An abolitionist owned this house and opened its great hall to the people he had freed.
Woodburn, also called the Delaware Governor's Mansion or simply Governor's House, is the official residence of the governor of Delaware, in Dover. The land was granted to David Morgan and his heirs by the Swedish crown in 1684. In the 1780s Charles Hillyard III bought it at a sheriff's sale for 110 dollars, and around 1790 he built the house.
It passed to his daughter Mary and her husband Martin W. Bates, who was a doctor, a merchant, a lawyer and a US Senator. In 1820 Bates leased Woodburn to Governor Jacob Stout, the first time it housed Delaware's executive. Bates sold it in 1825 to Daniel and Mary Cowgill. Cowgill was a Quaker and a committed abolitionist: he freed the people his family had enslaved and let them meet in the great hall of this house.
It stayed in that family for years before selling in 1912 to Daniel O. Hastings, who added the brick front porch, the pillars on the south facade and a reflecting pool along with interior changes. He sold it in 1918 to Frank Hall, a retired Philadelphia dentist, who renovated further.
The state bought it in 1965 and it has been the official residence since. It went on the National Register of Historic Places as Governor's House in 1972.
The residence's own site puts the appeal plainly: historians credit Woodburn's importance as much to its architecture as to the people who lived there, a list that runs to gentlemen farmers, landowners, an abolitionist, two US Senators, two doctors, a dentist, a judge and eight recent governors. It also keeps a page for its ghosts and legends, and a wall of First Ladies.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
