Mount Pleasant, Ohio, is kind of like Mayberry. Everyone knows everyone by their first name, and you don’t see much traffic. Off the beaten track, atop the highest point in Jefferson County, it doesn’t have even one stop light. But what makes this unfairly neglected hamlet special is that it played an important role in the battle to end slavery.
“Everyone here participated in the Underground Railroad,” says Sherry Sawchuck, president of the Mount Pleasant Historical Society.
While that’s probably a bit of an exaggeration, it’s no idle claim. Mount Pleasant was indeed part of the legendary network. The Network to Freedom, established by the National Parks Service to identify important places along the Underground Railroad, honored the village after its standard meticulous scrutiny.
Local awareness of Mount Pleasant’s Underground Railroad past has long been a tradition. Sawchuck, who grew up in Pleasant Grove, a hamlet five miles away, attended school in Mount Pleasant and said the story of the Underground Railroad was part of her grade school curriculum. The Mount Pleasant Historical Society, which was founded in 1948, began offering an annual pilgrimage of the village’s historic homes and she got involved when she was a teenager as a guide. During the 1980s she became a director of the society and was installed as its president in 1990.
“We still have an annual summer event,” she said, “with a different theme each year. Sometimes it’s a pilgrimage, or it might be a home and garden tour, or a lantern tour in which guides impersonate Underground Railroad conductors.”
It’s part of the society’s effort to raise funds to keep it afloat. One of those efforts was the publication of an educational picture book about Mount Pleasant’s history targeting grade schoolers that includes activities teachers can use to illustrate the history. Finances have been a problem for the hamlet because of its location. It’s difficult for businesses to survive.
“We had an antiques dealer,” Sawchuck explained, “and an inn that operated as a bed and breakfast that has closed.” She remains hopeful, however, that someone will come along and give them another try. The area has other attractions, she said. Among them are the Farm Restaurant, a remodeled farmhouse about two miles outside the village and the Black Sheep winery that opened this December about a mile from the restaurant. In Martins Ferry less than 10 miles south, is an auction house and across the river, off I-70, in Wheeling is a casino. Not far from Wheeling is Oglebay Park, a large recreational area with a golf course, skiing, and a children’s zoo. Plenty of accommodations are available in Wheeling or St. Clairsville, about 10 miles southwest and also off I-70.
Mount Pleasant’s significance, though, lay with its history. It was founded in 1803 by Quakers, who were part of the great migration of Friends from North Carolina to the Northwest Territory that began in 1800 and lasted into the mid-1820s. As many as perhaps 8,000 Quakers migrated to Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois after a law was passed in North Carolina stipulating that any slaves who were freed could immediately be re-enslaved.
“Jesse-Bob Town” was what they called Mount Pleasant during its early years, taking its name after Robert Carothers and Jesse Thomas, the men who laid out the village. By 1814 there were a reported 1,693 Quaker families in Ohio and Mount Pleasant was chosen to be the site of the Ohio Yearly Meeting’s first annual convention. A large plain two-story brick building with an A-frame roof, it can accommodate 2,000 people and originally had a folding partition inside to separate the sections for women and men. The meeting house, which has been carefully preserved by the Ohio Historical Society, remains today as the village’s most significant historic building.
The first annual convention of the Ohio Yearly Meeting in 1815 was a festive affair, as they all traditionally would become. The featured speaker was Charles Osborn, a Quaker from Tennessee, who the previous year had formed the nation’s first society callin