The John Brown Farm

New Richmond, Pennsylvania

The village now known as New Richmond has another John Brown landmark. Across the unpaved road from the tannery site is the location where Brown established a farm and built a log cabin and a frame barn. It is also where the graves of his first wife and two of their children are. The cabin and barn no longer exist, but the farm property is under the private ownership and care of Gary and Donna Coburn, who are members of the John Brown Heritage Association’s board of directors. Their present-day home and outbuildings overlook the tannery ruins, on rising ground nestled amid farm animals, grassy pasture, spring-fed ponds and thick woods. It’s a picturesque setting that retains the rural character of Brown’s original homestead. The Coburns in cooperation with the Association have hosted occasional interpretive activities on the farm, including John Brown memorial picnics and exhibits.

The Coburns’ property lies on part of the 200 acres that John Brown purchased in November 1825 in Crawford County, Pennsylvania. The tract was in Randolph Township at the time. It then became part of a newly formed Richmond Township. The tract had a quarry from which Brown is believed to have extracted and hewed the stone for the foundation walls of the tannery. Brown bought an additional 200 acres during the period when he and his family lived in New Richmond from May 1826 to May 1835. He also sold some parcels of his land during that time, and then the last of it in 1839. Brown’s nearly decade of residence in New Richmond was his longest in any one place during his adult life.

By October 1826, Brown had cleared 25 acres of his property in the sparsely settled township, where wild game abounded and small parties of Native Americans sometimes passed through. His log cabin for his wife, Dianthe, and their three boys, had two large rooms with fireplaces at each end and a sleeping loft that also accommodated some of Brown’s tannery workers. Brown was remembered as a firm but nurturing ruler of the household, which included not only family and employees but also some neighbor children who boarded there for a time to attend school in the cabin. Brown led the household members in morning prayers and Bible readings for their religious training. During winter evenings, in front of a blazing fireplace, he initiated athletic contests for their physical strengthening as well debates on various subjects for their mental improvement. He kept a small library in his home and set an example in encouraging all to read and learn.

In the haymow of his barn, Brown devised a secret room with a trapdoor and stepladder for use in hiding runaway slaves. The barn reputedly served as a station on the Underground Railroad, the covert network of people and places that aided African Americans who escaped slavery to seek freedom in the North and in Canada prior to the Civil War.

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John Brown’s family grew with the birth of two more boys and a girl. One of the boys, Frederick I, died March 31, 1831, at four years of age. Then dual sorrows struck when childbirth and a weakened heart claimed Brown’s wife, Dianthe, along with an unnamed baby boy, on Aug. 10, 1832. Dianthe died at age 31, “heavenly composed” while bidding farewell to each of the children, Brown said in a letter. Her marriage to Brown produced seven children altogether; five lived to adulthood.

In a little burial plot on the highest point of the farm, two tombstones mark the graves of the young son and the mother and infant. John Brown Jr., who was the eldest son of John and Dianthe, had the markers erected during a return visit to New Richmond after the Civil War. Persons wishing to see the gravesites may call Gary and Donna Coburn at (814) 720-2873 to request permission and access.

Following a period of overwhelming grief, John Brown hired a housekeeper who later brought her 16-year-old younger sister to help tend to the family. She was Mary Ann Day, daughter of a blacksmith living in Troy Township, Crawford County. Within a year, Brown wrote her a letter proposing marriage. She accepted the next day, giving him her answer while getting water at the spring on the farm. Married July 7, 1833, they went on to have 13 children. The first was born in New Richmond before Brown and his family moved back to Ohio. Seven would die in childhood, and two sons as young men were killed in the Harpers Ferry raid. A person of great endurance, Mary Day Brown held steadfast in her own antislavery beliefs as she managed the household during long periods when her husband was away on business and later when he was opposing slavery in the Kansas territory and planning the Harpers Ferry raid.

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