Bringing It All Back Home

This demographic pop—more Black people, most of them young— resulted in a surge of marriages after the war, and this, too, notes the Civil War scholar Donald R. Shaffer, was a rising trend all over. Black men, having finally claimed “the ultimate manly role—warrior,” brought to their postwar lives a war-tempered pride and confidence that extended to the pursuit of all domestic entitlements. How long had enslaved people been denied the right to choose a spouse, marry freely, and raise families in their own homes? Legal marriage, for so long the privilege of whiteness, was now every ex-slave’s portion, and free Black New Yorkers would make this a time to marry too. In Essex and Franklin Counties, Josiah Hasbrook, Alexander Hazzard, Charles Henry Hazzard, and Warren Morehouse all got married (and Private James Brady, already married, got married again). William Appo, a widower since 1863, found a second bride after the war. His young wife, Albertine Eppes, was one of seven women from the Black Woods who found a partner in this time. Charlotte Ann, an older daughter of John Thomas, was thirteen when Warren Morehouse went to Boston and joined the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth, but the regimental marker kept her memory in mind. On his return in the fall of 1866, “Wash” and the now seventeen-year-old farm girl swapped vows in the home of a Franklin justice of the peace. “Josy” Hasbrook also married local, and his St. Armand bride, Jane Ann Hazzard, was one of several of grantee Avery Hazzard’s children to take a postwar spouse. Avery’s daughter Adaline Hazzard married a Black veteran from Vermont; his son Alexander married his neighbor, Mary Elizabeth Bailey, the ex-slave who came to Franklin with the Bradys some years before the war; Charles Henry Hazzard married Julia Smith in Beaufort; and after Julia and her several relatives were settled in the Black Woods, those relatives found spouses too.⁵

Decades after county historians like Winslow Watson declared Smith’s giveaway dead and done, these fresh alliances were turning neighbors into families, in-laws, and new kin, deepening the legacy of Smith’s giveaway and double-knotting the long threads of its web.

Their history of military service and a devotion to the Union also amplified the social world of Black veterans on their return. In Vergennes, Vermont, the Ethan Allen Post of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) welcomed a new resident, Private William Carasaw (and what a coup for this post, to see a neighbor of the sainted John Brown in its ranks!). His farming days behind him, Carasaw found work as a whitewasher and hostler at the Stevens House (where Brown’s body rested in its casket before it crossed the lake), and he tried canal work, too. His employer, Lewis Mott, aware of his employee’s war-made disabilities, kept Carasaw’s work as light as possible. He liked this older veteran, found him trustworthy and reliable. Carasaw’s fellow congregants at his new church in Vergennes (Methodist), the veterans he met at the Vergennes post of the GAR, and fellow members of a new political reform group, invigorated his postwar society as well. On the stormy day of his crowded funeral in 1886, Vergennes’s high school principal was so moved by the pastor’s “tribute of respect” that he directed his students to make a model out of Private Carasaw, a “man without wealth or station, a plain laboring man” widely esteemed for his “Christian uprightness and integrity.”⁶

In Middlesex, Vermont, Jerry Miles joined the GAR, as would his neighbor Josiah Hasbrook. James Brady never missed a GAR meeting in Malone (eventually declaring himself the oldest GAR member in New York). Warren Morehouse may have belonged to a Bloomingdale post as well; after he died, the GAR helped out his widow and their children.⁷

The war opened up the lives and livelihoods of Black women, too, who headed up their households when their men were away, and when husbands came home disabled, or did not come home at all, hired out as cooks, washerwomen, hotel helpers, and housekeepers. Jane Craig farmed when Isaac died or disappeared, and when Jane Frazier’s husband was in the navy, the census taker called her “farmer.” On Silas’s return (“all broken down”), she cooked for a hotel, a job the widowed Susan Hasbrook Pierce took, too. In Franklin, the unhusbanded ex-slave Louisa Brady was a laundress, housekeeper, and farmer of her patch. No longer able to work his farm as hard as he once did, Charles Henry Hazzard now looked to his wife, Julia; she made money selling home-woven cloth and keeping house for neighbors. From the first, the Black Woods had been framed by its white founder and Black agents as a proving ground for Black manhood. Would a Black man get along up here as well as any white? He would, and so might a Black woman. But it would take the war to call to light all that she could do.⁸

Was this what Black women wanted? They didn’t have much choice. Not one of their returning men or boys could work the way he had. The war came home with the Black veterans in knotted joints and wheezy lungs, fevered sleep, bloody urine, swollen hearts, blinding headaches (sunstroke’s legacy), malaria, and chest colds that laid them out for seasons at a time. “I was a stout and healthy man [and] always ready to do a day’s work,” wrote Josiah Hasbrook on his return. “I have not been able to perform one half the labor I could before I went in the army.” Charles Henry Hazzard, a man “without a blemish” on enlistment, came north too weak to pitch hay. So bloody was his urine that a white friend said, “I think his kidney affliction would long ago have killed you or me, or anybody, but a colored man.”⁹

Hence the resolute pursuit of federal pension aid, a campaign that Black Civil War veterans and their descendants in the Black Woods waged into the twentieth century. White veterans also pressed their pension claims with zeal, but federal examiners demanded more evidence and paperwork from Black claimants and rewarded them with less, so the Black pursuit of pension justice was different; the odds against success were worse. It took Black veterans time they couldn’t spare and funds they didn’t have to track down long-distance witnesses who could vouch for prewar health and war-caused injuries, hire court officers or attorneys, and travel to review boards days away from home. Some Black veterans (Carasaw, Morehouse, and Frazier) deemed it not worth the effort. Their widows disagreed. On their husbands’ deaths, female heads of households needed pension money more than ever, and alongside Josiah Hasbrook, Charles Henry Hazzard, Lewis and Lafayette Mason, and Jeremiah Miles, the widows, too, put in their claims.¹⁰

Veterans, widows, and their grown children fought for that monthly stipend even after appeals were challenged or denied, enlisting help from doctors, bosses, army mates, and neighbors, Black and white—and maybe white especially. Not until the 1960s would scholars document the bias that skewed the Pension Bureau’s review process, but Black veterans felt it keenly. Why did federal examiners press the seaman Simeon Hasbrook for hard proof of his birthdate when, as his brother Josiah wearily explained, “There is no public record of his birth, nor no family Bible. Our parents were slaves in the State of New York and neither of them could read or write”? How could Josiah be expected to recall the “Reble Dr.” who tended him in Port Royal when, at the time, he was deranged with fever? Why would Charlotte Morehouse be pressed to name her husband’s army friends twenty years after his death? On these petty points, Black veterans’ bids for pensions were delayed. Charles Hazzard’s pension file is hymnal-thick because it had to be. The call for one more affidavit, medical report, or wartime witness was unrelenting. Hasbrook’s exasperated doctor told the Pension Bureau that this aging veteran was so disabled that his hand may as well be “amputated … at the wrist,” and that the only work he could do was “drive around a little with an old horse, gathering swill,” and still the government resisted. Hasbrook got his upgrades only after multiple appeals.¹¹

