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Belt-Gaskin House

New York, US

Belt-Gaskin House

Belt-Gaskin House is a historic home located at Auburn in Cayuga County, New York. It is a two-story, three-bay frame house built about 1868. The house was built by African Americans Thomas and Rachel Belt (or possibly Bell), who returned to the U.S. from Canada after the conclusion of the Civil War

. The National Register nomination document asserts:Evidence that the Belt family were freedom seekers is circumstantial but compelling. About 1805, Rachael Belt and Thomas Belt were born in Maryland, almost certainly in slavery. In the 1840s, they came to New York State, where their son George was born about 1849. Perhaps as a result of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, they left New York State for Canada, where another son, Isaiah, was born about 1854. Between 1865 and 1870, Thomas and Rachael Belt returned to the United States. On November 5, 1868, they bought a house on Cornell Street (now Chapman Avenue) in Auburn, New York, in a neighborhood near Harriet Tubman's home, where many other freedom seekers, as well as many Irish and U.S.-born people of European-American descent, were also buying homes. The Belt house appeared on an 1868 manuscript map by John S. Clark, from a survey by...

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