Samuel Philbrick, a birthright Quaker, and his wife were among Brookline’s leading and earliest abolitionists and financial backers of William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator. The Grimke sisters, the Quaker-convert daughters of a South Carolina slave holding family, who were part of the more radical women’s-rights branch of the abolition movement, stayed in the house during the winter of 1836-37. One of Brookline’s first anti-slavery meetings was held there at that time — when a public hall probably could not have been obtained for such a meeting. It was a ladies-only event, but reportedly the poet and ardent abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier listened from inside a closet. At about this time the Philbricks, at the suggestion of Wendell Philips, took a young black girl into their house as a domestic. They brought her with them to Sunday service at First Parish and had her sit in their pew, rather than in the balcony with the other black servants. As a result they were snubbed, they withdrew from the parish, and eventually helped establish Pill Hill’s Swedenborgian Church. The Tappan-Philbrick house is recognized as a part of the Underground Railroad, although its role in the abolitionist cause was far more longstanding and significant than its connection with the escape of two famous fugitive slaves (William and Ellen Craft) would suggest.