant and seamstress, slipped away from the President’s House during dinner. She had learned Martha planned to give her as a wedding gift to granddaughter Eliza Parke Custis Law, who was known for a fierce temper. Judge later told a reporter she was “determined” never to be Custis Law’s slave.⁷ Friends in Philadelphia’s free Black community carried her belongings, and she boarded the sloop Nancy, bound for Portsmouth, New Hampshire.⁶

Washington pursued her under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, a law he had signed, but avoided using force out of concern that it would spark riots or alienate northern abolitionists. When Judge offered to return in exchange for a promise of freedom upon the Washingtons’ deaths, he rejected the offer as “totally inadmissible,” saying it would reward “unfaithfulness with a premature preference.”⁷ She remained a fugitive under federal law until her death in 1848 and was never recaptured.⁸

Hercules and the Others

Hercules, Washington’s enslaved chef, understood the rotation scheme. He escaped on February 22, 1797, and lived in New York City until his death in 1812. When his young daughter was asked whether she missed her father, she reportedly said she was “very glad, because he is free now.” Christopher Sheels, a literate valet, was sent back to Mount Vernon in 1791 after Washington worried he would learn about the emancipation law; in 1799, Washington intercepted an escape note Sheels had written. Austin, a waiter whose frequent travel between Philadelphia and Virginia likely served to defeat the six-month threshold, died of a stroke in 1794. Moll and Joe were dower slaves whom Washington could not legally free in his will, though Joe’s wife and children were eventually freed by it.⁵

How the Memorial Came to Exist

In January 2002, historian Edward Lawler Jr. published “The President’s House in Philadelphia: The Rediscovery of a Lost Landmark” in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, showing that the site where Washington had enslaved people sat almost directly beneath the planned new Liberty Bell Center.⁹ The prospect of a shrine to liberty rising on top of a site of enslavement set off a public controversy.

Attorney Michael Coard founded the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition, which spent eight years pressing for a memorial. Coard used his radio show on Philadelphia’s WHAT to organize supporters, and the coalition collected 15,000 petition signatures.¹⁰ Archaeological excavations began on March 21, 2007, and on May 2, 2007, the Park Service and the city announced they had found the actual stone foundation walls of the house, along with the curved walls of Washington’s bow window, an underground passageway connecting the kitchen to the main house, and a root cellar where enslaved people had worked. The passageway and kitchen area had never appeared in historical records, making their discovery especially significant.¹

The 2010 Memorial

On December 15, 2010, the President’s House exhibit opened as an approximately 8,000-square-foot outdoor installation titled “Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation.” It was the first slave memorial on federal property.¹¹ Designed by Emanuel Kelly and Kelly/Maiello Architects with contributions from Lorene Cary and Louis Massiah, the installation used brick walls to trace the original architecture and included five motion-activated video screens, illustrated glass panels, and a glass vitrine overlooking the 2007 archaeological remains. A granite wall listed the names of the nine enslaved individuals, and bronze footprints in the ground symbolized the road to freedom.¹² Of the exhibit’s 34 interpretive panels, 13 were created specifically as a result of the coalition’s advocacy.¹⁰

The city spent roughly $3.5 million on the project, using municipal funds, Delaware River Port Authority grants, and federal congressional appropriations. The Park Service did not fund the exhibit.¹³ Under a 2006 cooperative agreement, ownership of the completed exhibit transferred to the NPS, with a provision that the two parties would consult before any changes were made. In 2015, the city also transferred the exhibit’s copyright to the NPS.¹⁴ Those two documents, as it turned out, would determine who controlled the exhibit sixteen years later.

The January 2026 Removal

On the afternoon of January 22, 2026, National Park Service workers began dismantling and removing the interpretive panels.¹⁵ The removal was carried out under a directive from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, implementing a March 27, 2025, executive order signed by President Donald Trump titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The order directed the Secretary of the Interior to ensure that public monuments under federal jurisdiction do not contain content that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living” and instead “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.” It also required improvements to Independence National Historical Park to be completed by July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.¹⁶

The administration described the exhibit as a “false revision of history” promoting “improper partisan ideology.” Mayor Cherelle Parker and other city officials called the removal an attempt to “whitewash American history.”¹⁷

