 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 calling for the immediate end to slavery. Among the resolutions passed was that Friends should be “careful to hear testimony against slavery and to provide for such people of color as have had their freedom secured and to instruct them in learning.” Though it didn’t say anything about fugitive slaves, such language was an invitation to accommodate them.
Also attending the meeting was a young man whose name would become synonymous with the antislavery movement, Benjamin Lundy. He had moved to Mount Pleasant in 1811 and got a job working as a saddle maker for Jesse Thomas. Originally from New Jersey, he moved to Wheeling, W. Va., just across the Ohio River, less than 10 miles from Mount Pleasant where he learned the saddle and harness making trade. It was in Wheeling, which lay between the slave breeding centers of Maryland and Virginia, and the new developing plantations in need of slaves in Kentucky and Missouri, where he saw the chain gangs with as many as 100 slaves shackled to each other on their way to their new masters. It compelled Lundy to write in his diary that his “heart was deeply grieved at the gross abomination; I heard the wail of the captive; I felt his pang of distress, and the iron entered my soul.”
Lundy moved about 10 miles south to St. Clairsville in 1816 and formed the area’s first antislavery society, the Union Humane Society. Its first meeting was held in his home and was attended by five persons. But within six months, eight local chapters had formed with a total of 500 members. Antislavery sentiment was so strong in the region that it persuaded Osborn to move to Mount Pleasant and publish the nation’s first antislavery newspaper, The Philanthropist, in 1817. Lundy, who had previously written a circular expressing his opposition to slavery under the pseudonym of “Philo Justitia” was enthusiastic about the paper and began submitting articles under that name. Following a trip to Missouri, and learning upon his return that Osborn had given up the paper, Lundy moved back to Mount Pleasant in 1821 an