Benjamin Lay, Radical Abolitionist

Long before abolition was fashionable, Benjamin Lay lived it. Born in England in sixteen eighty-two, the Quaker and dwarf settled near here and spent decades waging a one-man campaign against slavery in a society that did not want to hear it. He wrote a scorching pamphlet attacking Quaker slaveholders, boycotted every product made by enslaved labor, and staged theatrical public protests, once appearing at a Quaker meeting in a military coat hiding a bladder of red berry juice inside a Bible, which he pierced with a sword to represent the blood of enslaved people.

His own community disowned him for the trouble. Yet his decades of agitation helped move the Quakers to become, in seventeen seventy-six, the first religious body in America to formally abolish slavery within their own ranks. He lived in a cave not far from here. His grave was finally marked in two thousand eighteen.