The Thaddeus Stevens & Lydia Hamilton Smith Center for History and Democracy in Lancaster, Pennsylvania is a new addition to the commemoration of the Civil War and Reconstruction. It opened in the Spring of this year and it joins commemorative statues of Thaddeus Stevens in Gettysburg and Lancaster. I visited the museum in June, 2026 just a month after it opened.
The Thaddeus Stevens & Lydia Hamilton Smith Center at Stevens’s old home in Lancaster is named for Stevens and also for his biracial housekeeper, Lydia Hamilton Smith. Most people never knew about Smith until Steven Spielberg’s movie Lincoln in which Lydia Hamilton Smith gets a major supporting role as Stevens’s, Tommy Lee Jones’s, lover. The Center tells the story of both Smith and Stevens, as well as the history of the Abolition movement and Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania.
The Center is located at 13–15 East Vine Street, Lancaster, PA 17602. It is open Tuesday-Saturday10am–5pm and Summer Sundays (May 31–Aug 30)12–4pm. The ticket sales stop one hour before closing. The Center is closed on Mondays and on Sundays outside of the summer season. In 2026, the price for admission are Adult $20, Senior $18, Student $10, and children under 10 are free. You can purchase tickets here. There are paid parking lots nearby. When I went, I spent a little under two hours there.
The Center is administered by LancasterHistory, which also owns the James Buchanan mansion just ten minutes away. Lancaster is very much associated with the history of the Civil War and I would recommend a visit to the Civil War monument in town as well as to the statue of Thaddeus Stevens on the campus of the Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology. You may also want to visit Stevens’s grave.
There are plenty of restaurants and hotels in Lancaster.
In 1842, Stevens moved to Lancaster from Gettysburg. In 1844 Smith became his housekeeper. In 2002, there were plans to destroy the house. Students and their professor, Professor of Anthropology Mary Ann Levine, did an excavation of the site. Under the house they found cisterns that stored water for the residents. When Lancaster installed a central water system, the cisterns were no longer used. The archeological dig found that a cistern had been altered to allow people to enter it. Some have concluded that Thaddeus Stevens had done this to allow runaway slaves a secure resting place on the Underground Railroad. Robin Sarratt, the vice president of LancasterHistory, said that the cisterns helped mobilize the community to save the house as a secret hiding place for runaways. “[The cisterns] really became a galvanizing force for the full preservation of the site,” Sarrat later said.
At the time of Thaddeus Stevens’s death during the middle of Reconstruction he was hailed as a hero who liberated the slaves by his Republican colleagues, but as the Lost Cause took over by the early 1900s Stevens was reviled. The academic Dunning School made Stevens’s drive for racial equality one of the real tragedies of Reconstruction because it interfered with natural white supremacy in the South. In 1955, John F. Kennedy’s popular and Pulitzer Prize–winning Profiles in Courage (1955) characterized Thaddeus Stevens as “the crippled, fanatical personification of the extremes of the Radical Republican movement.” D. W. Griffith’ groundbreaking film The Birth of a Nation (1915) made villainous a Congressman Stoneman, a fictional Stevens. By the 20th Century, Stevens was the great antihero of Reconstruction.
By the 1950s, historians had begun to reexamine Stevens’s contribution. Black historians had always highlighted Stevens as a hero for equality, but most white historians really did not consider African Americans as a key part of American history. With the upsurge of the Civil Rights Movement after the victory in the case of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, historians looked into the Constitutional Amendments that won the case. As they researched they found that Thaddeus Stevens was very involved in providing for the legal protections for people of color, even though the Federal government had ceased to enforce the 14th Amendment from 1892 until 1954. When the movie Lincoln was released, most American people caught up with the historians.
The entrance to the center is through a thoroughly modern building that was opened in 2026. If you don’t purchase your tickets online, you can buy them here. There is a gift shop outside the ticketed area and several refreshment kiosks scattered throughout the building. At the entrance, there are introductions to the two main characters.
Smith was born at Russell Tavern in Gettysburg to a Scottish or Irish immigrant father, and a mother who was half Black and half white. She was born in 1813 or 1814. She was a devote Catholic and was married to Jacob Smith, a Black barber from Gettysburg, with whom she had two children. When she went to work for Stevens, she brought her children with her. Smith became active in supporting the Underground Railroad and after the Civil War, she began investing in real estate.
On the inside of the museum, there are displays that set the lives of the two protagonists in the historical context of their times.
Stevens was born on April 4, 1792 in Danville, Vermont. His parents had migrated there from Massachusetts where they bought a farm. Thaddeus was born with a club foot, which meant he could do the heavy work of being a farmer. His father disappeared in 1804, leaving his impoverished mother to take care of the family. His mother, Sarah Morrill Stevens, was a devout Baptist and she tried to raise her children as believers in that faith. Baptists at the time were strongly anti-authoritarian and Vermonters were generally against slavery.
