The house was located one block north of the Pennsylvania Statehouse, now known as Independence Hall, and was built by Mary Masters, a widow, around 1767.

Penn was entrusted to deliver Congress' Olive Branch Petition to King George III in a last-ditch effort to avoid war between Great Britain and the colonies.

Hardware merchant Nathaniel Burt purchased the property in 1832,[5] and gutted the house, inserting three narrow stores between its exterior walls.

"[1]Washington brought eight slaves from Mount Vernon to Philadelphia in 1790: Moll, Christopher Sheels, Hercules, his son Richmond, Oney Judge, her half-brother Austin, Giles, and Paris.

[7] Pennsylvania had begun a gradual abolition of slavery in 1780, freezing the number of slaves in the state and granting freedom to their future children.

The law allowed slaveholders from other states to hold personal slaves in Pennsylvania for six months, but empowered those same enslaved to claim their freedom if held beyond that period.

I find it best to fill with Ice which as it is put in should be broke into small pieces and pounded down with heavy Clubs or Battons such as Pavers use, if well beat it will after a while consolidate into one solid mass and require to be cut out with a Chizell or Axe.

[18]: 46–50  The Liberty Bell Center was under construction in January 2002, when the Historical Society of Pennsylvania published Edward Lawler, Jr.'s research on the President's House,[3] including the revelation that future visitors to the LBC would "walk over" the footprint of Washington's "slave quarters" as they entered the new building.

[21] In a March 12, 2002, evening lecture at the Arch Street Friends Meeting House and an interview the next morning on WHYY-FM, Philadelphia's National Public Radio affiliate, UCLA historian Gary Nash scathingly criticized Independence Park for its refusal to interpret the enslaved Africans at the President's House site.

[22] Independence National Historic Park (INHP) Superintendent Martha Aikens countered with an op-ed proposing that the enslaved be interpreted at the Germantown White House, some eight miles away.

[23] Nash's anger inspired the founding of the Ad Hoc Historians, a group of Philadelphia-area scholars whose immediate concern was the interpretation for the under-construction Liberty Bell Center.

[18] Coard delivered a petition signed by 15,000 people to Independence Park urging it to build a memorial to the President's House and Washington's slaves.

[18]: 52 The Philadelphia Inquirer published a front-page, banner-headlined article on Sunday, March 24, 2002, "Echos of Slavery at Liberty Bell Site.

"[24] NPS Chief Historian Dwight Pitcaithley wrote to Independence Park's superintendent, urging her to consider a different perspective: The contradiction in the founding of the country between freedom and slavery becomes palpable when one actually crosses through a slave quarters site when entering a shrine to a major symbol of the abolition movement....How better to establish the proper historical context for understanding the Liberty Bell than by talking about the institution of slavery?

The fact that Washington's slaves Hercules and Oney Judge sought and gained freedom from this very spot gives us interpretive opportunities other historic sites can only long for.

"[24] Members of the Ad Hoc Historians, ATAC, and Generations Unlimited participated in a May 13, 2002, planning session on the LBC interpretation, overseen by Pitcaithley.

[24] The Philadelphia City Council and the Pennsylvania General Assembly each passed resolutions urging the National Park Service to interpret the story of the enslaved Africans at the President's House site.

Philadelphia City Council appropriated $1.5 million toward a commemoration of the site, which Mayor John Street announced at the Liberty Bell Center's opening, October 9, 2003.

[28] Congressmen Chakka Fatah and Robert Brady secured $3.6 million in federal funds for the project, which they jointly announced on September 6, 2005.

[29] A national design competition for the President's House site was announced in late 2005, and more than twenty teams of architects, artists and historians submitted proposals.

The models and drawings were exhibited at the National Constitution Center and the African American Museum in Summer 2006, and the public had several weeks to comment and cast votes for their favorite design.

Early discoveries included brick foundations of the three Burt stores, built between the exterior walls of the gutted house.

The excavation uncovered the rear wall of the main house and, most surprisingly, much of the curved foundation of Washington's bow window.

"There can be little doubt that in Washington's bow can be found the seed that was later to flower in the oval shape of the Blue Room [of the White House].

[18] As the excavation's closing approached, the City and Independence Park issued a joint press release: More than a quarter million visitors have stood at the public viewing platform to witness this extraordinary place, to learn from the archaeologists, and to interact with each other on important topics such as race relations in the United States.

[36]The excavation was closed with a July 31 ceremony that included speeches, the dedication of a bronze plaque listing the names of the nine enslaved held at the site, a prayer, and the African ritual of spilling of sand and water as oblations.

[37] Completed in 2010, the memorial, President's House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation, is an open-air pavilion that shows the outline of the original buildings and allows visitors to view the remaining foundations.