Cutts–Madison House

The Cutts-Madison House stands on the north-east corner of Lafayette Square, and it is where Dolley Madison died on 12 July 1849, poor enough that a man she had once enslaved sent her food. The legend says she is still there, rocking in a chair on the side porch, smiling at passers-by. The Cosmos Club, which owned the house from 1886 and published a documentary history of it in 1904, recorded that in her day the front entrance was reached by plain wooden steps, and that the cast-iron balcony now on that elevation was put up by Rear Admiral Charles Wilkes after he bought the house in 1851 - at least twenty-one months after her death. The same 67,763-word history mentions no ghost at all. What the story leaves out is better documented than what it contains: Paul Jennings, sold from this address in 1846, and Mary Ellen Stewart, sent to the pump in Lafayette Park in December 1847 so that a slave trader could seize her, who escaped and sailed on the Pearl four months later.

Square 221, on the north-east corner of what is now Lafayette Square, was sold by the federal commissioners to Samuel Davidson on 31 March 1793. His heirs sold lots 12 to 15 to Richard Cutts, a congressman from the Massachusetts district of Maine, on 3 October 1818, and Cutts built the house there in 1818-19 for himself and his wife Anna Payne Cutts, Dolley Madison's sister. What Cutts built is not the building you photograph today. The Cosmos Club's documentary history of 1904 preserves a description given by Jane and Eliza Wilkes, daughters of a later owner: a small two-storey-and-attic house with a gable roof sloping east and west, dormer windows and no back building, its front turned towards Lafayette Square, and its principal entrance "reached by plain wooden steps". The garden ran south as far as the Tayloe mansion and east to the middle of the block. Cutts, who was Second Comptroller of the Treasury, could not manage his own debts. On 22 August 1828 the bank holding his mortgage sold the property to ex-President James Madison for $5,750. Madison died at Montpelier on 28 June 1836 and willed it to his wife. Dolley Madison moved in during November 1837 to cut her costs, went back to Montpelier in 1839 to try to save the estate and rented the Washington house out, returned in 1843 and sold Montpelier in 1844. The White House Historical Association puts it exactly: she lived there "off and on". In 1844 or 1845 someone pushed lit matches into the shutters at the rear and she was woken and carried out by a servant. The household in this house is the part the ghost story leaves out. Dolley Madison brought only part of the household to Washington - most of the people the Madisons had enslaved stayed at Montpelier - and she sold or hired out many of them over the following years to cover her son Payne Todd's debts. Among those who came with her were Paul Jennings, Madison's valet since the White House years, and a young woman named Mary Ellen Stewart with her mother Sukey. Ellen's brother Ben had already been sold to Georgia. In December 1847, according to the White House Historical Association's research, she arranged for a slave trader to call, then sent Ellen to the public pump in Lafayette Park to be seized there; Ellen suspected the visitor, fled and hid. A letter signed "Hampden", written in Washington on 8 March 1848 and printed in the Albany Patriot, tells the same episode from the street: "The girl, Helen, she agreed to send to the street-pump at dusk. Two traders were actually there to seize her, but they happened not to recognize her, and she passed them and made tracks down street." The same letter records that Jennings, sold through the intermediary Pollard Webb, had advanced Mrs Madison $200 of his own money to fix his price before she could sell him to the traders; the bill of sale from D. P. Madison to Pollard Webb was recorded on 4 March 1847, and Senator Daniel Webster, her neighbour on the square, then bought him and let him work off the debt at $8 a month. About four months after the pump, on 15 April 1848, Ellen Stewart went aboard the schooner Pearl with seventy-six others: thirty-eight men, twenty-six women and thirteen children. The Pearl was overtaken at Point Lookout. The trader Hope Slatter bought fifty of the recaptured, Ellen among them; her freedom was later purchased with money raised by William Chaplin and Dr Joseph Evans, and she went to Boston, married Thomas White and came back to Washington with her daughter Gertrude. Jennings, whose part in the escape was never discovered, published A Colored Man's Reminiscences of James Madison in 1865 and wrote of these same years: "In the last days of her life ... she was in a state of absolute poverty ... he often sent me to her with a market-basket full of provisions." Dolley Madison died in the house on 12 July 1849 and was buried from St John's Church opposite. Her son John Payne Todd sold the property to Rear Admiral Charles Wilkes on 3 April 1851. Wilkes moved the entrance round to H Street, turned the old Lafayette Square doorway into a window, cut the front windows down to the floor, put a balcony across that front, replaced the gable roof with a flat one and added a bay window on the south. General George B. McClellan used the house as headquarters from 26 July 1861 until late October. The Cosmos Club bought it in 1886 for $40,000 and enlarged it in 1886 and 1893, Hornblower & Marshall's addition being finished in January 1894. The federal government bought the house in 1940 for $1 million and leased it back to the club until 1952; it then became the first Washington headquarters of NASA, and it was in its ballroom, on 9 April 1959, that the seven Mercury astronauts were introduced to the press. Slated for demolition under the McMillan Plan, the house was saved after Jacqueline Kennedy intervened in February 1962 and John Carl Warnecke redesigned the scheme around it. It is now part of the Howard T. Markey National Courts Building.

The house has not been a private home since 1851 and cannot be visited inside. It is one of three historic buildings absorbed into the Howard T. Markey National Courts Building, whose public entrance is at 717 Madison Place NW; the house itself, at 1520 H Street NW, holds chambers and offices of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and the United States Court of Federal Claims. There is no tour, no ticket office and no ghost programme. What is open is the courthouse, and only as a courthouse. The building operates from 8.00 to 17.00 on weekdays except federal holidays, with the Clerk's Office on 8.30 to 16.30. Everyone entering passes a magnetometer and puts belongings through an X-ray machine; government-issued photo identification is required and visitors are given a temporary badge. Weapons, knives and anything with a cutting edge, aerosols, tools and flammable materials are refused at the door. There is a step-free entrance off H Street through a brick breezeway; courtrooms 201 and 203 need no stairs and courtroom 402 has a public lift on request, and trained service animals are admitted. The nearest Metro is McPherson Square on the Orange, Blue and Silver lines, with Farragut North and Metro Center on the Red line a short walk away. For most visitors the sensible plan is the outside. Lafayette Park is National Park Service land, open and free, and from the Madison Place pavement you look straight at the yellow stucco elevation and the cast-iron balcony that the legend calls Dolley Madison's porch. It is worth knowing, standing there, that she never saw it. St John's Church, where her funeral was held, is on the opposite corner of the square. Access to Lafayette Park is occasionally restricted at short notice for security reasons around the White House. Details checked on 17 August 2026; hours and screening rules for a federal courthouse change, so confirm on the court's own site before travelling.