Thaddeus Stevens was devoted to learning and tried to establish a public library in his hometown. He later went to Dartmouth College. When he graduated Dartmouth in 1814, he moved to southern Pennsylvania to try to secure a teaching job. He began teaching at the York Academy in York, Pa. Stevens also began studying law and he passed the Maryland Bar in 1816 and set up an office in Gettysburg. He was generally recognized as an up and coming lawyer in his mid-20s and was tall and well built in spite of his limp. In 1822 he was elected to the borough council.
Stevens began to speak out on national issues with the rise of Andrew Jackson. He thought that Jackson was a demagogue who aroused the poor people of the United States against the rich. Jackson was threatening the republic because “what is most calculated to make discerning men despair of the republic is the subserviency of the people, the facility with which they abandon their own principles for those of their rulers,” Stevens said. While some modern political critics of Stevens liken him to being a communist, he in fact defended the capitalist system and invested in ironworks and real estate.
In the late 1820s, Stevens became a leader in a new political party, The Anti-Mason Party. He attended the 1830 and 1831 national conventions where delegates discussed what they said was the threat posed to the republic by the Order of Freemasons. In 1826, a man criticizing the Masons was kidnapped in Western New York and presumably killed, which attracted national attention. Because the Order was a secret society with its own ideology, many non-Masons were afraid that the Order was looking to secretly control the government. In 1833, Stevens was elected to the Pennsylvania legislature as an Anti-Mason candidate. He said the Order of Freemasons was “an antirepublican and an insidious and dangerous enemy to our democratic form of government,” since “its whole tendency is to cherish a hatred of democracy, and a love of aristocratic and regal forms of power.” William Seward met Stevens at an Anti-Mason convention and the two became allies.
Below is Stevens’s law office.
While still serving in the Pennsylvania legislature, Virginia began pressuring Northern states to outlaw anti-slavery writing and agitation. Stevens, the chair of the Ways and Means Committee, strenuously opposed this imposition on Freedom of Speech. He helped author a report in response to Virginia’s request that said; “Every citizen of the non-slaveholding slates, has a right freely to think and publish his thoughts on any subject of national or state policy. Nor can he be compelled to confine his remarks to such subjects as affect only the state in which he resides.” Stevens said that “The domestic slavery of this country is the most disgraceful institution that the world had ever witnessed, under any form of Government, in any age.” [p. 49 Thaddeus Steven Civil War Revolutionary] While Stevens now began to speak frequently against slavery, in the 1830s he was also attracted to Black Colonization abroad. This plan was condemned by most Black leaders.
Pro-Virginia representatives in the legislature began urging that the vote be taken away from Black males. When Pittsburgh was considering taking the vote away from its Blacks, the African Americans sent a petition to the legislature asking them to protect their right to vote. Many Democrats did not want to receive it because they considered it offensive. Stevens spoke up against this prohibition saying “Such a memorial, coming from white men, would not be considered offensive.” [p. 52] Northerners who said they wanted to disenfranchise Blacks to appease the South were particularly targets of his ire. He said that “Let those who stand in fear of the South, truckle to their debasing tyranny.” He “would rather be the degraded subject of a southern master, than to be a northern freeman without the power and the courage freely to speak my sentiments on every subject.” [p. 54]
Below is the law office.
While Stevens became one of the best know anti-slavery legislators of the mid-19th Century, his early career as a lawyer included him taking on a case in which he defended a slaveholder from his slave suing for freedom.
By 1840, the Anti-Mason Party was declining and Stevens led the Pennsylvania party into becoming a part of the Whig Party. Seward, Stevens, and Abraham Lincoln were among a sizeable minority in the Whig Party opposed to slavery. However, there was a powerful group of Southern Whigs who were as supportive of slavery as any Democrat.
Before there was AI, there were books.
Resting up against the chair is Stevens’s cane.
The next room is a dining room. The dinner table and chairs are not part of the original house. This room was used for politicians and advocates to intermingle.
I have seen children sitting in the chairs.
Stevens’s cane, yet again.
Lydia Smith was mostly white, but even as one-quarter Black she was considered legally Black. She and Stevens became close friends and she advised him on his political positions. Historians are undecided on whether the two were romantically involved.
Visitors to Stevens home were impressed by Smith’s seriousness and education. Below is a painting of her.
The parlor furniture.
Next there is a section on Black life and resistance in Lancaster.
Before Stevens rose to prominence, Black leaders, many recently held in slavery, were working to free their people.
This husband and wife team worked to end slavery just a few dozen miles from where it was allowed in Maryland.
This desk was used by the couple to stay in touch with others in the campaign against slavery.
Most young people don’t realize that desks were very important communications tools.
