Liberty Farm and Abby Kelley Foster

In the Tatnuck neighborhood of Worcester, at the end of a quiet road, sits a farmhouse that was once one of the most radical addresses in America. Liberty Farm. The home of Abby Kelley Foster and her husband Stephen, who purchased the property in eighteen forty-seven and named it with full deliberate intention.

Abby Kelley Foster was born in Pelham, Massachusetts, in eighteen eleven and raised in Worcester in a strict Quaker household. The Quaker tradition gave her both a belief in human equality and the theological framework to act on it, at a time when almost no institution in American life agreed with her. She became one of the most effective and controversial abolitionists of the nineteenth century.

Her first act of public defiance came in eighteen thirty-eight, when she accepted an invitation to speak to a mixed audience of men and women at an anti-slavery meeting in Philadelphia. Her willingness to address men from a public platform caused a scandal that split the abolitionist movement itself. A significant faction argued that women speaking in public to men was improper and that allowing it would damage the cause. Abby Kelley's response was to keep speaking.

She became a full-time lecturer and organizer for the American Anti-Slavery Society, working alongside William Lloyd Garrison. She fundraised, organized local chapters, and put herself in physical danger at a time when anti-abolition mobs regularly attacked speakers.

Liberty Farm served two purposes. It was a home base for the Fosters' organizing work, and it was a documented stop on the Underground Railroad, sheltering freedom-seekers moving north. Abby also helped organize the first National Women's Rights Convention, held right here in Worcester in eighteen fifty.

The farm is now a National Historic Landmark. Abby Kelley Foster is buried in Worcester's Hope Cemetery. She is among the most consequential reformers of the nineteenth century who remains too little remembered.