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.

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