Mount Pleasant: Elegance and Enslaved Lives

The mansion called Mount Pleasant once moved John Adams to call it the most elegant seat in Pennsylvania. Built in the early seventeen sixties for John Macpherson, a Scottish sea captain who made a fortune privateering in the Caribbean, the house stands as a premier example of high-style Georgian architecture. But records document a darker reality alongside that elegance.

Macpherson is also said to have taken part in the sale and purchase of enslaved people of African descent. Four people believed to have been enslaved at Mount Pleasant were named Nell, Bernard, Castillis, and Cato. Their labor built and sustained the world Adams so admired.

Mount Pleasant is now part of Philadelphia's Fairmount Park and is open to the public.