Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

Some of the best stories in history emerge from total happenstance. We've told you a few

incredible tales from that genre. Here's another. It concerns a man from the 1700s you have undoubtedly never heard of, Benjamin Lay.

And why are we talking about him today, like 300 years later?

Well, because of a man named Dave Wormerling, the caretaker of Abington Meeting House in

Jenkins, Pennsylvania.

One day in the mid-1990s, he was poking around the old Quaker house looking for pesky mice.

What he found, he said, was a historical mystery, the etching of a small bearded man and a fancy colonial outfit.

On the back, the man's name, Benjamin Lay, with a little note describing him as a

zealous abolitionist who died in 1759. Wormerling was intrigued, and he set off trying to find out

more about this lay character. But the 1990s were mostly a time I like to call PI, pre-internet,

so he said about asking older Quakers around town what they knew about Benjamin Lay. It turns out,

not much. So he went to libraries, tried to find experts, and before he knew it, a decade went by without much to show for his efforts.

Then, in 2014, a big break came.

Marcus Redeker, a historian from the University of Pittsburgh, showed up at Abington Meeting House

to research a book he was writing. And wouldn't you know it, the subject was Benjamin Lay.

Wimmerling described his reaction to the post succinctly. I went nuts.

Music succinctly. I went nuts.

And then the mystery behind the etching unraveled.

The historian told the local Quakers that Lay wrote one of the first treaties against slavery in colonial America, at a time when many prosperous

Pennsylvania Quakers were slave owners. But for speaking out, the Quakers disowned him, and he was lost

to history. He was born in England in 1682, at a time when Quakers openly challenged the Anglican establishment,

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