Cedar Hill: The “Frederick Douglass Home”
When Frederick Douglass died in 1895, Helen Pitts Douglass devoted herself to making Cedar Hill a memorial to his life and legacy. Before her death in 1903, she created the Frederick Douglass Memorial and Historical Association to carry on her preservation work.
The “Frederick Douglass Home” became a unit of the National Park Service on September 5, 1962, after which they conducted major restoration work on the historic house. It was designated the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site in 1988.
Helen Pitts Douglass
Photo/artist credits indicated where known.
Read about Helen Pitts Douglass.
April 7, 2017
The record needs to reflect that Frederick Douglas was married to an African American woman, Anne Murray Douglass, who was the love of his life and mother of their five children, for more than 40 years from 1838 unttil her death in 1882. Anna also was an abolishionist and member of the Underground Railroad.
This was so interesting to me. I didn’t know Helen Pitts Douglass was a Mount Holyoke grad! She and my great-great grandmother, Lucinda Hinsdale Stone, were good friends. Lucinda spent a short time with them in Europe in c. 1888 (?), and had some interesting reminiscences about him in Athens. Some time after that, she was their guest for, I think, ten days at Cedar Hill.
Lucinda, like Helen, was a reformer–an abolitionist and suffragist. She was especially active in promoting college coeducation — equal opportunities for women to a college education. I am writing her biography–but it covers only her first 50+ years (1814-1866).