January 7, 2026 -  By surfacing records of enslaved people and engaging local residents, Philadelphia’s Stenton Museum is reexamining Quaker history – and reshaping its programming around a fuller, more honest history.

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For Laura Siena, a Northwest Philly resident and descendant of Quakers who settled in colonial America, digging into her family’s history and the Quaker presence in 18th-century Germantown has led her to discoveries she’s still working to make sense of.

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“My family came here in either 1681 or 1683 on a boat, and we grew up with this idea that they were just these amazing, wonderful people,“ she says. “Three years ago, a friend of mine sent me an article about how my family had owned slaves, and I never knew that.”​​

 

September 29, 2025-  Stenton has been awarded a $360,000 grant from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage for the project, Wrestling with Justice: Quakers and Northern Slavery. A new interpretive plan contextualizes the history of slavery at the historic house museum Stenton through exhibitions, tours, and programs. Illuminating the largely invisible labor force of enslaved and indentured people who lived and worked on the property in the 18th and 19th centuries, the research-based project challenges prevailing views of the time period by examining slavery in the North and Quakers who owned slaves. 

 

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