In mid-April, I had the opportunity to visit Philadelphia, accompanying my partner, Linda Ries, to her attendance at the Organization of American Historians Annual Conference.  While she sat in a windowless room listening to history, I devoured every museum in sight. It is America’s 250^th after all, and Philadelphia was where it happened.

On my way to Independence Mall on April 17^th and 18th along Market Street, I passed the President’s House Exhibit, located at the Southeastern Corner of Market and 6^th. After the Park Service’s removal of the interpretive panels, and the half-complete restoration by court order, the site had the character of a Roman ruin. What I saw at first angered me immensely. Following Trump’s Executive Order 14253, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” (should I put that in double quotes?), the National Park Service removed all of the panels that dealt with the difficult history of George Washington’s stay in this house in Philadelphia during his two terms as president and his relationship to his enslaved workers that kept his and Martha’s home there. Following a February Federal District court order, the same National Park Service began to put the panels back, but on appeal by the Administration, the Court halted the work, so the interpretive panels are now partially restored, partially taken down.

It was in this context that I took my phone and began to record what was up and what was removed.  I am not nearly the first to do this, and at the end, I offer several links to other individuals and projects that document what was there and what was removed.  However, what I am presenting may be one of the few if not the only comprehensive treatment of site conditions on that weekend- what remains, where it remains spatially, what the empty spaces look like, and what specifically was removed and from where. Finally, as an anthropological archaeologist, I also recorded what the visitors and the public put into those empty spaces and why that gives me optimism.

A Brief History of President’s House

Perhaps the best way to start is to quote the introductory panel to the Site (located as “m” in the map), which was one of the removed panels.

Presidents Washington and Adams lived on this site in the 1790’s when Philadelphia served as the nation’s temporary capital.  Both presidents worked to preserve the freedoms won by the American Revolution while accepting that nearly 700,000 people of African descent remained enslaved in the new nation. At his Virginia plantation, George Washington oversaw more than 300 enslaved people, nine of whom served in his Philadelphia household. John and Abigail Adams never owned enslaved laborers. Hired servants, including free and possibly enslaved African Americans, performed daily tasks in the Adams household.

The house that once stood on this site was torn down in 1832. In 2007, archaeologists exposed foundation walls outlining the location of the kitchen and adjoining basement passages where enslaved and free servants toiled for the Washington family.  Nearby remains of a house window revealed an addition to the State Dining Room.

History of the Controversy

What happened between 1951 and today has more baggage than what Lauren Sanchez Bezos packs for a transatlantic ocean liner voyage. US History.org and the April 27, 2026 Amicus Brief probably have the best overviews. I’m limiting my retelling to barest of bones, because otherwise it would triple the length of the blog and has been well-told elsewhere.  The source of the controversy was the inherent contradictions of George Washington, one of the founders of a nation built on the premise that “all men are created equal.”  It was his not only owning people, but ensuring their continued enslavement while serving him in Philadelphia through a loophole in Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Act. I would stop reading this blog now and read the Amicus Brief, as well as the excellent article by Sharon Holt on the controversy.

After the house was torn down in 1832, the area continued as part of downtown Philadelphia until after WWII. At that time, plans were drawn up for an Independence Mall Park, which was ultimately achieved in 1969 as a State Park. In the mid-1970’s, administration of the Park was transferred to the National Park Service, and ownership in 1998. President’s House was never envisioned as part of the Park, not so much because of the difficult history of the Site, as due to the fact that none of it was visible and may have only existed archaeologically, if at all.

Minimal nods to the presence of the President’s House were given, mostly through plaques or signage, until 2000 when archaeological work for the Liberty Bell Center uncovered and confirmed the existence of a smokehouse converted by Washington into quarters for his enslaved workers.

Increasing visibility of the Site and pressure from the public and advocacy groups over the next few years ultimately led to City and Federal Congressional support for recognition of the President’s House as part of the Mall, dragging an uninterested National Park Service along.  Substantial funding commitments from the City, the State, and the Federal Government in the mid 2000’s resulted in a 2006 Cooperative Agreement between the City and NPS that would plan and prepare an exhibit and an archaeological excavation at the Site.  In a Forest Gump moment, in late 2005 while working at PennDOT, I advised PennDOT, FHWA, and the City of Philadelphia and NPS in the drafting of a Section 106 Programmatic Agreement that funded and enabled the archaeological work there.

