The mid-morning sky over northern Trumbull County is hazy and livid, a typical July day for this neck of the woods. Cornstalks, intensely green and broad-leafed, seem taller than my subcompact car; a thunderstorm rumbles in the distance, toward the Pennsylvania line.

It is July 22, 2009, an inconsequential date, as far as I know. Yet, once I start poring over the photocopies spread across the table in the dining room of the Linda and Henry Lipps home, the date jumps at out at me like discovering your birthday is that of a famous person.

“On the evening of July 22, 1859, four men from Wayne, with four teams, moved the supplies in boxes marked ‘fence castings’ to the canal at Hartstown, Pa., to be shipped to Chambersburg. From there, they went to the Kennedy farm in Maryland, a few miles from Harper’s Ferry.”

I pause from my reading long enough to comment to my guests on the timing and coincidence of choosing this date, 150 years later, to visit the barn from whence those “castings” were removed — then I return to my readings in Chet Lampson’s “John Brown and Ashtabula County.”

The book is one of several in Lipps’ collection about Brown, the famous abolitionist who attempted to launch a national insurrection against slavery at the Virginia (now West Virginia) crossroads of Harpers Ferry, Oct. 16, 1859, 150 years ago this past week. This confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers is some 300 miles from Ashtabula County, but northeast Ohio’s connection to the raid is well documented by historians.

This is that story.



Connections

In the Oct. 27, 1859, Ashtabula Sentinel, the newspaper began its account of the Harpers Ferry incident with words that belied the fierce local interest in the incident: “We noticed last week a Negro insurrection at Harper’s Ferry, which later accounts show to have been neither an insurrection nor a riot.”

Ashtabula County was a stronghold of abolitionist activity and a terminus on the Underground Railroad. No fugitive slave was ever recaptured in Ashtabula County, whose sympathetic residents risked property and their own freedom in their work to help the fugitives escape to Canada. The news from Harpers Ferry, was, therefore, of significant political interest in the broad national debate about slavery.

Brown’s attempt to take the arsenal and thereby equip the South’s slaves with the means to obtain their freedom, is considered by many historians as the first spark of the Civil War — setting aside Brown’s guerilla warfare and massacre of slave-owning males in Kansas three years earlier. The days of talk, it appeared, were over — the hour of bloodshed was drawing near.

Beyond that, there were local, personal connections to the story, as well. Thirteen of John Brown’s 21 recruits who assisted in the raid had lived and worked in the area of Cherry Valley, Andover, Wayne and Williamsfield in the months leading up to the raid. Among them was Aaron Stevens, who had a romantic relationship with Jennie Dunbar of West Andover. Stevens was wounded during the raid and later hanged.

Other Caucasian raiders with a connection to the county were Edwin Coppic, also spelled Coppoc, who was hanged; Oliver Brown, one of John’s sons, who was killed during the attempt; Watson Brown, another son, hanged; Albert Hazlett, killed; Stuart Taylor, killed; Charles P. Kidd, killed; William and Adolph Thompson, killed; John Kagy, a Trumbull County native, killed; Jeremiah Anderson, killed; and John E. Cook, hanged.

Louis Leary, a black man from Oberlin, was killed in the raid, as was a free mulatto, Dangerfield Newby, who worked as a blacksmith for Smith Edwards on what was known as the Jefferson-Dorset Road. Newby was born a slave but had been freed by his Scottish father. At 44, Newby was the eldest member of the raiding party, excepting John Brown Sr. Newby saw the use of force as his only hope for obtaining freedom for his wife and several children, still in bondage. A worn letter from his wife kept him motivated:

“Buy me and the baby, that has just commenced to crawl, as soon as possible, for if you do not get me, somebody else will,” she wrote.



Convictions

Letters that certain Ashtabula County residents had written to the raiders in the months leading up to the event were very much on their minds following the Harpers Ferry incident. During the summer of 1859, Brown’s recruits trickled into the “Kennedy farmhouse” in nearby Maryland, which was raided after the incident and searched for evidence that could be used against Brown and his men. Would the government find among the papers evidence of conspiracy, even treason, in the words the Ashtabula County residents had penned to the traitors?

Also among those papers was the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” which John Brown and several followers drafted during a May 1858 convention in Chatham, Ontario. It was damning evidence of Brown’s plan to establish another form of government in the United States.