This is not to say that a hostile administrative culture targeted Black Adirondackers in particular. Military racism afflicted Black veterans all over the North. In the war they suffered higher rates of fatality and sickness than white soldiers, and after it, they died younger (at age forty years on average for Black veterans, and age fifty for white). Their portion of awarded pensions was much lower than what white men received: Black claimants won pensions 75 percent of the time, and whites 92 percent. What Black Adirondackers endured was part of a wider pattern of abuse.¹²

What was not usual, however, was the help that Black Adirondack veterans got from their white neighbors. More than thirty Adirondackers attested to the prewar health of Charles Henry Hazzard, vouching for this “remarkably powerful” grantee’s son who returned from the war “utterly broken down in health and constitution.” So convincing were the testimonials on behalf of this farmer (and later on, his widow), and so “excellent [his] character among his neighbors,” that pension investigator Clement Sullivane expressed an incredulity close to outrage when a New York Board of Surgeons rejected Hazzard’s appeals because he could not furnish doctors’ notes confirming his good health before the war. Of course he can’t! One doctor’s dead. The other has moved to who knows where. Further, Hazzard’s health history was readily available. “No man is better known in his community where he has lived straight along from his earliest manhood to the present time,” wrote Sullivane of Hazzard. Added a white neighbor, Hazzard’s “bad health has been a notorious fact in this neighborhood where he has lived, and he ought to have had a pension long ago.”¹³

Private Josiah Hasbrook also found he could count on neighbors, white and Black. Before the war, said Samuel Dickinson (white), Hasbrook was “a perfectly healthy man—never knew him to be sick—was a neighbor and worked with him in the Lumber woods the winter before he enlisted.” Betsy Torrance (white) echoed this: “I never knew him to be sick before he enlisted.” But after: “He came to my house and was taken with the chills and feaver and I nursed him up the best I could untill the [Hasbrook family’s] removal to Vermont.” After, swore the Hasbrook family doctor, the unhappy veteran was so stiff with rheumatism that he could not manage “more than one fourth of the day good manual labor.”¹⁴

Veterans’ widows and children who looked to white neighbors to back their appeals were also buoyed by the response. When the heart disease that Warren Morehouse contracted in the service killed him in 1882, his young widow, Charlotte Ann, appealed for a government pension. Alone with four young children, one of them bedbound with pediatric hydrocephalus, she got by with help from the Franklin poor fund and the GAR, but this would not be enough. As they had backed the pension claim of Louisa Brady, Charlotte’s neighbors rallied, ten of them vouching for her need.¹⁵

It must be noted, though, that this solidarity was not driven by any special pride in the Black veterans’ war service—or no more, surely, than what they felt for their disabled own, many of whom had served longer and suffered more in combat than their Black neighbors. Nor did these affidavits hint at a concern about racism in the Pension Bureau; white locals may have shared these biases themselves. What white affiants were defending was not racial justice but the right to own and name their memory, their ownership of place-based knowledge. Did a pension examiner in Plattsburgh say Charles Henry Hazzard was just fine? Well, that surgeon had no clue. He didn’t know the history. He never knew the man.¹⁶

“We are farmers, so is Charles H. Hazard—he has employed us—so have we him, on our farms,” said the St. Armand farmer Sylvester Reid in 1891. And Reid, not the Pension Bureau, knew for a fact that when Hazzard was on the farm, he could be so convulsed with pain he had to be carried from the field. “I knew her when she was a small girl,” said Eunice Swinyer of Charlotte Morehouse. “I knew her at the time of her marriage to Stephen Morehouse and know she was never been married before and has not been married since he died. She has always lived within a few rods of me and if she married I should have known it.” Eunice also knew all of Charlotte’s children’s birthdays, their middle names, and when Henry first had “fits” and was seized by paralysis. Who told her this? She was in the room. What greater authority was there than what she knew “by Personal Knowledge”? It was the sense of a fellow you got from growing up with him, watching him gut a fish, prune an apple tree, soothe a fretful child. Not just anybody could claim the patrimony of community. New people with big estates and clubs and second homes and camps were cutting up the country like a currant cake, but they couldn’t touch the birthright of lived experience. Not everything was up for grabs.¹⁷

Diasporic Prospects

When the names of the Black farmers dropped from Franklin and North Elba censuses in the quarter century after 1850, antiquarian historians assumed they had ditched the Adirondacks and farming altogether—quit because they had to, weren’t suited to it from an innate incapacity, and simply vanished or beelined back to the cities they probably never should have left. But these assumptions missed the mark.¹⁸

Many grantees, such as Samuel Drummond, Samuel “Poppa” Hall, and the Jefferson brothers, did head back to cities. Widowed women, like Susan Henderson, Phebe Murray, Eliza Carasaw, and (briefly) Susan Hasbrook Pierce, found city living more consoling and survivable, and maybe some single men felt this as well—like Blacksville’s Willis Hodges who, by 1853, was back in Brooklyn, betrothed and taking up the ministry. Also city bound were some of his Blacksville friends. But after the Civil War, several Black settlers used their bounties to stretch their wings and swap out for better farms, or sometimes homes in villages. Country life still suited them. They weren’t giving up.¹⁹

The Hazzards bought a farm lot in St. Armand, and Walter and Rachel Scott contracted for a fifty-acre Vermontville farm from Alfred Skiff, the officer who encouraged Scott to give Franklin a try. Before he went to war, Josiah Hasbrook Jr. bought a farm in North Elba, and on his return he and Jane Ann bought another. His mother Susan, done with cities, came to join him. She missed the country. She missed a home. In 1871, Josiah Hasbrook’s extended family moved to Westport on Lake Champlain (that most New Englandy of upstate shoreside towns, where ferries out of Albany docked every day and the air rang with the racket from the factories and forges), and touched down fleetingly in tiny Wadhams Mills. Next would come the big move to Vermont.²⁰

There was an echo here, albeit faint, of the wider, more dramatic migratory trend that followed the 1862 Homestead Act. This legislation, which offered free 160-acre land grants to hopeful pioneers, eventually pulled over half a million settlers to the trans-Mississippi West, among them many upstaters, European immigrants, Black freed people determined to get shut of the South, and, from the Adirondacks, the grantee-veteran Lafayette Mason, who rode this tide to Iowa and then to his and Mary’s last homestead in the Dakota Territory. But many more Black Adirondackers preferred small, affordable migrations that spoke less of John Soule and Horace Greeley’s romance with the West than of their hope the next frontier might be as close as the next hamlet, county, or state.²¹

In 1870, Josiah Hasbrook Sr., patriarch of his big clan, was a farm worker in Glastonbury, Connecticut, along with several of his veteran- sons, including “Josy,” who came down from North Elba to lend his father a hand. The war-disabled Silas Frazier and his wife, Jane, were in their small farm in Westport. Jane Craig, left or widowed by her husband, stayed on her North Elba farm as long as she could manage, then joined a sister’s farm in Saratoga County. The grantee George Holland put his Franklin farm behind him, but not for a city; he launched a truck farm in Canandaigua near the Finger Lakes. Alexander Gordon, long gone from Blacksville and his squatter’s patch in Duane, was farming in Monmouth County, New Jersey.²²

Enos Brewer, a sailor and grantee who homesteaded with Vermonters on Tupper Lake, left his cabin too, eventually surfacing at a new farm near Malone, where James Brady was farming. As for Avery and Margaret Hazzard’s brood: five of their eight children kept farming after the war, and three of them (Alexander, Charles Henry, and Adaline) farmed in the Black Woods of their folks.²³

