Eli Thayer

Location: Section 25

Like Abby Kelley and Stephen Foster, Eli Thayer was one of the nineteenth century's leading advocates for abolition. Mendon-born Thayer came to Worcester to teach at Worcester Academy of which he was principal from 1847 to 1849. Thayer also served as an alderman, inventor, school committee member, state representative, U.S. Congressman, orator, educator and real estate developer, and his monument attests to his role in populating Kansas with antislavery settlers to save the state for the Union on the eve of the Civil War. It has been said that in response to Thayer's visit in 1854, Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, coined the phrase "Go west, young man, go West." In 1849, Thayer founded the Oread Collegiate Institute off south Main Street. It was one of the earliest if not the first, collegiate-level schools for women in the United States.