Peter Felt

Peter Felt (December 1, 1784 – July 31, 1866) was a New Hampshire politician and pioneer, among the early settlers of Quincy, Illinois.

[4] Felt erected a house at Smithville (Smith Village), southwest of New Ipswich Common, across the lane from his father-in-law, Ebenezer Fletcher, whose home still stands.

In 1810, Peter Felt, with Josiah and Joel Davis, helped convert an old ironworks and held a stake in a cotton textile mill on the north branch of the Souhegan River for 17 years.

They went from Smithville, New Ipswich, New Hampshire, by carriage to Troy, New York, then by canal boat to Erie, Pennsylvania, overland to Pittsburgh, and by steamboat 981 miles down the Ohio River to Cairo, Missouri, and then up the Mississippi River to Quincy, Illinois, arriving in June 1830.

That winter, in the later years of the Second Great Awakening, on December 4, 1830, a small group gathered for a religious service in Felt's log cabin, on the southwest corner of Fourth and Maine streets, where the Gardner Museum, once the old public library, now stands.

Nonetheless, it was "a stark hut much admired," with the pulpit and seats "of planed boards," no upholstery, and no funds to purchase "a bell to call the people to worship.

Felt was a leading figure among the party of pioneers from New Ipswich who emigrated to Quincy and Mendon Township about the same time, including the family of Unitarian minister Mary Safford.

Peter Felt was declared an abolitionist after he joined others in signing a petition that called for a convention of those who held that "the system of American slavery was sinful and ought to be immediately abandoned.

.." He was among the 17 signees who attended the Illinois anti-slavery convention organized by abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy at Alton in October 1837.

[7][8] A few days after the convention, Lovejoy was murdered by a mob, becoming a martyr of the abolitionist cause opposing slavery in the United States.

Abolitionist Richard Eells erected a home near Felt's on Fourth Street in Quincy in 1835, which became a significant stop on the Underground Railroad, assisting enslaved people, crossing the Mississippi river from Missouri, which was a slave state.