Site of Timothy and Mary Gilbert’s House

Site of Timothy Gilbert's house at 2 Beach Street.

NPS Photo/Benstead

Quick Facts

Location:

2 Beach Street

Significance:

Home to an abolitionist and an Underground Railroad Site

OPEN TO PUBLIC:

No

MANAGED BY:

Private Residence

Staunch abolitionists Timothy and Mary Gilbert lived at this site.¹

In 1826, Timothy Gilbert, a wealthy piano maker, married Mary Wetherbee.² After the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, Timothy Gilbert became the president of the Boston Vigilance Committee, an organization that served as the financial backbone of Boston’s Underground Railroad. In addition to his work on the Vigilance Committee, he also opened their home to freedom seekers. As he wrote in a letter, Gilbert offered “his house as a refuge to any poor, panting fugitive, pursued by the slave-catcher, and warning the pursuer that if he entered behind him, he did so at his peril.”³ Timothy’s memoir records, that “Mary Wetherbee Gilbert was ever willing…” to help, and her hands, “…bound up the wounds of many a scared slave, and supplied the wants of many a half-famished fugitive.”⁴

In January 1851, slave catchers came looking for Lewis, a young freedom seeker staying at Gilbert’s house. One of the slave catcher’s wrote in the Massachusetts Spy, “We are fully satisfied… that the boy is yet in Boston and in the house of this man Gilbert…He will pay fugitive slaves more for work than any other persons and give them the privileges of his private residence, table, &c.; has private watchers employed for the better security of fugitives…”⁵ Together, Timothy and Mary Gilbert operated their home as a safe house, providing refuge and care to the freedom seekers who boarded with them.

This newspaper clipping describes Gilbert's letter about assisting freedom seekers. (Credit: “Anti-Slavery Convention at Valley Falls” The Liberator, October 11, 1850.)

Footnotes

1. Justin D. Fulton, Memoir of Timothy Gilbert, (Boston, 1866) 49, Archive.org
2. Fulton, Memoir of Timothy Gilbert, 47.
3. “Anti-Slavery Convention at Valley Falls” The Liberator, Friday, October 11, 1850.
4. Fulton, Memoir of Timothy Gilbert, 3-4.
5. Fulton, Memoir of Timothy Gilbert, 47. Also see: Massachusetts Spy, October 29, 1862.