Frederick Douglass

📍Cedar Hill, 1411 W Street SE, Washington, DC 20020, USA

“I was born into slavery on Maryland's Eastern Shore and never knew my birthday; my mother walked twelve miles at night to see me, and I barely knew her. I taught myself to read in secret on the streets of Baltimore, and at twenty I escaped to freedom. Nearly forty years later, in 1877, I bought Cedar Hill, a Greek Revival and Italianate house of the 1850s on some eight acres at the top of a hill in Anacostia, across the river from the Capitol and the White House. The district had been laid out for white buyers only; I bought it anyway. From my front porch I could look down on the dome of the Capitol, where the laws were made that once held me in bondage. I filled the house with books — my library of more than a thousand volumes — and family and visitors from around the world. When I needed solitude to write, I retreated to a little stone cabin behind the house that I called the Growlery. I lived here until the end of my life. Cedar Hill is now the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site.”

Sources: tclf.org npshistory.com atlasobscura.com