Todd House

The Todd House had rifles in the cellar and cannons in the haymow. Reverend John Todd's 1853 parsonage in Tabor, Iowa, looked like a minister's home in a Congregational colony founded to escape malaria on the Missouri bottoms — but Tabor was the nearest fully antislavery town to bleeding Kansas, and the parsonage was the arsenal. John Brown hid two hundred Sharps rifles, ammunition, sabers, and clothing in the cellar; a brass cannon sat in the haymow and a second on wheels in the wagon shed.

Tabor was, by the historians' account, the headquarters of the northern Kansas forces — the arms depot for men going down to the free-state fight and the hospital for the wounded coming back. Brown used the town as his secret base through 1856-57; after defending Lawrence he came east through Tabor, and the arms he'd cached in Todd's cellar went east with him — the same rifles that would be carried into Harpers Ferry in 1859.

The Todd family sheltered freedom seekers as a matter of course — the house is one of only four documented Underground Railroad stations left in Iowa, and the whole town is a Network to Freedom district. A former congressman bought it in the 1960s and sold it at cost to the Tabor Historical Society — the parsonage where the war's weapons were stored now run by the town that stored them.

The Todd House is the archive's arsenal file — the Iowa parsonage whose cellar held the Sharps rifles bound for Harpers Ferry, in the town that was John Brown's secret headquarters and the Underground Railroad's Kansas gateway.