Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation
210 East Genesee Street

Architecture
The house is typical of the Greek Revival style that you can see along East Genesee Street. It boasts the first bay window in Fayetteville. the house had extensive grounds, including a gazebo, orchard, apiary, garden, and various animals.

History
This house was part of the military tracts divided up from the land taken from the Haudenosaunee during the Sullivan Campaign of 1779. The orders from Gen. George Washington sent Gen. John Sullivan into the heart of Haudenosaunee territory with orders to destroy all villages and crops and drive the inhabitants west to Fort Niagara. This land was then seized to pay soldiers, like Origin Eaton. When he claimed his land in the early 1790s, he was one of the first white settlers in what would become Fayetteville. He built a two room house that now serves as the Gift Shop and Matilda Effect Gallery.

Matilda Joslyn Gage and her husband, Henry Gage, moved to Fayetteville in 1854. At that time, the house had been expanded to include the two-story columns that you can see across the front of the house. Henry and Matilda were supporters of the Abolitionist Movement, both having grown up in houses that were active on the Underground Railroad. When Rev. Jermain Wesley Lougen, the leader of the Central New York Underground Railroad was looking for volunteers, the Gages was happy to offer their home as a stop as well. As Matilda said herself: “One of the proudest acts of my life, one that I look back upon with most satisfaction, is that when Rev. Mr. Lougen of this city went to the village of my residence to assert the names of those upon whom run-away slaves might depend for aid and comfort on their way to Canada, I was one of the two solitary persons who gave him their names. Myself and one gentleman of Fayetteville, were the only two persons who dared thus publicly defy “the law” of the land, and for humanity’s sake render ourselves liable to fine and imprisonment in the county jail, for the crime of feeding the hungry, giving shelter to the oppressed, and helping the black slaves on to freedom.” from The National Citizen and Ballot Box, May 1880.

In the early 1860s the family added on a room facing the gardens for Matilda’s mother and father, Helen and Hezekiah Joslyn.