Alone among Smith’s Black land agents, Samuel Ringgold Ward still spoke of farming. But when the aid he gave to fugitives raised the threat of legal action, Ward fled to Canada, then moved to England, where a Quaker activist gave him a fifty-acre farm in Jamaica. In 1855, Ward made Jamaica his last home. He didn’t farm, however. Pastoring a small church was the work that filled these years.²⁴

The grantee’s son, Josiah Hasbrook Jr., farmed as long as he could swing it. Bucking every westward trend, the Union veteran took his family out of Essex County to make their future in the Green Mountains of Vermont. In the late 1870s, when white farmers were ditching their Vermont ancestral homes for points west, the Hasbrooks staked out a new home in Bear Swamp north of Middlesex, not far from Montpelier, the state capital. Their new home was aptly named; sheep and dairy farmers kept rifles loaded and at hand.²⁵

Why here? Land—so much of it cleared and abandoned—was surely a good buy, and in Montpelier (twelve miles southeast) and Burlington (thirty-two miles northwest) were relatives of wife and husband both. It could be, too, that Jane Ann and Josiah, both the children of pioneers, had cooled on the postbellum Adirondacks so dear to tourists, outdoorsmen, and health seekers, and where, increasingly, the best prospect for poor Black people seemed to be working for well-off whites. This son of a suffrage-seeking pioneer may have recalled that fifty years before New York, Vermont abolished slavery, and a hundred years before New York, Black Vermonters got the vote. No sooner was the Fugitive Slave Act passed than Vermont legislators raced to outlaw it (a move that so enraged some Southern legislators that they tried to get Vermont kicked out of the Union). Vermont’s long legacy of agrarian egalitarianism was hopeful too, as was the Hasbrook tie to John Brown and his family. In Vermont, Brown’s good name gleamed.²⁶

The Hasbrooks made a sturdy home in Bear Swamp. They leased an old farmhouse and enrolled the boys in school. Jane Ann tended Adeline, her first daughter, and Josiah bought more land and started logging. Soon enough, locals were calling a stream near his home Hasbrook Brook. He joined the local GAR and was eventually made post commander, no small feat for a Black man in white Vermont. Sometimes he worked for white neighbors; sometimes they worked for him. And here, as he had done in the South when he made the rounds of freed people to alert them to the Union victory, he got the word out. This place works. Come see for yourself.²⁷

Hasbrook’s half sister Lucy and her husband, the ex-slave Jerry Miles, came to Middlesex and never left. Leonard Worts, a grantee-farmer from North Elba, moved to Middlesex when his wife died. Jane Ann’s aging mother, Margaret, from St. Armand, and Eliza Carasaw, William’s widow, who each had grown children living in Montpelier, stayed in Middlesex for long spells. And it wasn’t only Adirondackers whom the Black Vermonters welcomed. In 1883, eight years after they arrived, the Hasbrooks gave themselves a fifteenth-anniversary party. So many Black guests came from Montpelier it took a four-team coach to haul them.²⁸

Ten years later, a reporter from the Vermont Watchman & State Journal covered the Hasbrooks’ silver anniversary. The family built a dance hall for their revelers near their farmhouse in Bear Swamp. In attendance: “republicans, democrats, populists, prohibitionists, Americans, negroes, Irish, Canadians and Low Dutch, mulattoes, maroons, quadroons, octoroons, creoles and orioles, without regard to politics, race, religion or previous condition of servitude.” Toasts poured like cider from local politicians, farmers rich and influential, a minister, and the hosts. There were card games, spirituals, gift presentations (mostly silver), a feast, a fistfight, a three-piece band, and dancing until dawn. And the Montpelier writer made no apologies for his exuberantly long account: “The excuse is that this was no ordinary wedding.” Not ordinary for him, anyway—a city guest stunned by the social and racial diversity of the occasion. He didn’t know what Hasbrook knew, or Charles B. Ray before him. The frontier was a leveler. It might not last, but it happened. People met you eye to eye.²⁹

Unfortunately, and no surprise in this tough era, Hasbrook’s zeal to expand his farm outran his ability to pay for it. His creditors were losing patience, and he was losing heart. His neighbor and old army friend, Jerry Miles, had played it safer, working mostly on small farms near his own. ( Jerry’s son Frank did this too, managing eventually to buy a farm and win a warm obituary in the local paper in 1934 as a “well known and highly respected farmer.”) But Hasbrook could not stay the course. The rheumatism that stole into his joints during the war had turned his legs to stilts, his hands to clawhammers. He couldn’t milk, and so he sold his cows, and without manure, what good were his fields? Then in 1894, the beleaguered father was blindsided by the loss of his and Jane Ann’s middle son, George, age twenty, who succumbed to “ulcers in the head.”³⁰

Was it time to leave the farm? The new statehouse in Montpelier wore a gilded dome that seemed to glow all the brighter against the tree-stippled hillside lifting high behind it, and the legislature, Hasbrook learned, needed an assistant doorkeeper. Were his frozen hands up to the job? He and Jane Ann had family here. Their children would have cousins. With endorsements from fellow veterans, Vermont senators, and an ex-governor, Josiah applied for the post in 1896. Between his war service, the state’s hard-core Republicanism, its proud history of slavelessness, and his own ties to Captain Brown, he was confident he’d get it.³¹

A generation earlier, he might have. But by the 1890s, Vermont, like Adirondack Country and so much of the North, was refining the old narrative. Burgeoning anxiety about the heavy tide of immigrants and racial degeneration now spoke more loudly to Vermonters than the old rote devotion to racial justice. With despair, a Vermont poet described a boneyard of deserted farms littering the land:

Had Yankee emigrants pushing west taken with them all the enterprising, can-do spirit of their forebears, leaving only torpid layabouts, now joined by lesser “races” from French Canada, Ireland, and southern Europe? And what would the black face of Josiah Hasbrook in the statehouse say about white Vermont’s concern with its imperiled racial purity?³²

To a reporter pressing for a response from Hasbrook when he didn’t get the job, the Black man tersely offered that perhaps “the Republican Party does not look after those who have always stood by it.” Likely so, but the legislative disavowal glimpsed a more systemic truth: Vermont’s vaunted antislavery legacy had not produced an antiracist culture. After Montpelier dashed his hopes, the veteran and his family prepared to leave Bear Swamp for good. And no farewell party marked their abrupt departure for “parts unknown.” They were there, and then, a reporter noted with some puzzlement, they vanished. Where to? Why the hurry?³³

Hasbrook’s creditors understood. Farm desertion in New England, so common in these decades, was a proven way both to dodge debt and to beat it; Hasbrook’s long-worked contract hill farm went into foreclosure, and he wouldn’t see a dime. But he also wouldn’t go to jail. Vermont law forbade the interstate prosecution of a debt, and in his new home, the leafy college town of Amherst, Massachusetts, Hasbrook was free and clear to start again.³⁴

