A Pioneer in the Cause of Freedom

Descended from German Quakers who immigrated to Pennsylvania in the late seventeenth century, Elisha Tyson was born in 1749. As a young man he became wealthy in the milling business in northeastern Maryland before moving in the early 1780s to Baltimore, where he grew even wealthier and established a reputation as a prominent member of the city’s business community. Over the course of more than three decades in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Tyson helped found abolition socie