On April 22, 2003 The Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation purchased the historic home at 210 East Genesee Street in Fayetteville, NY, where Matilda Joslyn Gage lived and worked from 1854 until 1898.

PLANS FOR THE HOUSE

Our long-term plans call for a restoration of the house to the period of Gage’s occupancy, following thorough research and an architectural analysis of the building’s physical fabric by a recognized preservation architect. The house will be accessible to the public as an historic house museum, interpretive center, research facility, and a multicultural meeting place.

We are working closely with the village of Fayetteville and the local Chamber of Commerce to develop the Gage historic home as a center of area tourism, as well as the Syracuse Convention and Visitors Bureau, the Women’s Rights National Historic Park, the Susan B. Anthony House, the Harriet Tubman House, and the National Collaborative for Women’s History Sites on developing the “Votes for Women” trail in Central New York. In addition, the Gage House may be an important link on two of Governor Pitaki’s HeritageNY proposed trails: the Women’s Suffrage Trail and the New York State Freedom Trail.

ARCHITECTURAL SIGNIFICANCE

The Gage House is architecturally significant as a fine example of Greek Revival architecture, representative of the economic and cultural development of this area. It is part of the Village of Fayetteville Historic District. The house appears to retain a high level of integrity to her period of occupation.

WOMAN’S RIGHTS

The house was a major site of woman’s rights activity from its construction in 1854 until Gage’s death in 1898. In addition to her leadership role in the national organization, Gage helped organize the Virginia and New York State suffrage associations, and was an officer in the New York association for twenty years. From 1878 to 1881 she published the National Citizen and Ballot Box, the official newspaper of the NWSA, from her home in Fayetteville. The National Park Service recognized the importance of this house by including it on the “Votes for Women” trail designated in its 2001 Women’s Rights National History Trail Feasibility Study.

Susan B. Anthony visited the home so often, as the two women worked together on the History of Woman Suffrage, that the family designated the guest bedroom as “The Susan B. Anthony Room.” Family tradition says that Anthony, on one of her many visits to the house, scratched her name in the upstairs library window. The name is still on the window today.

Part of a larger movement of women exploring new avenues of religious expression, Gage was a contributor to Stanton’s Woman’s Bible, and penned her magnum opus, Woman, Church and State (1893) which further elaborates the role of the church in woman’s subordination. Discouraged with the slow pace of suffrage efforts in the 1880s and alarmed by the conservative religious movement that had as its goal the establishment of a Christian state, Gage formed the Women’s National Liberal Union in 1890 to maintain the Jeffersonian wall of separation between church and state.

It is one of four women’s history sites open to the public in central/western New York, along with the Harriet Tubman House in Auburn, Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, and the Susan B. Anthony House in Rochester.

ABOLITION/FREEDOM TRAIL

Before the Civil War, the Gage house was a center of abolitionist activity and quite likely also a way station on the Underground Railroad. When Rev. Mr. Loguen, the Syracuse conductor of the Underground Railroad, came to Fayetteville, Gage wrote, "to ascertain the names of those upon whom run-away slaves might depend for aid and comfort on the way to Canada, I was one of the two solitary persons who gave him their names.” The Gage house is the only historic house open to the public in Onondaga County (and one of the very few in New York State) identified as a site affiliated with abolitionism and most probably with the Underground Railroad.

THE HOME OF AN ADOPTED IROQUOIS

Gage was adopted into the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk Nation, had friends from the Onondaga nation, and wrote about the superior position of Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) women. The Gage house is the only historic site in the country that interprets the Native American influence on the early woman’s rights movement.

THE HOUSE OF OZ

It is the only house in the United States that is open to the public where L. Frank Baum, Gage¹s son-in-law and the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, spent time. Baum married Gage¹s youngest daughter in the parlor of the Gage home in 1882. The house will be restored using exterior and interior photographs that Baum took of the house in 1888. Gage was Baum’s intellectual mentor, according to Baum’s biographer, Michael Patrick Hearn.

SUMMARY

This property is significant architecturally and historically, because it uniquely carries a wide story of woman’s rights history, abolition and the Freedom Trail, Haudenosaunee history, L. Frank Baum and the Oz books, and the ongoing struggle to maintain religious freedom.