Then there were the well-documented visits John Brown made to the county. A letter written by Congressman Joshua Reed Giddings to John Brown and dated May 26, 1859, suggested Giddings received Brown at his home in early June 1859. A Jefferson resident, A.C. Hawkes, later would admit to having taken Brown from Ashtabula to Jefferson for the meeting.

The U.S. Senate’s investigation into the raid, however, failed to prove that Giddings had knowledge of Brown’s bloody plan. The investigation did reveal that Giddings arranged for Brown to speak at the Congregational Church in Jefferson during Brown’s spring 1859 visit and that a collection of $20 was received from the audience to aid Brown.

In a speech in Philadelphia, Giddings would deny knowledge of the plan for Harpers Ferry but, nevertheless, avowed his acquaintance and sympathy with Brown and declared that the murder of Brown’s son Frederick, by the Rev. Martin White in Kansas, drove the old man to make the raid.



John Jr.

Brown’s connections to the county go back to the early 1840s, when his eldest son, John Brown Jr., was a student at Grand River Institute (Academy) in Austinburg. It was there John Jr. met Wealthy Hotchkiss, whom he married in 1848. Wealthy was the sister of Eunica Hotchkiss, who married Ethelbert Alexander (E.A.) Fobes.

And it is that relationship that takes us back to the corn fields of Trumbull County.

Linda Lipps’ great-grandmother Esther Fobes was the niece of E.A. Fobes, who owned the farm a mile or so northwest of here, at the corner of McClelland and Hayes Road in Wayne Township. Like the splintered, weathered vertical siding on the old barn, the structure is but one plank in the story of John Brown’s Raid, but one of great interest, nevertheless, for the Lipps family.

Esther lived to be 95. She died in 1942, several years before Linda was born. Toward the end of her Esther’s life, the story that Esther had always told to her family about her discovery as a 12-year-old playing in the Fobes barn, was put to paper.

“John Brown and his family were staying with one of our neighbors, E.A. Fobes in Wayne,” states the story. “I was a small girl at the time and felt pretty shy of him at first. He had such a strange face and big, black eyes. I later found out it was not best to judge people by their looks.

“He had supposedly come to visit his son, but later it was found to be a business trip, hoping to get some help with his project. He was successful, as some of the men gathered up firearms and hid them in the hay in the barn. One day when children were playing in a barn, digging a cave in which to hide in case Indians came, we found the firearms secreted in the hay.

“Of course, we were frightened and ran to the house to tell our story of the firearms in the haymow. We were instructed not to go near them for we may get shot. Also if we told anybody what we saw, something awful would happen to us.”



The arms

The arms had made a circuitous journey to Ashtabula County, according to the report of the Senate committee that investigated attack. Several years prior to the raid, 200 Sharp’s carbines were forwarded by the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee from New England to Chicago, where they were placed under the care of the National KansasQ 8 Aid Committee. They were detoured to Iowa, where they remained until John Brown petitioned to have the arms placed in his possession “for purposes of defense in Kansas.”

Brown eventually acquired the arms, as well as 200 pistols received as a “volunteer gift,” which were shipped to Ashtabula County in 1858. It would appear the arms entered the county by rail through Conneaut, then moved south to Cherry Valley on bobsleds. They were hidden in the cabinet shop of King & Brothers, which was located on Creek Road. To conceal their identity, the arms were stored in coffins.

“Owing to bad roads, I have delay in moving the freight, and it is all yet at the Depot at C,” John Brown Jr. wrote from Lindenville, Ashtabula County, on Feb. 13, 1858. “I yesterday read your letters to the (Mr.) King and to Mr. Hoisington, who were much gratified.”

John Brown, according to Lampson, was receiving mail at the home of Horace Lindsley, who lived on Creek Road in West Andover. The mail was addressed to J. Smith & Son, in care of Lindsley.

The stash of weapons entrusted to the eldest son was impressive: 200 Sharp rifles; an equal number of pistols; 58 powder flasks; 10 kegs of gunpowder; more than 400 spears, swords and bayonets; and one major general’s sword. Some of the spears were said to have been made at a blacksmith’s shop in Wick (Wayne Township).



Black Strings

On the evening of July 22, 1859, Alex Fobes, Schulyer Noxon, Nathaniel Coleman and M.F. Dean of Wayne Township hitched up four teams to their wagons, removed the boxes marked “fence castings” from the barn and hauled them to the canal at Hartstown, Pa. From there, the cargo moved to Chambersburg, Pa., and thence to the Kennedy farm in Maryland.

