House #135 is the largest on Elfreth’s Alley, taking up 26 feet of the street frontage. Its size is partly due to the fact that it was built over top of a cartpath, incorporating it into a tunnel.

It is the home’s history in the 20th century that I want to explore a little bit today. In 1930, the home was rented to three Black families, then the only Black residents on the street: Robert and Gladys Morton and their daughter Goldie, Charles and Elinore Wilson, and Nettie McCrae and her infant son Robert. We talk a lot about these folks in episodes 5, 6, and 7 of The Alley Cast, but I wanted to explore what we know about these folks a little more here in this series of blog posts about African American residents of Elfreth’s Alley over the years.