The President’s House
PHILADELPHIA – A federal appeals court will let the Trump administration alter mentions of slavery at a historical site in Philadelphia, overruling a lower court judge who had blocked the effort.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit said last week that new information panels prepared by the National Park Service “are full of historical context” and that Philadelphia could not challenge the decision under a federal rule-making law. The City couldn’t show that a final agency action that it could fight had yet occurred.
“Given all these developments, we cannot agree with the district court that the exhibit removal six months ago was NPS’s last word on the matter,” Judge Thomas Hardiman wrote.
The site is the President’s House, where presidents George Washington and John Adams once lived. Washington owned slaves there, and the NPS used crowbars to take down exhibits informing the public of their stories in January
President Trump’s 2025 executive order told the Department of the Interior to make sure national parks do not “contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times).”
But that contrasts with the mission of the President’s House. Philadelphia and the federal government agreed in 2006 to design a somewhat-restored version that tells the stories of those who were enslaved there under Washington.
Admission is free to the house, located on the corner of 6th and Market streets. It is designated as a National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom site and informs the public of slaves like Oney Judge, who escaped the house after Martha Washington told her she would be given to Washington’s granddaughter as a wedding gift.
Philadelphia, it said, has an equal right to the design of the house and has spent $3.5 million on it. The lawsuit claims the federal government violated the Administrative Procedures Act in making a final agency decision that is arbitrary and capricious. The Third Circuit said there was no agency action conducted by the NPS.
Gov. Josh Shapiro joined Philadelphia’s cause, as did Democrat state senators Nikil Saval, Vincent Hughes, Christine Tartaglione, Anthony Williams, Art Haywood and Sharif Street. The sudden loss of history is causing harm and anxiety to their constituents, they say.
District judge Cynthia Rufe quoted George Orwell’s 1984 when issuing the injunction – “All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.”
New NPS panels at the site will inform visitors that Washington expressed discomfort with slavery but relied on it to run his Virginia plantation. He “signed legislation that both upheld and limited slavery,” a panel says, with another featuring a picture and excerpt from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
Other panels feature Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass.
“They highlight the momentous events that took place in the President’s House and the other sites at Independence National Park,” Hardiman wrote.
“They acknowledge the evil of slavery, including its injustices and hypocrisies, and, by telling the story of the nine slaves that Washington kept in the President’s House, remind us of their essential humanity.”
