Historical Marker Society of America

Friend (Quaker) Meeting house, Corner of Federal and Pearl Streets. Famous Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison started the Main anti-slavery movement here with a speech given in 1832.

Garrison advocated "immediate emancipation without compensation" to the slave-owners instead of colonizing free African-Americans to Liberia. In 1836 Portland's first pro-slavery riot occurred here during and anti-slavery speech by Henry Brewster Stanton. The meeting house was attacked again in 1847 when abolitionists Garrison, Frederick Douglass and Charles Lenox Remond attempted to lecture. Anti-slavery women successfully protected the speakers.