Many freedom seekers came through Farmington, linked to a network that extemded through Delaware, Washington, D.C., and Maryland. Farmington Quakers were prominent among the many abolitionists who aided the people escaping slavery. 

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"When I arrived in Farmington, I felt, for the first time in my life, that I was my own master. I cannot describe to a free man, what a proud and manly feeling came over me, when I hired to Mr. C[omstock], nor when I assumed the dignity of collecting my own earnings." - Austin Steward, Twenty-Two Years a Slave and Forty Years a Free Man (1857)

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J.C. Hathaway, a Farmington Quaker, was a women's rights advocate and a major abolitionist who served as the President of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society and as the president pro tempore of the first national women's rights convention, held in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1850.

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Frederick Douglass spoke in the 1816 Farmington Quaker Meetinghouse and attended the Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls in 1848. Of J.C. Hathaway, Douglass said, "A faithful friend of the slave and co-laborer in the cause of the oppressed."

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