The first stand alone museum about Thaddeus Stevens will hold its grand opening at 46 Chambersburg Street in downtown Gettysburg, PA on Thursday, April 4, from 5 to 7 p.m. The date is also the 232nd birthday of Stevens and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Thaddeus Stevens Society.
Gettysburg Mayor Rita Frealing and other local officials are scheduled to speak at the event. Tom Jolin, Civil War period musician, will provide entertainment at the event.
Stevens was the most powerful congressman during and after the Civil War. He helped to persuade Abraham Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and was instrumental in the passage of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery. He is the father of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, the single most important amendment requiring equal treatment under the law and extending the Bill of Rights to the state level.
The 815 square-foot space will feature the Thaddeus Stevens Society’s extensive collection of Stevens artifacts including Stevens letters, period newspapers and stoves made at iron mills owned by Stevens. There will also be numerous books and documents available for research on Stevens.
The storefront is across the street from where Stevens’s home was located at 51 Chambersburg Street until it was torn down a hundred years ago. Stevens lived in Gettysburg from 1816 to 1842. While there, Stevens became a prominent anti-slavery and pro-education state legislator and owned two iron mills in the area. He then moved to Lancaster, PA in 1842 where he was elected to Congress and was instrumental in the legislative destruction of slavery.
The Thaddeus Stevens Society has over 300 members across the county and six in foreign countries. In 2022 it installed a statue of Stevens in front of the Adams County Courthouse on Baltimore Street in Gettysburg.