Hatter’s pressman, handyman, post office worker, quarryman, caretaker, chambermaid: Hasbrooks held all these jobs, except his Addie. Tuberculosis killed her when she was twenty-three. In Amherst, Hasbrook’s son Lloyd Garrison farmed (though not on land he owned). Until his death in 1915, Josiah Hasbrook himself got by painting houses, delivering mail, and hauling firewood and junk. And in this town, as in Middlesex, he joined the local post of the Grand Army of the Republic. On Decoration Day he bore a wreath to the cemetery with other veterans who could still manage the stroll. A picture of them hangs in the Amherst town library. The bespectacled Private Hasbrook, still tall and lanky in his old age, if slightly stooped, stands in dress gloves and a formal jacket, the wreath hanging from his hand. Amherst on Decoration Day would have been awash in blooms, but Hasbrook’s drawn face reveals nothing of the moment. He looks tired and preoccupied. Maybe his thoughts were back in Middlesex with the land and farm he lost to debt. There was a stream there that bore his name. Did anyone remember Hasbrook Brook? One of his three dead children was buried there. How long since anyone dressed George’s grave with blooms?³⁵

Or perhaps he was preoccupied with his ongoing battle with the Pension Bureau, still refusing (and would keep refusing) his appeals for an increase. Even after Hasbrook’s death, justice would be denied this pioneer. Newspaper accounts routinely and mistakenly described Josiah as Mary Brown’s “servant.” The ever-driven, hopeful arc of his long odyssey from Fishkill to North Elba, then south into the slavelands, back again into the Black Woods, then east into the Green Mountains of Vermont, moving finally to this Massachusetts college town when age and infirmity caught up with him at last, was whittled down to service for the Brown family, and his family’s North Elba stay of fifteen years shaved back to one point alone: They came, and then they left. Another colored family, vanished. But the Hasbrook family’s great migration was no parable of Black incapacity. It was as deliberate and resolute as any bold removal to the West.³⁶

On the Trail of Tommy Elliott

The migration of Private Thomas Elliott, the self-freed slave who cooked for Company K in New York’s Ninety-Sixth and accompanied his white army mates to North Elba after the war, was also trimmed in public memory, his bold life contracted to one chapter, and this the one that wasn’t true: Tommy Elliott (town historian Mary MacKenzie was assured by North Elbans) was a fugitive who found his way to John Brown’s farm in the early 1850s and worked for the old man and got to be his friend. Brown (or a descendant) gave Elliott his Bible. Why, Elliott and Brown were thick as thieves!³⁷

MacKenzie sensed these dates were out of whack, and my own review of Elliott’s military pension records confirms her intuition. Private Thomas Elliott saved himself from bondage, and didn’t move to North Elba until years after Brown was hanged. It was an army mate that urged him to North Elba, where “Tommy” Elliott worked on Alpheus Demmon’s farm for years (likely overlapping at some point with the veteran and sometime Demmon farmhand “Josy” Hasbrook). Then, and well before the Demmon farm was sold, Elliott pushed east into the Adirondack iron-making district and got work as a hammersmith in Jay, headquarters of the J. & J. Rogers Iron Company, a family-managed empire whose mines, bloomeries, and forges webbed the wide Ausable River valley with scores of rough, teeming settlements. In 1880, only Michigan’s Marquette County produced more iron ore than New York’s Essex County. No Essex County company employed more full-time workers or made more iron than Elliott’s employer. And in Jay, as in North Elba, Elliott boarded with a white family, their brick home hemmed with apple trees. He went to church (First Methodist Episcopal), taught Bible, gained a name for “industry and frugal habits,” and voted. It may have been in Jay, too, that he changed his name to Thompson, the surname his Virginia father took when he was freed. In 1882, when this ironworker put down $1,200 for a town lot on the Ausable River, staked at the corners by old “hot pipes” from long-gone blast furnaces, Thomas Thompson was how he signed his name.³⁸

Unfortunately, Thompson took up iron work right when market trends began to favor consolidated operations to the west. The resultant layoffs and site closures hit Adirondack iron miners hard. Ethnic strife and wildcat strikes were on the rise, and Thompson, a Black Methodist in an increasingly Catholic, culturally embattled workplace, may have been moved to wonder whether this place was his best home. He had tried working at a small forge in the hamlet of North Hudson, and also at the New Russia Iron Works, where all night long the racket from the giant trip-hammer echoed off the hills. By 1880, he had moved to Elizabethtown and was (again) boarding with a white family while he scouted for a homesite of his own. But only two years after he put down money on a piece of riverfront in Jay, he gave up on the whole idea, and left for good.³⁹

In New Jersey’s Newark, migrants from the South were arriving every hour. Here were Black neighborhoods and schools, Black baseball teams and Black-owned stores, and, in striking contrast with the Ausable valley mining district, a supply of viable romantic prospects. This is not to say that late nineteenth-century Adirondack censuses record no interracial marriages. But they were few, and public notice scowled. When Frederick Douglass married a white woman in 1884, the editor of the Elizabethtown Post, anticipating an eruption of interracial unions, suggested that evidence of race mixing be met with old-time vigilantism. Riding miscreants out of town on a rail—was not interracial marriage a reason to bring this hoary custom back?⁴⁰

In Newark in 1888, Thomas Thompson met, courted, and married a Black woman from Virginia. She took his self-chosen, nonslave name for hers, and that surname would be her daughters’. The house they rented and then bought, freestanding on a Black block, was in his name as well. Fine and cherished gains for sure, but losses were felt, too. Never would he build that dreamed-of home on the banks of a wild river. Nor would his daughters know an integrated classroom, or his family an integrated church. The proud work of the artisan, the thrill and risk of working with hot iron and a forge, was behind him now. Thompson was a night watchman at a lime works and a factory. No meteoric spray of sparks or manly yelling here. He had three people who looked to him for school clothes, church dues, good shoes, and fresh milk, and while he had never sought a pension, perhaps figuring that his two names would complicate the process, he could no longer put it off. In 1906, the former army cook, age sixty, readied his appeal. For backup, he got two white officers from his old company and neighbors from North Elba, Sylvanus Paye and Judson C. Ware, to assure the government that the names Elliott and Thompson belonged to this same veteran. The pension was approved.⁴¹

And what better time for this former Adirondacker, his memories now stirring, to make a trip to Lake Placid, the old road gleaming with macadam, the hotel windows glimmering with filamented light, and at the village edge, a smartly painted train station with pillars, portico, and a shiny hardwood floor? Intervale was spruced up too—not that Company K’s assistant cook would have been invited in to look around. By 1908, Private Elliott’s first Adirondack home, once a stronghold of radical abolitionists, belonged to the Lake Placid Club, among whose exclusionary rules was the one that kept Blacks out.⁴²

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

What happened to Thomas Elliott/Thompson in local memory—the vanishing of his biography, his reinvention as an acolyte of John Brown—was nothing new. Both Lyman Eppes Sr. and his son would be misremembered in these terms, and Josiah Hasbrook Jr. too. Stories that dramatized Black agency were appropriated and absorbed into narratives that exalted white courage and initiative. Early histories of the Underground Railroad indulged this tendency, as did the careless revisionism that turned the free-born Lyman Eppes into a fugitive. Timbuctoo itself was reinvented in the service of John Brown’s martyrology. As Elliott/Thompson was said to have mysteriously vanished from North Elba, so was Timbuctoo assumed to have simply self- destructed, its settlers drifting back to the cities from which they presumably came.⁴³

But it wasn’t Elliott/Thompson who disappeared. What vanished was an interest in his story when it slipped beyond Brown’s orbit. Too often local history reads an absence from the home place as desertion, disappearance, a failure to commit—and between disappearance and diaspora is a difference. Flight and purposeful migration are not the same. Nothing about the Smith grantees and their descendants who kept farming when they left the gift land—who went on to work in North Hudson and New Russia, or to farm in Vermont, Connecticut, or the Dakota Territory—was uncommitted. The faithlessness was history’s: out of sight, out of mind.

