Cliveden first opened its servant’s quarters to the public for interpretive tours during the Mt. Airy Day festival May 7 for the first time in its 244 year history.  

On that day, nearly 200 curious neighbors and community leaders toured the facility to learn about individuals who once worked for and served Cliveden’s Chew family, according to a news release.  

"The opening of the servant’s quarters moves Cliveden closer toward its goal of an expanded African American interpretation for the site,” Cliveden Executive Director David Young said in the news release.

He added that the space “can bring our local community together in ways that help Germantown.”  

According to Young, 45 members of local Boy Scout Troop 358 had worked seven hours the previous weekend to clean out the facility. The group, based out of Grace Baptist Church in Germantown, chose Cliveden for its service project because of the site's storied history and for the ability to reclaim some of the lost spaces African Americans once inhabited.  

Staff members of Cliveden received support from its board of directors and local partners to open the servants quarters and to develop programs and tour experiences that expand the site's African American interpretation.

"The diverse background and knowledge of individuals on our team ensured that these projects aligned with the needs and expectations of Germantown community members," Young said in the news release.

Three grants from community, regional, and national agencies were recently announced in support of Cliveden’s efforts to promote dialogue among community members and young audiences about the site’s history:

• The Heritage Philadelphia Program of The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage awarded the site an Interpretation Implementation grant for "Emancipating Cliveden," a project that will radically reinterpret the historic site based on evidence of the Chew Family’s slaveholding past. The initiative is informed by a year-long planning process that involved community engagement and outreach with a diversity of partner. It will result in the development of new exhibitions, media installations, and programs that explore the relationship between wealth, privilege, and slavery in early American culture.
• The National Trust for Historic Preservation and the National Endowment for Humanities will support the "Cliveden Conversations" series, a public forum discussing issues of race, history, and memory in Philadelphia. Scholars from across the region will be invited to present lively discussions which incorporate new research from the Chew Family Papers collection.  
• The First United Methodist Church of Germantown’s “Community Needs Committee” will also support Cliveden by providing funding for "History/MyStory/OurStory: Crafting and Telling Historical Stories." The program will pair traditional griot storyteller and Pennsylvania Commonwealth Speaker Denise Valentine with Lankenau High School teacher George Chappelle and two of his Social Studies classes. Nearly 35 students, who are calling themselves the “Cliveden Scholars,” will work with Valentine to develop public performances based on traditional African storytelling that will augment archival records of the lives of the enslaved individuals who worked on the Chew Family’s plantations.  

The Cliveden staff expects work on new exhibits and tour programs to start immediately.

The "Conversations" series will begin June 24th with Joseph McGill, who is the program officer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s southern office.  He will speak about his experiences with the “Sleeping in Slave Cabins” project, a personal research expedition he has conducted by staying overnight in slave cabins across the United States.  He will spend the night prior to "Conversations" in Cliveden’s servant's quarters.