For nearly a decade and a half Belleville provided a home for one of the nation's premier abolitionists. Theodore Dwight Weld, an impassioned orator and organizer in the antislavery cause, moved into a fifteen-room house on a fifty-acre lot along the banks of the Passaic River in 1840. With him came his wife Angelina and her unmarried sister, Sarah Grimke.

Sarah Grimke described their residence as located on "a sweet little river, gliding noiselessly by thro' rich meadow land." It was a perfect place for recuperation, and Theodore Dwight Weld had exhausted himself in tireless efforts to eliminate the evil of slavery. He planned to do farm labor for three or four hours a day and to spend the rest of the time writing. Weld hoped to regain the use of his voice; it did return in 1841 and he spoke out against slavery at a July 4 rally in Newark.

Weld became active in the Essex County Antislavery Society. His antislavery writings proved to be influential. When Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, came under attack by slaveholders for its inaccurate portrayal of slavery, the authoress wrote a 262-page defense of her book. In it, on twenty-one separate occasions, she cited Weld's expose of the "peculiar institution," Slavery As It Is.

The Grimke sisters originally had come north from South Carolina where their father was a slaveowner. They became active in the antislavery cause as well as in the movements for temperance (Angelina circulated a petition against the sale of intoxicating beverages in Belleville) and women's rights (the sisters adopted the liberating "Bloomer" costume designed by Amelia Bloomer, another women's-rights advocate).

Weld and company opened the "Weld Institute" at Belleville in 1848. In the school about twenty students learned composition, history, math, drawing, and character development. Theodore Weld was not only a teacher; in 1847 he became the local superintendent of schools.

The Weld entourage, which included many guests who remained for visits of indefinite length, left Belleville in the early 1850s. They moved to Perth Amboy and its utopian community, the Raritan Bay Union; Weld taught at the Eagleswood School there.

Source: Belleville: 150th-Anniversary Historical Highlights 1839-1989 by Robert B. Burnett and the Belleville 150th-Anniversary Committee Belleville, New Jersey. 1991.