Five New Sites (and New Information) Added to Trail

The Freethought Trail has added five new sites (bringing the total number of sites to a record 123) and enriched its coverage of nineteenth-century antislavery political action.

Three new pages for sites in Oswego, New York, are complete:

• The Oswego Public Library (https://freethought-trail.org/trail-map/location:oswego-public-library/): This unusual Norman Revival building was funded by one of the largest single charitable gifts made by abolitionist and philanthropist Gerrit Smith. (Oswego was the port that served Smith's many business enterprises and through which he and his agent John B. Edwards helped numerous slaves to escape to Canada.) The building is now the nation's oldest public library building still in continuous use.
• The home of John B. Edwards (https://freethought-trail.org/trail-map/location:home-of-john-edwards-agent-of-gerrit-smith/): John B. Edward was Gerrit Smith's business agent in Oswego and his collaborator in much Underground Railroad work. The listing includes biographical information on Edwards and descriptions of the way Smith's business empire in Oswego was organized and run.
• The site of the 1852 National Liberty Party Convention, at which Gerrit Smith was nominated as the antislavery party's presidential candidate (https://freethought-trail.org/trail-map/location:old-oswego-city-hall/): The listing includes substantial information on abolitionist political parties that arose in 1840; the 1852 convention in the building now known as Oswego's Old City Hall was one of the last such conventions held. The listing also contains historical information on the history of the building itself.

Two additional pages are under construction: the site of an 1839 antislavery meeting held near Oswego in New Haven, New York, and the site of an 1848 woman's rights convention held in Rochester shortly after the famous convention in Seneca Falls.

In addition, substantial new background information on the Liberty Party, Liberty League, and National Liberty Party, which ran abolitionist candidates for president from 1840 to 1852, have been added to the cause page on Abolition (https://freethought-trail.org/causes/cause:abolition/) and the biography page of Gerrit Smith (https://freethought-trail.org/profiles/profile:smith-gerrit/).

A research project is currently underway to identify more sites of regional woman's rights conventions and abolitionist meetings. It is expected that additional sites will be created as the needed historical information is acquired.