This is not to sentimentalize these unremarked migrations. If moves to new farms and better prospects expressed agency and nerve, they also suggested the unrelenting pressure of distant market forces that kept Adirondackers—Black and white—scrambling to stay afloat. Across the nation in the postwar years, economic trends drove poor farmers, wage laborers, and hired hands off the land, and in the Adirondacks, as in neighboring Vermont, farm abandonment was long the norm. From 1870 to 1925, Essex County lost a third of its farms. Subsistence farming had no future in a new market economy. Rising taxes, surging land values, and higher prices all around (for farm machinery, seed, livestock, hired help, and simple upkeep) clamored for more income. And poor farmers, lacking cash or collateral and unable to make costs, could not keep up. In his compendious A History of Agriculture in the State of New York, Ulysses Hedrick kept the explanation simple. With the modernization of the farm, “the economic hazards of farming are increased. A man must have money to begin and keep going. His cost of doing business is sometimes greater than the income… . At every turn of country roads, insolvent farmers can be found—some have been insolvent all their lives.” You might meet the challenge if you had collateral to start with or knew a local banker or merchant who would favor you with credit. But if your holdings boiled down to two cows, a chicken coop, and a scratch farm in the woods, who would risk a loan? Only those blessed with assets could catch the updraft of opportunity. For the rest, writes the historian Jack Beatty, “freeholders slipped down the ladder to tenants; tenants to farm laborers; farm laborers to migrant workers,” and, within a generation, “the representative American of 1860, the farmer, in a Gilded Age coinage, had become the ‘hayseed’ of 1890.”⁴⁴

Add to the economic uncertainties of rural life for a poor farmer in this era the further liability of race, and the picture darkens more. Civil War bounties and pensions for the families of Black veterans were useful, but the more meaningful capitalization that might have helped Black Adirondack farmers compete in a commercial market stayed out of reach. As for Black women, if the postwar era meant they sometimes worked out of the home, this likely did not translate into the confidence observed in the Black veterans. Out-of-home employment would not have lightened household chores, which now included tending debilitated, sometimes bedbound men. And to bone-weariness, add anxiety, for low-wage jobs offered no reprieve from poverty. If the shift from farm wife to wage earner brought a glimmer of empowerment, illness or old age could snuff it out in a season. After six years living with her son Josiah, Susan Hasbrook Pierce (the ex-wife of one grantee, the widow of another, and the mother of a third) took her eleven-year-old daughter, Lucy Ann, to Westport. There she cooked for a living, and cooked again at the Stevens House in Vergennes, in Vermont. When her son Josiah moved his tribe to Wadhams Mills, she and Lucy went there too, and likely moved in with him. This working widow was the image of postbellum Black mobility. But was this movement upward? Did life improve for her and Lucy when she worked out of the home?⁴⁵

On John Brown’s death, his abolitionist allies made sure that two of his daughters got out of North Elba and into Franklin Sanborn’s boarding school in Concord, Massachusetts. No Boston abolitionist stepped up to swoop away the fourteen-year-old Lucy Ann and set her up with schooling when her mother Susan, fifty-five, died in Wadhams Mills in 1873. There would be no school at all. Lacking resources of her own or any nearby family, Lucy reviewed her options. Bunking with the Hasbrooks in Wadhams at this time was her brother’s old army mate Jerry Miles, the Virginia-born ex-slave who made the Black Woods his new home after the war. Jerry, in his twenties, and Lucy Ann, fourteen, were married four months after her mother’s death. The next year they were living in Middlesex, Vermont.⁴⁶

In the dispatches from Middlesex in Montpelier newspapers, the Mileses’ domestic triumphs were warmly noted. Jerry once returned from Bear Swamp with seventy-one trout. Their prize hen laid an egg as big as a potato. Sixty guests attended their wedding anniversary in 1894. The farmhand Jerry Miles, “known to everybody and always favorably known,” made a sturdy world in Middlesex. His funeral was thronged, “showing the great esteem in which [he] was held.” His employer, the town judge, was a pallbearer. But a good name promised no marked advancement. Miles never owned his home, not outright, and like North Elba’s Lyman Epps Jr., he could not make a living farming for himself.⁴⁷

The progress that the ex-slave and deedholder John Thomas proudly reported to Gerrit Smith in 1872 would not be realized by any of Thomas’s descendants. Things did not pick up for them. Things did not notably pick up for any of the descendants of the early grantee-settlers. After the war, the children and grandchildren of the “first families” of the Black Woods, the Thomases and Eppeses, Carasaws and Hasbrooks, Hazzards and Morehouses, got by, and that was it. Hired hand, house servant, laundress, teamster, waiter—these were the jobs that whisked them into the next century. For the dark skinned, hard times just stayed hard, whether in Franklin and Essex Counties or in Brooklyn, Baltimore, and Amherst, and no rags-to-riches hagiographies of African Americans brighten nineteenth-century Adirondack county histories. Not that we would read a Black success story in these volumes. The approving sentences on Thomas Thompson in the Essex County history of 1885 were a fluke. Behind the confident biographies in county histories simmered the anxiety of Main Street authors and subscribers who were all too mindful of a new pluralistic culture that threatened their hegemony. Up-from-under stories of Catholics and non-Anglos were suffered rarely, and town-proud accounts of Black Americans not at all.⁴⁸

This was the age, let us recall, when centuries-old race prejudice was girded by the emerging discipline of physical anthropology and the pseudoscience of renowned exponents like Louis Agassiz of Harvard, Samuel George Morton of Philadelphia, and the Alabama physician Josiah Nott. From these and other well-born pundits, stern “proofs” of the innate inferiority of “lesser” races and the calamity of “race mixing” would make their way into public policy and legislation. The case for a natural racial hierarchy and Black biological inferiority based not on habit, faith, politics, or profit but on the “neutral” study of skull size and body type stiffened white anxiety with scientific respectability. And university lecture halls would not contain the reach of these cold influences. The rural North registered them too.⁴⁹

When she was young, John Thomas’s granddaughter Rosa Scott was a laundress in Vermontville. Two decades later, living in Englewood, New Jersey, she still washed clothes. In the Adirondacks, her brother Richard was a hired hand and blacksmith; in New Jersey, forty years later, he worked at a city dump. William and Eliza’s sons were laborers, truckers, boiler stokers, and grooms. Hellen “Libby” Hazzard, another of Thomas’s granddaughters, cleaned homes in Saranac Lake and ironed laundry, a skill as tightly identified with Black women as peddling was with immigrant Eastern European Jews—with a difference. White peddlers leveraged wagons into storefronts, and these into fine mercantile emporia. In the Adirondacks were a score of them, from Ginsberg’s, the beloved department store of Tupper Lake, to D. Cohen & Sons Hardware in Saranac Lake, where John Thomas’s great-grandson Marshall Morehouse worked for thirty-five years. Would a lifetime on the job earn this shop hand a promotion to store manager, supervisor, or part owner? Morehouse got a paycheck. He would not move up. Nor would his Aunt Libby own a laundry of her own or see her children buy an Adirondack business; they made for cities as soon as they were grown, and drove laundry trucks for others, hauled mail, and swabbed floors. This was honorable and valued work, with paychecks that were steady, but no hope in this of trading in the mop for the life of the mop’s manufacturer, no rising up, no office with a view.⁵⁰