The Lawsuit and Judge Rufe’s Injunction

The same day the panels came down, the City of Philadelphia filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, naming the Department of the Interior, Secretary Burgum, the National Park Service, and Acting NPS Director Jessica Bowron as defendants.¹⁸ The city alleged that the removal violated the 2006 cooperative agreement, which required the parties to “meet and confer” before changes, and that the NPS’s actions were arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act.¹⁹ The Avenging the Ancestors Coalition and The Black Journey Philadelphia Walking Tour later intervened as plaintiffs, represented by the University of Pennsylvania Law School’s Advocacy for Racial and Civil Justice Clinic and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.²⁰

On February 16, 2026, Presidents’ Day, U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe issued a preliminary injunction ordering the administration to restore the exhibit while the lawsuit proceeded. In a written opinion opening with an epigraph from George Orwell’s 1984, Rufe compared the administration’s actions to the novel’s “Ministry of Truth” and rejected the government’s claimed power “to dissemble and disassemble historical truths.” She noted that removing the materials about Oney Judge in particular “conceals crucial information linking the site” to the national Underground Railroad network.²¹ She also prohibited the installation of alternative replacement panels.²² By February 19, the exhibits had been restored ahead of the court’s deadline.²³

The Replacement Panels

In April 2026, the NPS published proposed replacement panels on its website. The new panels included sections titled “Presidents Washington and Adams on Slavery” and “The Constitution and Slavery.” They named all nine enslaved individuals and acknowledged what the administration called the “evil of slavery, including its injustices and hypocrisies.” They described Washington’s rotation of enslaved people to evade Pennsylvania law and noted his approval of the Fugitive Slave Act. An Interior Department spokesperson said the changes reflected a commitment to “celebrating and acknowledging the full breadth of our nation’s history.” The Avenging the Ancestors Coalition rejected the replacements as “deeply offensive” and “revisionist,” calling them an attempt to “sanitize history.”²⁴

The administration appealed Judge Rufe’s injunction to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. By June 2, 2026, only about half of the original panels had been reinstalled before the appeal froze the site in a half-restored state.²⁵

The Third Circuit Reversal

On June 18, 2026, a unanimous three-judge Third Circuit panel reversed Rufe’s injunction. Writing for the panel, Judge Thomas Hardiman held that “the City does not have any statutory, property, or contractual rights that empower it to curate the exhibits in the President’s House.”²⁶ The court found that the 2006 cooperative agreement, as amended in 2009, established that the exhibit would be “owned, maintained, managed, and interpreted by the NPS,” and that the city had waived “any claim or right to any property interest.”²⁷

The panel also ruled that 16 U.S.C. § 407n, which requires the city’s agreement before alterations to certain historic sites, applies only to Independence Square and Carpenters’ Hall. The President’s House sits a block north of Independence Square and falls outside that protection. The ruling cleared the way for the administration to install its replacement panels before the planned July 4, 2026, celebrations.²⁸

A Parallel Case in Massachusetts

Five days before the Third Circuit ruling, on June 13, 2026, U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley in Massachusetts issued a separate preliminary injunction in a lawsuit brought by the National Parks Conservation Association, the Association of National Park Rangers, and other historical and conservation groups. That order directed the NPS to halt all further changes to national park displays made under the executive order and to restore sites that had already been altered. Kelley said the administration was attempting “to rewrite the Nation’s history with a white-out pen.”²⁹ Her ruling explicitly addressed changes at Independence National Historical Park. As of mid-June 2026, it remained unclear how the Massachusetts order would interact with the Third Circuit’s decision permitting replacement of the Philadelphia exhibit.²⁸

Where Things Stand Now

In June 2026, the National Trust for Historic Preservation named the President’s House one of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places, citing federal actions that undermine its historical significance and public interpretation. The site also received a $25,000 preservation grant with the designation.³⁰ Carol Quillen, president of the National Trust, said the group wanted “to save these places, not just because the bricks and mortar is important but because the stories these places hold are important.”³¹

Mayor Parker has vowed to “pursue legal avenues to reverse the decision,” and the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition said it is consulting with attorneys about its options, including a potential Supreme Court appeal.³² U.S. Senator David McCormick, a Pennsylvania Republican, has joined a bipartisan effort calling for the exhibit’s restoration.²⁵ Michael Coard has said the coalition’s goals extend beyond Philadelphia: restoration of the original 34 panels, expansion of the current memorial, and the creation of similar memorials on federal property across the country where enslaved people were held.¹⁰

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