John Brown Farm

John Brown's body lies a-mouldering at North Elba — the small, plain, unpainted farmhouse on the 270 acres he bought in 1849 under the Adirondack peaks, in the Black settlement colony Gerrit Smith's land grants had created. Brown moved there to farm beside the free Black families Smith had enfranchised; it was from this farmhouse that he went to Kansas, and to Harpers Ferry, with the plan to end slavery by armed confrontation.

The raid failed in thirty-six hours — Brown was captured October 18, 1859, tried by Virginia for treason, and hanged December 2. His body came home by his own request and was buried in front of the farmhouse on December 8 — six days after the execution that made him, in the North, a martyr and, in the South, the confirmation of every fear. The song the Union armies marched to put his body in the grave it is actually in: 'John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave.' Most who sang it never knew the grave was a farm plot in the Adirondacks.

In 1899 the remains of several of his Harpers Ferry followers were moved to the small graveyard beside him — the men who died in the engine house buried with the man who led them there. New York took the farm in 1896; it was a shrine from the moment of burial, and it is a National Historic Landmark now — the farmhouse and the graves under the peaks where the man's truth, as the nomination puts it, goes marching on.

The John Brown Farm is the archive's martyr file — the farm the raider bought in a colony founded to free Black voters, where his body came home six days after the hanging, and where his Harpers Ferry dead were gathered to lie beside him in 1899.