Lucy Colman Homesite, Rochester

Beginning in 1857,  Lucy Colman lived at 33 Chatham Street. That may have been the year when Colman taught at—and, according to her autobiography, scuttled—a segregated school; Rochester’s last segregated school closed in that year, whatever role Colman did or did not play in its closure.

Colman still appears in a Rochester city directory from 1864, by which time she had emerged as a controversial speaker for both abolition and woman’s rights. (Nineteenth-century practice was to use the singular, woman's, when referring to women as a class; later practice was to use the plural, women's).

Chatham Street no longer exists, apparently a casualty of the I-490 highway and urban renewal. Its final vestige seems to be a driveway between two industrial buildings on Central Avenue.