Hudson, Ohio: Connecticut's Colony and John Brown's Home
Near Akron, Ohio
Hudson, Ohio, looks and feels like a New England village transplanted to the Western Reserve, and that is precisely what it is. In seventeen ninety-nine, a Connecticut farmer named David Hudson led a settlement party west along the new land claims the state of Connecticut held in northeast Ohio. He reached the site on June seventeen, seventeen ninety-nine, and by eighteen oh two the township carried his name.
The settlers who followed were New Englanders steeped in Congregationalist faith and a deep opposition to slavery. Among them was Owen Brown, who arrived with his family in eighteen oh five. Owen's son John grew up here, attended the local school near the town green, and absorbed Hudson's fierce abolitionist culture.
That upbringing shaped everything that came after: John Brown's raids in Kansas in the eighteen fifties and his attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in eighteen fifty-nine were the violent conclusions of a moral conviction first forged in this quiet Ohio town. Western Reserve College, founded in Hudson in eighteen twenty-six, was one of the earliest institutions in America to openly debate ending slavery.
