Merchants House Museum

A New York family spent nearly a century in the same house, leaving behind the objects of everyday life. Seabury Tredwell, a prosperous merchant, bought the brick row house on East Fourth Street in 1835 and moved in with his wife, Eliza, their eight children, and four Irish servants. The home had been built three years earlier by Joseph Brewster. Its rooms held the family through changing generations and a city expanding around them.

Gertrude Tredwell, the youngest child, was born in the house and died there in 1933 at the age of ninety-three. When her niece prepared to sell its contents, a distant cousin recognized the value of preserving the home together with its furniture, clothing, and personal possessions. The Merchant’s House opened as a museum in 1936. Its survival offers a rare view of an entire nineteenth-century household, including both the family who owned the home and the servants whose labor helped maintain it.