The Conspiracy House, John Brown in Chambersburg

In the summer of eighteen fifty-nine, an older man calling himself Dr. Isaac Smith, an iron mine developer, took a room at Mary Ritner's boarding house in Chambersburg. He was John Brown, the abolitionist who had already bled Kansas with guerrilla warfare.

For months he used the boarding house as his staging ground, receiving crates of rifles, revolvers, and nearly a thousand custom-forged pikes, planning an armed uprising at the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Just outside of town, Frederick Douglass met him in secret and tried to talk him out of it, predicting it was a trap. Brown pressed ahead.

In October, the raid failed, and Brown was captured, tried, and hanged. The boarding house stands today as a designated site in the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.