Catherine Ferguson Residence

Overview

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THEN:
According to the federal census of 1830, seven black men who lived on Thompson Street owned seventeen female slaves. The women may or may not have been their wives and daughters; the census didn't say. In the 1850s, this address marked the last home of Catherine (Katy) Ferguson, a black pastry-shop owner believed to have served as a foster mother to forty-eight children in the course of her life - twenty-eight black orphans and twenty white ones.
Source: Six Heritage Tours of the Lower East Side by Ruth Limmer in collaboration with NYC's Lower East Side Tenement Museum

NOW:
No signage or information regarding Catherine Ferguson's existence was to found nor the Interracial School for the Poor. The building itself has been turned into an apartment complex and the neighborhood is considered to be predominantly white upper middle class and quite expensive.

African American Heritage LES
updated 01/2010 by NYU Tourism Maps