Stevens was very involved in the legal defense of the Christiana African Americans. Edward Gorsuch of Maryland, his son and nephews, and a Federal Marshall went to the house of an escaped slave named William Parker in the town and the Gorsuch demanded to search the house because he was looking for four of his escaped slaves. September 9, 1851 became a date remembered by the African American community in Pennsylvania because Parker refused the demand of the slaver. Parker was hiding two of the escaped slaves and did not want them to be recaptured. Parker’s wife blew a horn to signal to nearby Blacks to come to relieve the siege.
Approximately seventy-five Blacks came running to the house. Many had rifles and pistols. When several white neighbors arrived, the Marshall told them to help the slaver party, but they refused. The Marshall told them that they were committing a Federal crime by refusing to held them, but they still refused. Edward Gorsuch then confronted one of the runaways who was fortunate enough to overpower his enslaver and push him to the ground. Gorsuch was then shot several times and died soon thereafter. Several of the slave-catching party were also wounded and they retreated.
After the Christiana Riot, President Millard Filmore sent in the United States Marines to overcome Black resistance to slavery. 36 Blacks and five whites were arrested and charged with the capital crime of treason.
The government put one of the white men on trial named Castner Hanway for treason. Thaddeus Stevens headed the defense team and he showed to the jury that the men involved in the Cristiana Riot were not waging war on the Federal government nor trying to overthrow it. After a fifteen minute deliberation, the jury found Hanway not guilty. The other men charged were also released.
The use of Federal troops to try to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law turned many against the South. Slavery could be seen as a “Southern thing” that Northerners did not have to worry about. Now they were presented with the possibility that the Marines could show up in their towns to take away African Americans.
The Center has on display a farm implement that one of the Blacks brought as his weapon to defend Parker.
Another form of Black resistance was the enrollment of 180,00 African American men in the United States Colored Troops. There is the story of Isaac Smith’s enlistment. He was Lydia’s son. She wanted him to embrace Catholicism before he went into the army, but, whatever his religious beliefs, he volunteered.
Isaac Smith was known for his banjo.
By the mid-1850s as the Whig Party went into decline, Stevens used the growing Know Nothing Party to build up his electoral support. Since Smith was a Catholic and he would have two Catholic nuns attending him at the end of his life there have been some questions about what his intentions were. Stevens never acknowledged joining the anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic party but he turned to them in the 1854 election.
With the Whig and Know Nothing Parties on the road to extinction, Stevens became a Republican. When the Republican Party adopted a pro-immigrant platform in 1860, he did not object.
Stevens played a key role in the Congress during the Civil War.
There are several displays on his accomplishments during the War and Reconstruction. He advocated the enlistment of African Americans into the army and the ending of slavery with the 13th Amendment. A year later he backed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 which was the first broad civil rights piece of legislation and which established that Blacks and the children of immigrants were United States citizens. He helped to pass the 14th Amendment and worked to impeach President Andrew Johnson while Stevens was dying.
There is a large room in which different freedom struggles over the last 175 are displayed.
As well as the reactionary and racist resistance.
There are also lessons to be learned from both Stevens and Smith for today’s world.
And there is the opposite side. The Lost Cause and Dunning School made Thaddeus Stevens a villain and portrayed Smith as a manipulative whore.
The next section are the private living quarters of Thaddeus Stevens.
This is where Stevens slept when he was in Lancaster. It was here he died.
In site of his brief alliance with the Know Nothing Party, he had two Catholic nuns beside him in his last minutes.
Next to the bed is Stevens’s hairpiece.
Items from his room.
The boots by the fireplace belonged to Stevens.
While Stevens’s views on religion were controversial, he had the Bible in his room and often quoted it.
Lydia’s Smith’s style of dress. She did not dress fancy, but her dresses were well-made.
Here is the personnal library for the house. Lawyers often spend 15 hours reading each day for their cases, and then when they lay work aside-they spend more time reading for pleasure.
After the death of Thaddeus Stevens:
While Stevens gave her a substantial amount of money before he died, he never changed his will to reflect his promise to provide for her.
A biography of Lydia.
A painting.
I said goodbye to the Stevens & Smith Center and I was hungry.
Across the street was the Southern Market which has been turned into a food court.
There are thirteen chef stations and a full bar. The the hall holds about 250 persons. It is located at 100 S. Queen Street, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The market opened in 1888. Some of the food includes Caribbean, Vietnamese, Thai, Middle East, Morocco, Deli, Sushi, German, and Pizza. There is also a coffee bar.
Being in Lancaster, I figured I would try German food. I got two large sausages with fresh sour kraut, red cabbage and German potato salad. My fathers family is German, so I love the food.
I also had the pierogies. The Sausage dish was very good, but the pierogies were just okay. They look better than they taste.
The station is called Cabbage Hill Schnitzel Haus, shown below.
After your visit to the Center, you may want to visit James Buchanan’s home just ten minutes away.
Note: All color photos of buildings in this post were taken by Patrick Young except as noted.
