05/09/2026
John Brown and his group passed through Guthrie County on their way to Harper’s Ferry. They stayed at the Porter Hotel in Dalmanutha. A platter believed to have been used to serve John Brown at the hotel is on display at the Village. John Porter and his wife were actively involved in the Underground Railroad network that crossed the southern portion of our county. They are buried in the Dalmanutha Cemetery.
John Brown was born into a deeply religious family in Torrington, Connecticut, on May 9, 1800. Led by a father who was vehemently opposed to slavery, the family moved to northern Ohio when John was five, to a district that would become known for its antislavery views.
During his first fifty years, Brown moved around the country, settling in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York, taking along his ever-growing family (he would father twenty children). Working at various times as a farmer, wool merchant, tanner, and land speculator, he was never financially successful. Yet despite his financial setbacks, Brown always found a way to support the abolitionist cause. He participated in the Underground Railroad and, in 1851, helped establish the League of Gileadites, an organization that worked to protect those escaping enslavement from slave catchers.
In 1847 Frederick Douglass met Brown for the first time in Springfield, Massachusetts. Of the meeting, Douglass stated that, "though a white gentleman, [Brown] is in sympathy a black man, and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery." It was at this meeting that Brown first outlined to Douglass his plan to lead a war to free slaves.
In October 1859, John Brown led 21 men on a raid of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. His plan to arm slaves with the weapons he and his men seized from the arsenal was thwarted, however, by local farmers, militiamen, and U.S. Marines led by Robert E. Lee. Within 36 hours of the attack, most of Brown's men had been killed or captured.
Brown was found guilty of murder, treason, and of inciting slave insurrection. In December, he was hanged. It was a turning point for America, for with his death all hope of a peaceful end to the slavery issue died as well.
📸: Daguerreotype of John Brown by Augustus Washington, c. 1846 (Public Domain)