Plans for the exhibit were contentious and negotiated among the City, NPS, the public and several advocacy groups, which included Avenging the Ancestors Coalition.  The resulting design for the interpretation for the Site was ultimately accepted by all parties, but like all truly balanced negotiations represented a compromise.  Everyone was unhappy to a greater or lesser degree, but that is the nature of compromises.  As stated in the Amicus Brief:

Ultimately, the interpretative panels displayed at the President’s House until this January reflected the culmination of more than eight years of sustained, often contentious engagement among historians, archaeologists, community organizations, elected officials, journalists, and hundreds of thousands of members of the public—all operating within a formal framework of institutional partnership between the City of Philadelphia and the NPS. (p. 20)

On December 15, 2010, Mayor Michael opened the permanent installation, “President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in Making a New Nation, addressing a crowd of several hundred in bitterly cold weather.  

2026

For nearly 16 years, the President’s House served as a presence at the Independence Mall complex, adding the Executive Branch narrative to the Congressional and Judicial narratives. On January 23, 2026, without notice or warning National Park Service workers removed all of the panels from the President’s House Site. The removal was in response to Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14253, issued in January, 2025.  Almost immediately, the City of Philadelphia filed suit in Federal Court to prevent the destruction of the removed panels and require the restoration of them back at the Site.  

On January 24^th, the Organization of American Historians issued a statement on the removal of the panels, the same organization whose conference Linda attended in mid-April, thus enabling my visits.

On February 16^th, U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe ordered the exhibits to be restored pending legal challenges to the executive order. The Government appealed, and on February 20^th, Third Circuit Judge Thomas M. Hardiman halted restoration, but ruled all exhibit materials must be preserved so that they could be restored, pending the outcome of future legal actions.

On April 9^th, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals granted a partial stay of the District Court’s preliminary injunction, allowing the National Park Service and other federal officials to delay restoring the President’s House site to its January 21, 2026, condition and to delay certain maintenance requirements.  The court denied the federal government’s request to pause the part of the injunction that bars them from damaging or altering exhibits, panels, or artwork at the site. The order also blocked the installation of replacement materials or further changes without the mutual agreement of the City of Philadelphia.  The appeals court instructed federal officials to continue preserving the status quo at the President’s House site while the case moves forward.

This left the Site in limbo and akimbo, with half the panels restored and half still removed, but (hopefully) stored.  On April 27^th, an Amicus brief (that I joined) was filed on behalf of the panels and the history behind them. Other Amicus briefs have also been filed in support of restoring the President’s House Site panels.

Oral arguments for the Third Circuit Court of Appeals are scheduled for June 2^nd.

The April 17-18^th Visits

On April 17, 2026 and the following day, I visited President’s House on the way to other museums on the Mall.  Although I had read about the controversy and the Park Service Actions, it is different standing in front of it, like some ancient graffiti’d Roman ruin. It was at that time I decided to try to perform some useful service and document the panels that were present and the panels that weren’t. Each panel that existed was photographed as was each missing space, along with some additional views.  In particular, I was taken by the efforts by the public to call out the Park Service and to attach what they felt were the missing panels.

To orient you to the status of the President’s House, I prepared a series of photographic views, which are keyed in the map below:

Reconstructing the Lost Panels

With the existing panels and empty spaces duly noted, the problem of identifying the missing panels and their location was much harder than I initially anticipated, requiring all of the archaeological tricks of the trade I had acquired over the years.  There were numerous web sites put together by good and concerned citizens that listed and showed photographs of the missing panels. Their role in saving history was incalculable and to them I give my thanks.  However, in most cases, where the panel was originally was not indicated.  So at the onset, I found myself  conducting the second archaeological study at President’s House, this time piecing together much more recent material culture like some life-sized jigsaw puzzle.

I was initially encouraged by two web sites. One was a Youtube discussion from the Keystone Curiosity website of the missing panels based on a first-hand visit. 

The second was the Missing History of our National Parks website. This site showed a number of before and after photographs, which proved useful as well as slightly difficult, as some of the panels marked in the website were obviously the wrong ones.

Working through a process of elimination, and context (was the background? brick or stone?), I was able to place several but not nearly all of the missing panels. I also used some Frassanito-like tricks, such as figuring out where the camera (or phone) taking the image was placed through the reflection in the image being photographed (such as missing panel f: Contagion and Liberty). The reflection placed the panel at the southern chimney because of the reflected view to those buildings situated a little bit further south from Market.

