Eli Thayer (June 11, 1819 – April 15, 1899) was a prominent antislavery politician who established the town of Ceredo.

Thayer was born in Mendon, Massachusetts, and graduated from Brown University. Early in his career, he moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, and established the Oread Institute, an all-women academy. In 1854 he was elected to the Massachusetts Legislature and became known for his outspoken views against slavery. That same year, Thayer organized the New England Emigrant Aid Society, which encouraged Northern abolitionists to migrate to the Kansas Territory during the turbulent 1850s. Only a small fraction of the abolitionists who rushed into Kansas were associated with Thayer’s movement; however, some still credited him for helping Kansas enter the Union as a free state. After the Kansas endeavor, Thayer served two terms in the House of Representatives from Massachusetts, from 1857 to 1861.

In 1857, Thayer established the American Emigrant Aid and Homestead Company to buy land and establish industrial communities across the South populated by Northern settlers. His goal was to demonstrate the superiority of a free-labor manufacturing economy to a slavery-based agricultural one. While Thayer insisted his project was undertaken purely to make money, many Southern newspapers responded with hostility and accused him of establishing anti-slavery colonies.

Thayer originally wanted to build his first settlement in eastern Virginia but soon looked towards the western part of the state, where land was cheaper and slavery had a smaller presence. In spring 1857, Thayer scouted locations near the Kentucky and Ohio borders around present-day Huntington. He purchased a tract of farmland in northern Wayne County along the Ohio River and named it Ceredo after Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture. Construction on the settlement began that summer. Thayer visited Ceredo several times over the next few years but left development in the hands of hired agents. On July 21, 1857, Thayer gave a speech in nearby Guyandotte to elicit support for his project, extolling its economic benefits. Many locals remained suspicious, however. Just a month later, Congressman and enslaver Albert Gallatin Jenkins held his own meeting in Guyandotte, at which he convinced attendees to issue a resolution opposing Ceredo.

Thayer’s project faced other problems as well. The Panic of 1857 financially damaged the Homestead Company; instead of being the first in a series of settlements, Ceredo became its only one. Delays in the shipment of steam engines slowed the construction of buildings. While Ceredo was advertised in the North and frequently mentioned in the New York Herald, only a few dozen New England families migrated there. The town’s population did not exceed 500, a far cry from the thriving industrial city Thayer had envisioned.

The start of the Civil War in 1861 brought an end to Thayer’s Ceredo experiment. He never returned to the area and, after 1865, relinquished ownership of the settlement. During the war, Thayer still maintained an interest in changing the South through colonization. At one point, he unsuccessfully petitioned President Lincoln to invade Florida, confiscate slave plantations, and populate them with Northern emigrants.

In his later years, Thayer worked as a New York agent for western railroad companies before retiring back to Worcester, where he died.

A few issues of the Ceredo Crescent newspaper that coincide with the years of Thayer's experiment (1857-61) can be found through the Library of Congress.