In Saranac Lake, James Morehouse, the youngest son of Charlotte Ann, was a stonemason and a construction worker. In New York City, he worked on construction projects for the WPA. He lived alone in Corona, Queens; his neighbors were Italians and Argentinians. During the Depression, his mother came down from the Adirondacks and lived with him for her last years—and what a shock for this octogenarian daughter of a self-freed slave, the girl whose late husband broke camp for one of Charles Dickens’s stringers. Charlotte Ann took in her father John Thomas when he was failing. Now it was her son’s time to do the same for her.⁵¹

Was it hard? Did she miss Vermontville? She was a lifelong child of the woods, and she surely recalled some of her youth with joy. Eggs so fresh they warmed the palm. Woodsmoke, fireflies, the gilded haze of late summer. Private Morehouse courting her, and she still such a girl! Then, Warren’s death, the children young, and winter rolling toward them like a great ragged army. In 1934, the last year of her life, thermometers in parts of the Adirondacks registered fifty-two below. And her Sicilian neighbors were so proud of how they stood it, these big-city winters. They had no idea.⁵²

When North Elba was a wilderness and Vermontville a crossing in the woods, the Black grantees and their pioneering wives were needed. It was all hands on deck when a wolf needed tracking or a farmer late with taxes needed help getting his place back in his name. The new frontier community was as vulnerable as a newly made nest, finding its resilience in each woven twig. That the Black veterans and their widows could look to white friends for help when they applied for pensions, and that many of these neighbors gave that help so freely, was a testament to the community and its small strength. But this was never about building a utopia or honoring an equalitarian agenda. This was the daily application of the old dictum ex unitate vires, and when community building was less a matter of strength through unity, the adhesive of expedience relaxed. It was a sure fact that in 1847, the estimable Iddo Osgood invited Charles Ray and James McCune Smith to ply their trades in his home hamlet. But the squire died. North Elba grew. When sufficient white folk were on the ground to preach a sermon and set a bone, the invitation was not repeated. Casual racism and Christian fellowship were easy bedfellows in the Black Woods. The agrarian Charles Bennett Ray had promised that on-the-ground daily dealings between farm families would point to trust, respect, and maybe even something like affection, and a great many stories from the Black Woods—revelations in the redemption records and pension files especially—suggest the pastor got this right. But as crossroads settlements burgeoned into hamlets, and hamlets into towns, the social landscape shifted. Need, that eager conjurer of frontier fellowship, no longer cast much of a spell.⁵³

Something for the Son of Ham

In 1885, the grantee’s son Charles Henry Hazzard learned just how much his good standing in his St. Armand home could help him. That year, a county constable came to his farm with a summons from the court: Hazzard had been found guilty of nonpayment of a debt. The constable was here to escort the aging farmer to the county jail for three months.⁵⁴

Hazzard knew he owed the money. The debt was for a horse he had bought in Ausable Forks in 1884. Though the horse was wheezy and “poor in flesh,” the seller (white) promised it would rally with a little time and care. Hazzard got the horse back to his farm, but when it wouldn’t drink or eat and then collapsed, both hind legs snapping, he had to put it down.⁵⁵

What was his obligation? The white veterans he tapped for advice were good neighbors and community-builders, like himself. Six years earlier, he and his brother Alexander joined ranks with fifteen neighbors to found St. Armand’s Brookside Cemetery, and when forest fires lunged, the Hazzard men helped beat them back. Captain James H. Pierce had founded the St. Armand lumber hamlet Bloomingdale and served as its first president, town supervisor (repeatedly), and postmaster. Black farmers brought potatoes to his starch factory. He backed their claims during the tax sales and, after his return from the war, their appeals for military pensions too. Hazzard’s other confidante, 2nd Lieutenant Judson C. Ware of North Elba, was credible as well. A former county sheriff and town supervisor, he grew up in the Black Woods. In July 1857, while John Brown was in Kansas, Ware, three Browns, two Thompsons, and the grantee’s son, Simeon Hasbrook, camped out on Whiteface and had themselves, wrote Annie Brown, “a first rate time” despite their ill-made, over-smoky campfire. Back from the war, Ware took the side of his Black neighbors against farm seizures for back taxes, bought property from them, and saw them take their vows. And when he and Pierce reviewed Hazzard’s situation, they gave their best advice. This horse seller was a swindler. Hazzard owed him not one cent.⁵⁶

But the confident reassurance of these white men, advice that might have worked for Hazzard in St. Armand, could not help him where he wasn’t known. Elizabethtown was only thirty miles from St. Armand, but where a Black man wasn’t known, the presumption of his criminality was apparently a given. And when a county constable turned up at his farm, the good word of his neighbors couldn’t help him. The county jail would be his home for three months—or would have been but for an unexpected intervention.

A decade before Hazzard’s case was brought to Byron Pond’s attention, when this prominent Elizabethtown attorney was the Essex County judge, Pond heard white farmers in St. Armand neighbors side with the Hazzards against the threat of land confiscation for back taxes. He heard about the Hazzards’s roomy fenced-in garden, and about the twelve acres of wild grass they mowed for their animals. Pond, an estate attorney, had helped sort out Avery Hazzard’s will. And if Pond’s occasional dealings with Gerrit Smith were strictly business, and his devotion to the antislavery cause no match for his older brother’s (Alembert Pond was active in the Underground Railroad), Pond still made sure he got to Deer’s Head Inn for orator Wendell Phillips’s remarks about John Brown’s last days in 1859 (the room was packed, and Phillips lived up to his name). By 1886, Pond had served his town and county in every available capacity: county judge most famously, but also school board head, postmaster, town clerk, Republican convention delegate, and district attorney. He was sixty-three when he gave Charles Henry Hazzard’s case a look. And as far as he could see, what happened here was casebook plain.⁵⁷

Franklin Rowe, the horse dealer’s lawyer, had grossly, even criminally, overreached. Hazzard had never had an opportunity to find a lawyer, plead his case, or organize an appeal. Further, the fellow who sold him his horse never asked for or expected him to go to jail. Sheriff, constable, and attorney, each had overstepped the law. Pond saw to Hazzard’s early release, and at Pond’s insistence, the court acknowledged that Hazzard’s jail time was a mistake (only after extracting Hazzard’s promise, however, that he wouldn’t countersue). It would be at Hazzard’s own insistence, however, that Pond pressed for more. Why, Hazzard demanded, had he still to pay a fine? Was no compensation owed to him? Was no one here accountable? Pond apparently agreed, and said as much to Rowe, the horse dealer’s attorney: “Hazzard is anxious that something be collected for his being improperly kept in jail for two months. The plaintiff would naturally be the party to call upon in such a case … but the judge saw fit … to protect him, but to leave you exposed. Now, I don’t like to do anything that shall look like punishing a fellow lawyer, still it seems under the Fourteenth Constitutional Amendment, something must be done for the Son of Ham. What do you say about it?”⁵⁸

