Following a visit to the Washington Heights Library for a read-aloud about birds, PS 4 co-teachers Lizette Lantigua and Yomayra Gomez and their 1st-graders spied the Morris-Jumel Mansion as they walked through upper Manhattan’s Jumel Terrace Historic District.

“The kids got curious about it, and the teachers as well, because my co-teacher and I had never been there,” Lantigua said. On June 18, they and their students walked from their nearby school to the Georgian-Palladian-style home that is Manhattan’s oldest surviving residence for a class trip.

After venturing guesses from 45 to 100,000 about the mansion’s age, the 1st-graders learned from Caroline Siavichay, the museum’s school and community programs manager, that the mansion is 260 years old. “Oh, my God!” one of the students responded in amazement.

Its age was the first of a series of revelations shared with the students about the mansion’s storied history.

Roger Morris, a colonel in the British army, and his wife, Mary, built “Mount Morris” in 1765 as a summer home on land that first belonged to the Lenape people. During the American Revolution, the homestead served as the headquarters first for Gen. George Washington for five weeks in the fall of 1776 and then for British and Hessian forces, after the Morris family abandoned it. Wine merchant Stephen Jumel and his wife, Eliza, bought it in 1810. Decades later, in 1841, the Jumel home also housed a famous African American family when Eliza Jumel hired Anne Northup and her children to do housework at the mansion. Anne Northup was the wife of Solomon Northup, a freeborn Black New Yorker whose 1853 memoir, “Twelve Years a Slave,” was adapted over a century later, in 2013, into an Academy Award-winning film. The property opened as a museum in 1904 after one of its last private owners, Lillie Earle, sold it to the city of New York.

Erica Berger

PS 4 teacher Lizette Lantigua leads the way as students are guided through the mansion.

Museum educator Loren Silber urged the visiting history “detectives” to look for clues about how life was different 260 years ago, tying into the 1st-grade curriculum standard of learning that historical sources reveal information about how life in the past differs from the present.

If members of a family wanted a picture, they needed someone to draw or paint it, Silber explained to the 1st-graders. The size of a painting at the museum of Eliza Jumel and her grandchildren as well as details showing the lace on Eliza’s dress provide clues that the Jumel family was wealthy. Families who weren’t wealthy would have lived in farmhouses, or, in the case of the Lenape people, roundhouses or wigwams, Silber said.

Erica Berger

The students look for clues in a historic Jumel family portrait.

The students visited the mansion’s Octagon Room — they counted its eight walls — where the home’s owners once hosted guests. Next the students participated in a scavenger hunt on the second floor. They spotted feather quill pens and ink bottles, fireplaces in each room, candles, a backgammon board, chamber pots and ewers. They also observed that there were no bathrooms.

“People used these chamber pots at nighttime because they didn’t want to go all the way outside to go to the toilet,” Silber said, prompting gasps among the children.

The class went down to the basement to visit the colonial-era kitchen, where they spooned lemongrass, cloves, chamomile, sage and lavender into muslin bags to make sachets. “I’m going to give it to my mom,” said a student who blended three herbs. “I think she’s going to love it.”

The scavenger hunt was a hit with the 1st-graders, who enjoy classroom scavenger hunts, Lantigua said. Students partner up and walk around the classroom looking for math problems that they then solve together. “I use it as a way to review and practice before the test,” she said.

The Morris-Jumel scavenger hunt, which was recently added to the museum’s K–3 program, makes the visit more hands-on and interactive for the kids, Lantigua said. “The students really enjoyed that,” she said. “That was my favorite part, too.”

The museum offers school programs that are aligned with curriculum standards. The program for kindergarten through grade 3 is “What Was Life Like in the Past? An exploration of 19th century life for the Jumel and Northup families.” The program for grades 4–12 is “Fighting for Freedom: The Mansion during the American Revolution.” Tours are available Mondays through Wednesdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Visits are $9 per student ($6 per student for Title I schools) and are capped at 40 students. For an additional $3 each, students can make a sachet or use a quill pen to write on parchment paper.