A further breakthough occurred when I stumbled into the Google Maps Streetview feature of Yellow Man from the 598 Market Street Address. Not only did it show the entrance on the south side of Market, but allowed you to actually “walk” south along the eastern side of the Site and peer in occasionally.

Normally, this wouldn’t matter, but the recording was in 2024, before the panels were taken down. Generally, the images of the existing and now-missing panels were clearly visible, good enough to match to existing photographs from the other sites. Unfortunately, they weren’t really good enough to read the text. Now, that would have been something.

The final missing pieces were provided by the Save our Signs project. Save our Signs is a national crowdsourced project to record for posterity and protection, National Park Service signs that might be removed under Secretary of Interior’s Order 3431. Following the President’s Executive Order 14253, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, Secretary Burgum invited citizens to report any signage for “inappropriate content.” The Save our Signs effort asks everyone to build a community archive of the signs, exhibits, and texts that could soon disappear from our national parks.

Fortunately, President’s House was included in the Archive on its own page, under Independence National Historical Park. As one might expect, many of the photographs were of sufficient quality to read all of the text. Some of these photographs served as the basis images for the Missing History of our National Parks website, but fortunately, the Save our Signs page had multiple images of higher quality than what was show on the Missing History website.

As part of the Exhibit, there were several video monitors. My understanding is that these also provided historical content to the Exhibit. Monitors that were present at the Site those April days were turned off or otherwise not working.  It would have been nice to have recovered the video of these that had been “taken down,” but it is beyond my capabilities.

Below is my best reconstruction of the existing and missing panels, in their proper place. I should note at this point that the Exhibit never had a smooth narrative flow, with disjointed panels trying to incorporate Washington’s Philadelphia home, the founding of a nation, and Washington’s enslaved workers and their stories.

President’s House Panels

This orientation map below shows the location of all existing and missing panels.  Existing panels are denoted by numbers in blue circles; missing panels by letters in red stars. The same base mapping as was used for photographic views comes from Google Maps. For both existing and missing panels, sometimes several images were required to show and read the panels properly. These are usually denoted as sub-labels, e.g. 15-exising-left and 15-existing right.  If anyone has an image of a missing panel that is better and of higher resolution, please forward it to me and I will update the image.

Existing (each panel is “clickable” as a link. Where there are several images, each is separately clickable.)

1. Death Carts
2. Refuge in the Country
3. A Day of Reciprocity
4. The Opener of the Way
5. I Am Free Now
6. I Will Fear No Evil
7. The Keeper of the House
8. Suppressing the Opposition
9. An Act Respecting Fugitives from Justice
10. We Shall Come to a Civil War
11. Burn this Treaty to Hell
12. Promoting the Abolition of Slavery
13. Strengthening Ties with the United States
14. Awarding a Peace Medal
15. History Lost and Found – left and right
16. I and My Household
17. Freedom Might be Too Great a Temptation

Missing (each panel is “clickable” as a link. Where there are several images, each is separately clickable.)

1. The Executive Branch – left
2. The Executive Branch – right
3. The House and the People Who Worked and Lived in It – left, center, and center-right
4. The House and the People Who Worked and Lived in It-right
5. Oney Escapes
6. Contagion and Liberty
7. Is Hereby Empowered to Seize Such Fugitives
8. The Dirty Business of Slavery
9. Slavery in a Growing Nation
10. Mount Vernon to Philadelphia: A Path to Freedom
11. Chef Hercules
12. Life Under Slavery – left and right
13. The President’s House Site

Optimism and Closing Thoughts

I would be totally remiss if I failed to discuss the “graffiti’d” part of this ruin. As we all know, graffiti is not a modern phenomenon, but dates to well before Pompeii and Herculaneum. Here at President’s House, the graffiti mainly took the form of photocopied pages or notes written on paper taped to the walls, especially in those missing panel spaces.  The messages were generally unified in varying levels of distaste of the current Administration and the National Park Service.

Clearly the actions of the National Park service were fooling no one.

In some instances, folks simply posted photocopies of the missing panels, especially the ones that told the story of Washington’s enslaved workers.

