How now, John Brown?

On June 23rd, 1859, John Brown made his last stop in Ohio before going onto historic notoriety just months later in a foiled, and insane, attempt to plunder a federal arsenal to arm slaves in a massive revolt against their owners (see left, click to enlarge). In a nation boiling over a sectional crisis that pitted factions for and against slavery and states rights, John Brown became a symbol of animosity of the times.




Brown spent his formative years in Ohio, specifically Northeast Ohio in communities of Akron, Hudson and Richfield. His home in Hudson, on Hines Hill, still stands and was built next to his tannery business he started as a young adult. Brown was also a sheep herder, entering into a co-op with the Perkins family. Simon Perkins is one of Akron's founding fathers and it is the house that Brown briefly lived in that Simon Perkins later owned, that is known as the John Brown House in Akron.

It is not open much to the public these days, but on June 23rd, 2009, a free-admission open house was held to mark the Sesquicentennial celebration of Brown's last stop in Ohio. The house sits on property owned by the Summit County Historical Society, which also operates the Simon Perkins House on the opposite corner to the John Brown House (see right, click to enlarge) at the corner of Copley Road (Route 162) and Diagonal Road, just a hop, skip and chimpanzee jump from the Akron Zoo.

The John Brown House is larger now than when its most known inhabitant lived within, as the Perkins family built on to the house and later in time it served as the clubhouse for the Portage Path Country Club (a 9-hole course).

On display at the nondescript Tuesday night Open House were dozens of newspaper reproductions (from the 1800's and modern time), items from the John Brown educational trunk -- reproduction artifacts used for classroom education (see right, lower picture), a women's aid society (see left, click to enlarge) during the Civil War display and several Civil War era local artifacts, including Major Voris's saddle, a chunk of log from the Civil War battle at Chickamauga -- with musket balls still embedded in the wood (see right, upper picture), other era artifacts, an apparently authentic U.S. 45-star flag (which is long past the Civil War) and two large wooden plaques honoring Civil War battles and dead from the area that reportedly hung at the Akron GAR Hall (see lower right, click to enlarge).

To say John Brown was a radical is an understatement. An extreme abolitionist, Brown often traveled around the Northeastern U.S. preaching to end slavery, bringing along fugitive slaves on his travels. He established a farm in Elba, New York where he housed runaway slaves. Many, but not, of his children shared his abolitionist passion and when the freshly formed Kansas Territory threw open the status of the state as slave or non-slave state to the people, his family was one of many who migrated west within the states borders.

Termed "Bloody Kansas" for the many clashes between slavery and anti-slavery groups, Brown conducted a massacre along the Pottawatomie River near Ossawatomie, Kansas, murdering nearly a dozen pro-slavery individuals in the late 1850s. A statue today exists in a park setting near the high school in Ossawatomie.

Brown's grand plot, that moved him from celebrity to martyrdom (in the eyes of many Northerners, that is) was his attempted raid of the arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia (at that time). In the attempted takeover, Brown was severely wounded and two of his sons killed (along with several other deaths). The entire episode is cloaked in celebrity, as commanding officer of the U.S. Army unit that ended the dispute was Robert E. Lee in one of his last actions as a U.S. soldier. His chief subordinate officer in this matter was J.E.B. Stuart, who along with Lee both gained fame as Confederate generals.

In what was surely the O.J. Simpson trial of its day, Brown was tried for treason and executed on December 2, 1859. Brown's health was critical during the trial and appeared in court lying on a cot, from which he made several grand pronouncements about his views on slavery in defense of his actions. Newspapers, which in the mid and late 1800s were the equivalent of blogs, Twitter and Facebook, printed his commentary from their own bias.

Among the literature handed out at the Open House was a list of events during the summer of 2009 to commemorate 150 years since "crazy old John Brown" emblazoned his name in history. On the Sesquicentennial of his execution, Akron will hold more commemorative events to its most legendary and historic son.

J.