M'Clintock House

The M'Clintock House, the site where the Declaration of Sentiments was drafted for the First Women's Rights Convention.

NPS

Richard Hunt built the two story red-brick house at 14 East Williams Street in Waterloo, New York in 1836, but never lived there. The M'Clintock family of seven moved into the house in 1836 and were its first tenants. Thomas and Mary Ann, their five children, and others made this their home for 20 years until they returned to Philadelphia. The M'Clintock family ran a local business, led the local Quaker Monthly Meeting, and were involved in almost every reform activity in Western New York. Together they ran a Drugstore and school in the commercial buildings along Main Street, they supported Anti-slavery, Temperance, and raised money to benefit the Irish famine, Hungarian Revolution, and the local poor. The M'Clintocks offered their house to fugitive slaves as a station on the Underground Railroad.

On July 16, 1848, Mary Ann M'Clintock hosted a planning session for the First Women's Rights Convention. At this session she, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and perhaps several others drafted a document they called the Declaration of Sentiments. It was ratified on the second day of the First Woman's Rights Convention and signed by 100 men and women. Modeled on Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, this document proclaimed that "all men and women are created equal."