Ceredo: The Abolitionist Town That Almost Was
West Virginia
In the spring of eighteen fifty-seven, Massachusetts congressman Eli Thayer announced he would build a free-labor manufacturing city in western Virginia. Thayer had already made national news helping organize New England settlers to flood Kansas with anti-slavery voters. Now he turned to the South itself.
He purchased land along the Ohio River in what is today Wayne County, named his colony Ceredo after Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture, and began recruiting New England workers and craftsmen. Settlers arrived that summer, drawn more by economic opportunity than ideology. But the Panic of eighteen fifty-seven hit the Homestead Company hard, John Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry in eighteen fifty-nine frightened away investors, and the Civil War finished the project entirely.
Ceredo survived as a small town but never became the showcase of free labor Thayer had imagined. It was the only community his company ever built.