John Brown Jr. stayed behind in Ashtabula County. At the time of the attack, he had just returned from Canada, where he had been engaged in organizing the most ambitious of former slaves at border towns. In a March 1874 Atlantic Monthly interview, Owen Brown, who escaped from Harpers Ferry to Ashtabula County after the raid, stated that his brother would have been at Harpers Ferry but their father was driven to jump-start the operation out of fear that he had been betrayed to the government.

Other biographers have gone so far as to say John Jr. refused to participate in the raid, as did brothers Jason and Salmon, and their brother-in-law Henry Thompson.

There was an immediate response from many citizens within Ashtabula County and western Pennsylvania to protect John Jr. with life and property, as well as any of the raiders fortunate enough to escape the clutches of the Virginia militia and federal marshals. The oaths thus taken would be considered acts of treason.

This company of men became known as the Independent Sons of Liberty, or Black Strings, for the black string tied to the buttonhole of their shirt collar. The organization, which started in the West Andover neighborhood where John Brown Jr. had been living, eventually grew to a state and national lodge.

Foremost on its agenda was protecting Brown Jr., summoned to give testimony in the government’s case against his father and the Senate investigation. That report noted “ … it appeared by the return of the marshal of the northern district of Ohio, as deputy of the Sergeant-at-Arms, that John Brown Jr. at first evaded the process of the Senate, and afterwards, with a number of other persons, armed themselves to prevent his arrest. The marshal further reported in his return (answer to the Senate) that Brown could not be arrested unless he was authorized in like manner to employ force.”

John Brown Jr. found refuge in a Dorset farmhouse, outside of which a musket-bearing watchman was posted. Lampson’s account states that at least two witnesses told him that the upper part of this house was lined with sheet iron and had “portholes permitting views of anyone approaching and an opportunity to use guns.”

A system of alarms, the ringing of dinner bells along the string of farmhouses between Jefferson and the farm, was devised by the Black Stringers to alert Brown of the marshal’s approach. U.S. Marshal M. Johnson of Cleveland promised the Black Stringers he would not try to capture the fugitive.

During this time, John Brown Jr. also found refuge in the attic of Betsy Cowles’ house in Austinburg, a landmark that still stands on Route 45.

Owen Brown and Barclay Coppic, two of the raiders who successfully escaped Harpers Ferry, eventually showed up in Ashtabula County. On the night of the day John Brown was hanged for his crimes at Charles Town, Dec. 2, 1859, Brown and Coppic boldly shared their stories of the raid from the steps of the Ashtabula County Courthouse.



Aftermath

Following the hanging of John Brown Sr., the hangman sent a small piece of the scaffold to James Redpath, a journalist who first introduced Brown and his Kansas exploits to the American people. Redpath, who wrote a biography of Brown, cherished the wood and called it “a bit of the true cross, a chip from the scaffold of John Brown.”

As one more indication of Ashtabula County’s importance in the John Brown story, Redpath visited Jefferson in March 1860 and gave a speech in a public meeting March 16. The occasion was the execution, or as Redpath said, the martyrdom, of raiders Stevens and Hazlett, the last of the Harpers Ferry prisoners.

Redpath said: “I regard John Brown as a martyr to the right and his execution as the murder of a devout and sincere man, for the crime of translating into action the moral teachings of the Bible, and the political opinions of the Revolutionary Fathers.”

In 1862 John Brown Jr. purchased a 10-acre plot on the south shore of South Bass Island at Put-in-Bay. He lived out his life there, with his wife and brother Owen Brown, who escaped after the raid. Brown Jr. farmed, harvested grapes, practiced surveying, taught science and mathematics to islanders and lectured on temperance and slavery. His home was filled with memorabilia of Kansas and his father, and although he had chosen not to participate in the raid, the eldest son of one of America’s influential men defended his father’s character against criticism.

John Brown Jr. died in 1895 and is buried on the island. His last documented appearance in Ashtabula County was in 1862, at the funeral of Black Stringer William Henry Harrison Reeve of New Lyme.

One hundred fifty years after the raid on Harpers Ferry, historians continue to dissect the event and the complex characters and issues that precipitated it. Although Ashtabula County’s role in the big picture was small, one can’t help but wonder if the course of our nation’s history would have been much different had a 12-year-old girl been more vocal about her discovery in a Wayne Township barn’s haymow.