Freethought Meeting Site Receives Historical Marker

For the first time, a freethinkers' meeting site has received an official historical marker. the William G. Pomeroy Foundation funds roadside historical markers in New York now that the state has discontinued doing so. Working with Town of Huron Historian Rosa Fox, in 2019 the Pomeroy Foundation delivered a marker for the James Madison Cosad farmstead at 11060 Lummisville Road, Huron, New York. It was the site of an August 1877 "Grove Meeting" that attracted some 2,000 persons. So far as is known, this is the only site of a freethought event acknowledged as such with an official marker anywhere in the United States.

The Huron meeting gave rise to the New York Freethinkers Association, which held seven important freethought conventions between 1878 and 1886. At the 1878 convention held in Watkins (now Watkins Glen), freethought publisher D. M. Bennett was arrested with two others for selling a sex-radical tract. The resulting scandal involved both freethought orator Robert Green Ingersoll and U. S. President Rutherford B. Hayes, and indirectly led to the adoption of the so-called Hicklin standard that defined obscenity under U. S. law until 1957.

Other New York Freethinkers Association conference sites included Chautauqua Lake (1879), Hornellsville (1880, 1881), Watkins again (1882), Rochester (1883), Cassadaga (1884), and Albany (1885).