John Brown's Akron: The Abolitionist Next Door

Between eighteen forty-four and eighteen fifty-four, one of the most consequential people in American history lived in Akron. He rented a house from Colonel Simon Perkins, ran a wool business, raised a large family, and quietly became the center of a network devoted to destroying American slavery.

John Brown had been an abolitionist all his life. His father had sheltered freedom seekers in Hudson, Ohio. Brown grew up believing slavery was a sin against God that demanded active resistance, not just moral disapproval. By the time he arrived in Akron, he had been working the Underground Railroad for years.

Here in Akron, his wool business gave him perfect cover. He traveled regularly between Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia to buy sheep and sell wool. Freedom seekers could hide in his wagon. His home became a way station on what he called the Subterranean Pass Way. Frederick Douglass visited him here. Henry Highland Garnet visited him here. Akron in the eighteen forties and fifties was a hotbed of Free Soil politics, and Brown was at the center of it.

He left Akron in eighteen fifty-five and spent the next four years moving toward a confrontation he believed was inevitable. In October of eighteen fifty-nine, he led a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry in Virginia, hoping to seize weapons and spark a general uprising of enslaved people. He was captured within two days. A Virginia court tried and convicted him of treason. He was hanged on December second, eighteen fifty-nine.

His execution made him a martyr in the North. A year later, South Carolina began the secession that became the Civil War. The man who had lived quietly in Akron, hauling sheep through Ohio's back roads, had helped set off the defining crisis of the century.