This was delicately put. For all the condescension of that “Son of Ham” remark and a consoling nod to the shared fraternity of class and whiteness, Judge Pond knew that his word and reputation were not enough to force a change; the “slow democracy” of personal acquaintance and grassroots loyalty was, by itself, no guarantor of justice. Pond invoked the Constitution because pressure had to come from local vigilance and federal law alike—that is, from top and bottom both. The appeal to the highest law of the land let Rowe know Judge Pond’s grasp of the stakes here, and while Pond did not spell it out, his expectation was transparent: Do more for this Black man or we may meet in court.⁵⁹

Court costs and fine were cancelled. Hazzard’s name was cleared. He went home early, his purse intact. These were gains, and this was something. But had a breach of justice been redressed? For Hazzard’s two months behind bars, for the blow to his and Julia’s subsistence farm (half the planting season stolen), for the trauma to his once enslaved wife, who surely figured she had put these blows behind her (white men seizing, stealing people, presuming Black culpability a given)—for this, there was no compensation. The Hazzards of St. Armand never saw a dime.

Hagiographers and Hayseeds

Toward the end of the century, the heyday of the Adirondack homesteader was over. Railroad tracks that once girdled the Adirondack region now bore “summer tramps” and late Gilded Age tycoons to the watery interior. By 1893, sixty private Adirondack parks held more than 940,000 acres; grand hotels added laundry rooms and servant quarters and wide sloping lawns. Rumors of mill-made pollution, scarifying clear-cuts, soil erosion, and the risk of waterborne epidemics had finally claimed the interest of downstate voters: in 1894, they overwhelmingly approved an article for the state constitution to maintain the Adirondack Forest Preserve in a condition “forever wild.” Now tourism and the conservation lobby would shape the image of the region, sweeping the old-time subsistence farmer, that quaint and now somewhat comic “hayseed,” to the unlit, dusty wings.⁶⁰

That same year, Louisa Brady and John Thomas were buried in the Vermontville Union Cemetery under slim headstones in the second row. I like to imagine the widower and the widow (that’s how the 1880 census enumerator described her status; in fact, her errant soldier-spouse outlived her) making the best of things in their last years, two old friends occasionally meeting up over a slice of pie to count the season’s blessings: a good run of sap, hollyhocks higher than the gate latch, a better price for potatoes at the starch factory at the Eight-Mile Schoolhouse, or maybe a new dope for the pestilential blackflies (not that these foul potions ever did a thing).

Other topics—the lonely death of Samuel Brady, Louisa’s only son, the vanishing of her second husband, the ruination of John Thomas’s first family in Maryland, or the death in 1860 of his and Mary Ann’s one boy—these survivors may have kept to themselves. And they may have held back, too, about more recent disappointments. The hope that legal freedom for four million Black Americans would conjure a new age of justice and equality. The assumption that their little colony of Black farmers would keep and eventually thrive. The wish that at least a few of the younger folks could scratch out a better deal on the land than their folks. By 1885, Eugene Thew’s shingle mill sprawled across the bones of Freeman’s Home. Four years later, John Thomas sold his hundred-acre farm to a white man for $800, enough money to see Thomas through his dotage—but how hard to part with that good land! Thomas’s son-in-law, Walter Scott, once a farmer, was down to day work, as were Warren and Charlotte Ann’s boys. All the grandchildren answered to bosses. Not one could say, as Thomas wrote Gerrit Smith in 1872, that he worked for himself. Even old Mr. Eppes in North Elba was giving up his family farm. His grown girls had made for distant cities, and Lyme Jr. could or would not shoulder it alone.⁶¹

To a reporter, Lyme Jr. allowed that he might have married if more Black women lived nearby or if he’d ventured to a city. His parents met in a city. His sister Kate met her husband (Black) in Manhattan, moved there, and never left. But Lyme was a homebody. North Elba was his world. Here were old friends, work, his parents’ graves. So he stayed single, and having no young family to help him, never did farm solely for himself. Nor would he enjoy his parents’ upward mobility. In effect, the casual constraints of Jim Crow apartheid paralyzed his prospects as they almost did those of Thomas Elliott, who only found a partner when he left the North Country for Newark. Lyme Epps’s parents, with their children’s help, beefed up assets and social standing alike, but the bachelor son was stuck. All his life he worked for others—hauled trash, tended oxen, groomed the links at a whites-only resort. The job he wanted, caretaker and guide at the John Brown Farm, he never got. That was a state hire, and would stay a white one as long as any poor white farmer wanted it, however tepid his connection with John Brown.⁶²

At least Epps was always on the scene at the events that brought the crowds. In 1896, when the State of New York took charge of the farm from Kate Field’s John Brown Association, the Eppes family sang Brown’s favorite hymn. And on August 30, 1899, the anniversary of the Battle of Osawatomie, there was another fine to-do when the remains of eight of Brown’s twenty-one “Raiders,” redeemed from damaged or unmarked graves in Harpers Ferry and elsewhere and now gathered in one casket, gained an honor long denied them: a proper burial with speeches, prayer, military salute, and place of rest by the gray stone of their commander. Elsewhere in Lake Placid that last week in August was a golf tourney, a ladies’ euchre competition, and a minstrel show and cakewalk. But what summoned a throng of thousands (the New York Times guessed 3,500) were the goings-on at John Brown’s farm. On foot and by carriage, tourists, pilgrims, and native Adirondackers hiked the road to Brown’s clapboard home.⁶³

Part of the thrill of the occasion was the by now well-published story of what had made it possible—a heist, a traveling trunk, an illicit plan that, in its unlikeliness and bravado, seemed to suggest the spirit of Brown’s raid itself. Earlier in July, three passionate admirers of John Brown had resolved to locate and retrieve the boxed-up remains of Brown’s eight followers who, not long after the raid, had been buried (more like dumped) with some secrecy in a muddy riverbank near Harpers Ferry. Their plan was to get these bones back to North Elba and see to their reburial, with honors, near John Brown’s grave. In July, the organizer of this effort, Thomas Featherstonhaugh of Washington, DC, tracked down a photographer in Saranac Lake who, in 1896, had self-published her elegiac photo essay, A Hero’s Grave in the Adirondacks. The booklet, which he chanced on at the John Brown Farm, moved him deeply. Perhaps Katherine McClellan, the photographer, would wish to help him? His scheme was wild and illegal, but if justice long denied could be delivered, McClellan was all in. In early August a large trunk came to her Saranac Lake home bearing the remains of eight raiders, painstakingly recovered from three crude pine boxes half a century in muck. Then it was McClellan’s turn to bring the thing to closure. She prevailed on North Elba to provide a silver-handled casket. The burial would happen at the August anniversary of Osawatomie at John Brown’s grave.⁶⁴

