A daguerreotype of Rosanna Vosburg, born enslaved in Kinderhook in 1800, who gained her freedom at 21 and became the supervisor of the Olcott family’s house staff at the Ten Broeck Mansion in Albany. She worked for the family for 63 years until her death in 1884.

The portrait of Rosanna Vosburg is displayed near a china cabinet in the butler’s pantry in the Ten Broeck Mansion, where she lived and worked for four decades after the Olcott family purchased it.

Kathryn Kosto, executive director of the Albany County Historical Association's Ten Broeck Mansion, holds an artist's rendering of a $1.9 million education center that will be named in honor of Rosanna Vosburgh. Construction is expected to begin this spring along the gardens behind the mansion.

Kathryn Kosto, executive director of the Ten Broeck Mansion, looks over 19th-century ledgers from the Adam Van Allen family and stored at the mansion.

A bedroom in the attic of the Ten Broeck Mansion, where Rosanna Vosburgh and the five young Irish immigrant women servants lived. A long-term goal is to renovate the derelict attic rooms and a rooftop deck, which are on the fifth level and off-limits to visitors.

ALBANY — Rosanna Vosburgh is a powerful portrait of upward mobility in Albany.

She was an African American female born in 1800 in Kinderhook and enslaved to the Vosburghs, a Dutch immigrant family of carpenters and sawmill operators who built the first bridges in the New Netherland colony’s patroonship of Rensselaerswyck.

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She toiled at household duties on the Vosburgh’s farm, but her intelligence, organizational and leadership skills augured a more distinguished future.

Although details of Vosburgh’s ascent remain predictably murky due to her race and social station in that era, what is known of her life represents an exemplar for Black History Month and beyond.

“It’s incomplete, but Rosanna’s story is about freedom and opportunity in Albany. It’s a story we celebrate, especially during........

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