William Lloyd Garrison was born in 1805 on School Street in Newburyport and was raised in deep poverty after his sailor father, Abijah Garrison, deserted the family in 1808. With almost no formal schooling, he sold candy and begged for food as a small child, later worked making shoes and cabinets, and grew up in Newburyport living with friends while his mother, Fanny, sought work in Lynn and other cities; she died in 1823 when he was 17. At age 12 he apprenticed at The Newburyport Herald, taught himself reading, writing, printing, and journalism, and soon became foreman. At 20 he founded The Newburyport Free Press, but its reforming zeal alienated local citizens and the paper failed. Five years later he established the long-running anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator in Boston. When he returned to Newburyport in 1830 to give an abolitionist speech at the Congregational Church on Brown Square, many strongly disapproved and the congregation would not permit his next scheduled address. The Essex County Anti-Slavery Society held its annual meeting in Brown Square in 1836, but when it tried to hold an anti-slavery convention there in 1837, a mob disrupted the gathering with tin pans, horns, howling, rotten eggs, and sticks, and cut the buttons from one speaker's coat. Although some residents took part in the Underground Railroad, much of prewar Newburyport remained conservative and unsupportive of Garrison and the abolitionists, as shown in 1859 when Representative Spofford denounced their “constant and useless agitation of the slavery question.” After the Civil War, however, Garrison was generally hailed as a prophet in the North.