Here, as in 1896, Katherine McClellan was a principal photographer. Her fine pictures showed men in bowlers and stiff coats, and ladies in wasp-waisted gowns, hair pinned high, parasols lifted to the haze. Also documented: the speakers in their good suits, firm of visage, thin of hair. Bishop Henry Potter of New York spoke (this churchman, veteran pulpiteer, and avid club member loved the Adirondacks; he had a big camp on a little island in Lake Placid). Potter’s friend Whitelaw Reid of the Herald Tribune prepared remarks as well. (His camp, Wild Air, was at Upper St. Regis Lake.) The master of events was the Lake Placid hotelier George Stevens, who introduced, from Groton, Massachusetts, the cotton-bearded Rev. Joshua Young, ever honored for his prayer at Brown’s funeral, a kindness that half a century before had cost him his first ministry in Burlington, Vermont. Speaking for the veterans were Colonel Richard Hinton and Captain James Holmes, the latter of whom had fought with Brown at Osawatomie.⁶⁵

Hinton, resting heavily on his cane, talked about the raiders. Bishop Potter gave thanks to William Lloyd Garrison and Gerrit Smith. The Eppes family, John Brown’s old friends, sang Brown’s favorite hymn, “Blow Ye the Trumpets Blow,” Charles Wesley’s mystic, stately anthem of apocalyptic liberation, and a newer tune, “In the Sweet By-and-By,” an everything-is-coming-up-roses crowdpleaser that would have made Brown wince. But this wasn’t John Brown’s show, not Brown the plotter of seditious raids. That Brown (“crazed,” “unbalanced,” “misguided,” “blinded by fanaticism,” as accounts of this commemorative event described him) was no hero here.⁶⁶

This day’s great man was Brown the catalyst, whose actions sparked the fuse that led to war, an awful war, but necessary, purifying, and at least as much an object of reverence as Brown himself. For it was the war, not Brown, that put a stop to slavery, as this day’s program drove firmly home. The event that set the war in motion might belong to Brown and his men, but thanks for the death of slavery went to Lincoln and his army. So there would be no agitators at the podium today, no latter-day Wendell Phillips among the speakers, no W. E. B. Du Bois to speak for Black Americans and represent Black sentiment on issues that would certainly compel John Brown if he were alive—like Jim Crow, or voter suppression, or lynch law, or the dead letter of Reconstruction. To invoke these crises would suggest that Brown’s business was unfinished, the deeper purpose of the war unresolved. And this was not the thing. The point was to say, Done here, to walk away that summer afternoon calmly certain that John Brown and his raiders were now at rest. Three regimental salutes from the NY Twenty-Sixth Infantry, the singing of “My Country ’Tis of Thee” and “John Brown’s Body,” and finally the sweet strains of “Taps” fixed the raiders and their story in a narrative of war and victory, reconciliation and recovery, and claimed the day for patriots. No dissent, no protest, no dwelling on the grievances of Black Americans. Slavery was dead.⁶⁷

It is a pity that Katherine McClellan did not train her lens on the crowd itself. Always, at events at the farm that honored “Old John Brown,” were Black people. Black Adirondackers had been coming to the shrine for fifty years. They came for Brown’s burial, for GAR events, for the transfer of the farm to the State of New York in 1896. This particular event would have held a singular appeal for Black Adirondackers, since it honored Black raiders along with white. As late as 1899 and not counting the Eppeses, at least thirty direct or extended-family descendants of the Black Woods pioneers were in the region, calling it their home. There were Appos, Hazzards, Morehouses, Scotts, Langleys, Princes, Johnsons, Williamses, Ricketsons, Davises, and Gardineers—and some still farmed. That year, north of John Brown’s farmhouse, were two farms run by Black families. Charles Henry Hazzard and his wife, Julia, worked the farm they bought after the war. Next to them, Alexander Hazzard’s widow, Elizabeth, ran the old family farm with some of her children.

In 1902 her enterprising daughter Adaline and son-in-law, William Langley from Vermont, converted part of their Bloomingdale farm into a cure cottage for Black invalids afflicted with tuberculosis. In the Resorts section of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in May 1902, the Langleys advertised the “first resort house for colored people” in Saranac Lake. It would never be a moneymaker, and the family’s fiscal woes were not improved by Adaline’s brother Avery’s failure to distribute earnings from the sale of a Hazzard home among his siblings (they wound up suing him to get their share). In 1911, the county sheriff put the old Hazzard farmhouse up for auction for unmet debts (mostly owed to the Bloomingdale storekeeper Sydney Barnard). Yet somehow, Adaline and William kept their eight-bed “Langley Cottage for Colored Patients” going. It was still listed—at seven or eight dollars per diem—in the 1916 directory of the National Tuberculosis Association (the only designated resort for Black people among the approximately seventy Saranac Lake directory listings that year). No less than her settler-grandfather, Avery Hazzard, and her father Alexander, an Adirondack guide, Adaline Hazzard Langley was a pioneer, a Black woman blazing a trail into the frontier of recovery and health.⁶⁸

Were there Hazzards at John Brown’s farm in 1899? For all of history’s abiding interest in the Eppeses, it was this family from St. Armand who stuck with farming long after the Eppeses gave up. And the Hazzards, noted McClellan in her 1896 essay, were as cozy with the Browns as the Eppeses. Perhaps Adaline’s uncle, Charles Henry Hazzard, knew about Brown’s plans, and had an opportunity to join him. He would have made a good fighter. Recall the teenage street brawl in Union Village, 1848, that landed him in jail, and then, in 1886, his fierce demand that Judge Byron Pond push for a better settlement from the lawyer who got him locked up for no reason.⁶⁹

This may be why, when I imagine Hazzard there at John Brown’s grave in August 1899, I see no breathless celebrant. I see someone pondering the impact of his celebrated neighbor and wondering, not for the first time, if he should have made Brown’s destiny his own. I see him imagining his bones mingling with the martyrs in their casket, his name offered to the throng by the white man leaning on his cane. This could have been his long home too, his green grave next to “the Meteor of the War.” Instead he had held out for another war, another call, a choice that consigned him to obscurity even while enabling his blessings, which for all the hard times did add up. There was this fine sunlit day, for instance, and Julia and his stepchildren, their hard-worked farm, his “best of reputations” among his St. Armand neighbors, and these long years of his, three-quarters of the century, and here he stood, still on the warm side of eternity. In 1877 and then again, in 1898, St. Armand made him village constable—this in the same New York whose laws had twice put him behind bars! But this was how things blew in the Black Woods, on winds so careless, you couldn’t take a thing for granted. Anything could change.⁷⁰

To speculate so nervily, however, I would need to know that Hazzard was there. I would need him to have been seen and, moreover, recognized as a presence whose history was essential to the day’s meaning. And who would do this? Who would turn that day from the old men with their snowy beards and self-regarding speeches rolling out like waves of foam, and notice Private Charles Henry Hazzard? Or contest the rifles booming and the strains of “Taps” declaring this thing over, done with, put to rest? Who could, would want to, break this spell?

Rest was the allure, the great prize, after all. Rest for the raiders, for the veterans, and for the pilgrims too. Rest from the past but, more, especially, rest from what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would call the “fierce urgency of Now.”⁷¹ So the Black pilgrims in their soft caps and dark plain coats remained unnamed and unremarked, and as “Taps” gave up its notes, they, too, dispersed into the loose drift of the crowd.