William H. Seward House

The house at thirty-three South Street in Auburn, New York was home to William H. Seward, one of the most consequential American statesmen of the nineteenth century. Seward served as Governor of New York, a United States Senator, and Lincoln's Secretary of State, the man who negotiated the purchase of Alaska from Russia in eighteen sixty-seven, a deal so ridiculed at the time that newspapers called it Seward's Folly.

The house was also a documented stop on the Underground Railroad. Seward and his wife Frances sheltered freedom seekers in their basement, and the family maintained a close friendship with Harriet Tubman, who later bought a home nearby in Auburn with Seward's help. On the same night John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, a co-conspirator entered this house and stabbed Seward in his bed.

He survived. The house opened as a museum in nineteen fifty-five and retains its original furnishings and family collections.