Located about 40 miles northeast of Albany, this nineteenth-century house and its landscape were the childhood home of abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Susan B. Anthony. In 1826 Daniel Anthony, a devout Quaker and abolitionist, moved his family from Massachusetts to New York to manage a cotton mill in partnership with Judge John Mclean. In 1832 Anthony supervised the construction of the home where his daughter Susan would spend the most formative years of her childhood. It was, for example, while living in the Battenville residence that she first encountered slavery, meeting two slaves at the Mclean family home, and was snubbed by a local school master who refused to teach her long division because she was a woman. These experiences helped cement the values and principles that shaped her future work women’s rights and the abolition movement.
The Anthony house is nestled against a hillside along a blind curve of the two-lane Route 29, which passes close to its entrance. A steep, unpaved drive runs between the house and a garage (formerly a carriage barn), also located on the one-acre parcel. Designed in a roughly square-shaped plan, the main block of the house rests on an ashlar foundation and consists of an area of approximately 1,150 square feet. The exterior of the main block is largely of Federalist and Greek Revival design, with the inclusion of late Victorian adornments added in 1885. A two-story wing was added in 1991, replacing a clapboard addition built in 1835. In 2006 the State of New York Department of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation purchased the property for $1. It was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2007.
