The abolitionist John Brown, who farmed and chose to be buried near Lake Placid — 'John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave.'
Right near Lake Placid, in a place called North Elba, there's a plain little farmhouse and a simple grave, and buried there is one of the most thunderous, troubling, world-shaking figures in all of American history. His name was John Brown.
You've heard his name in a song, whether you know it or not: 'John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave.' Well, this is the grave. Right here in these mountains.
Brown was an abolitionist — a man who hated slavery with a fire that consumed his whole life, and who came to believe that words and prayers would never end it, that only blood would. In the eighteen-forties he came up here to these mountains, to a settlement of free Black families trying to make a hard living on hard land, and he farmed alongside them and helped them. He loved this high, wild country. And he asked to be buried here.
Then, in 1859, he went to a place in Virginia called Harpers Ferry, and with a tiny band of followers he seized the federal arsenal, meaning to spark a great uprising to free the enslaved. It failed. He was captured, tried, and hanged. But his raid, and the way he met his death — calm, certain, unafraid — lit a fuse across the whole country, and many say it was one of the sparks that set off the Civil War itself, the war that finally ended slavery.
They brought his body back up here, to the mountains he'd asked for, and buried him at his farm in the December cold of 1859. And there he lies to this day, under a simple stone, in the shadow of these High Peaks. A hard, fierce, complicated man — a killer to some, a martyr and a prophet to others — resting in the quiet Adirondack ground. His farm's a state historic site now, and you can go stand at the grave. It's a powerful, sobering place. Something to think about, in these peaceful mountains he chose for his rest.
Photo: K. F. McClellan · Public domain
