After witnessing the slave trade in Wheeling, Virginia, Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lundy resolved to battle slavery, first organizing the Union Humane Society in St. Clairsville in 1815. In 1821, he moved to Mount Pleasant and began publishing the Genius of Universal Emancipation, a newspaper devoted wholly to anti-slavery issues, which was later published in Tennessee, Baltimore, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia. Lundy traveled widely to promote its circulation, lecturing on the moral evils of slavery and its associated negative economic and social effects, and his home served as an Underground Railroad stop. Built in 1813, the left side of this structure was the site of the Free Labor Store, where residents of Mount Pleasant, a predominately Quaker community, organized the Mount Pleasant Free Produce Company in 1848 for the sale of goods, wares, and merchandise in general produced exclusively by free labor. The store operated until 1857, when the company was dissolved, but that dissolution did not reflect any lessening of anti-slavery sentiment in Mount Pleasant, and this is the only free labor store known in continued existence.