That visitors to President’s House are simply not having it, whether they be tourists or Philadelphia residents. I found this one of the few upsides to this whole sordid act. It gives flesh to the bones of OAH’s January statement:

At stake is the core democratic principle that the public has a right to an honest, accurate account of its nation’s own history, free from political censorship or manipulation. Historical knowledge is a shared civic resource and a bedrock of accountability. Government suppression of the facts of history for political and ideological ends is a practice of authoritarianism.

What was more remarkable was that over a 24 hour period, the graffiti had been removed (probably by Park Service staff), but then immediately replaced by the next group of visitors.  This inspired me to prepare an alternative Junior Ranger Activity.  If you are in Philadelphia or are planning to visit Philadelphia in the near future, feel free to download it, print it, and use it. 

Once you have downloaded the appropriate file, print out each of the panels.  Then visit President’s House at 598 Market Street with a roll of painter’s tape, and put the missing panel back up in the place it was taken down. If you take a Sharpie and some blank paper, you can also provide some additional commentary.  However, understand that within 24 hours what you have put up will likely be taken down, so you might also want to document your work with your phone.

For convenience, I am offering this in a file that could be downloaded and conceivably be e-mailed.

Alternative Junior Ranger Activity – smaller file size (6 mb)

During my second visit to President’s House, I encountered two very disparate tour groups, one led by a Park Service Guide, and one led by the The Black Journey. I caught a few lines from the NPS tour, but the Guide and his charges were fairly quiet as they shuffled along. Not so the other group, with a largely African-American membership. The Guide, in a clear and penetrating voice, told the story of Washington and the enslaved workers that served him and his family, as well as the escape of one of those workers, Ona Judge. This was a history that at least some folks wanted to know and share.  President’s House was part of the Original Black History Tour, one of several walking tours offered by the The Black Journey in Philadelphia.  Doug Burgum and the National Park Service may have had certain goals for the fencing off inappropriate history. Thanks to the City, advocacy groups, public history websites, visitors, and the public, it doesn’t seem to be working. Nor should it allowed to be.

Ultimately, the right thing to do will be to restore the missing panels to their pre-2026 status.  The reason for doing so is not because this is some cherished correct history.  History is constantly reinterpreted and retold and there is probably no finer example of that than the President’s House and its story as told between WWII and today.  Rather the reason for putting the panels back is to respect the process that was engaged to reach this particular telling, which despite some of the specifics, all of the interested parties agreed.  It is by no means the final version, though.

As Sharon Holt (2026) concluded in her article:

The hopeful care of the founding generation and the work of generations of Americans who followed them to realize the ideals that they could not, has given us a nation built by all of us, for better and for worse. Errors have been legion over our 250 years; so have reflection, remorse, and repair. Americans are still building our nation today and we will continue building it into the future. Here in Philadelphia, the work of creating the Presidents House installation moved many people some of the way toward acknowledging how slavery crippled the promise of liberty. Preserving the President’s House interpretation, or recreating it should that become necessary, will move many more. The work of telling liberty’s full story in all its complexity, sorrow, and glory remains ahead of us.

On that cold December 15^th day in 2010, Mayor Nutter stated, “This is where the dialogue begins. This is where the conversation of this contradiction must start.” Let us all pray that following the restoration of the panels, the true conversation can begin.

References

Publications

Holt, Sharon Ann

2026    What Happened, and What Did Not, at the President’s House on Independence Mall. Pennsylvania History 93(1):5-14.

Yamin, Rebecca

2008    Digging in the City of Brotherly Love. Stories from Philadelphia Archaeology.  Yale University Press. New Haven.

Internet Sites

OAH Statement on the Freedom and Slavery Exhibit Removal at Independence National Historical Park.

US History.org, The President’s House in Philadelphia. This also provides an excellent timeline from 1947 through 2026.

The Missing History of our National Parks. A useful, if slightly erroneous listing of which panels were removed in January 2026.

Keystone Curiosity YouTube Site. An on-the-ground visit to the President’s House January 29, 2026, both before and after. Specifically, What was on the Panels Removed? The President’s House: Philadelphia

Google Maps, October, 2024 streetscape view of the President’s House site, at 598 Market Street. This was invaluable in locating which missing panels belonged where. Some of the detail is remarkable.

Save our Signs Archive. (www.saveoursigns.org) Best examples of the missing President’s House Panels.

April 27, 2026 Amicus Brief (one of many), filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.