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@mattmcgorry : Repost from @moustachemannyc - “This week I hiked through the foothills of Altadena, CA with @mattmcgorry in search of Owen Brown’s gravesite. Owen was instrumental in his father John Brown’s abolitionist activities. He killed one of the pro-slavery thugs in the so-called “Pottawatomie Massacre,” fought in the Bleeding Kansas wars to secure Kansas as a free state, and followed his father and brothers to Harper’s Ferry, where he gathered intelligence on slaveholders in the area. He was the only Brown to make it out of Harper’s Ferry alive, leading four other raiders through the woods in an escape that lasted weeks. He went on to serve as an officer in the Union Army during the Civil War and moved to California with his sister Ruth and brother Jason. He spent his last years living in the hills of Altadena in a log cabin with Jason (standing on the right in the last photo, next to Owen). When he died in 1889, a crowd of 2,000 people (nearly the entire population of Pasadena) marched from his funeral up to the gravesite. Ten years later a stone marker was placed on the site, reading “Owen Brown, Son of John Brown, The Liberator. Died Jan. 9, 1889. Aged 64 Y’rs.” Over the next hundred years, admirers of #OwenBrown and his father would hike up to his grave and pay their respects. Opponents made their way up there as well. The marker was thrown down the hill so many times and dragged back up by supporters that a stone base was eventually added to it. In 2004 it was removed again and remained missing until it was found in 2012 by the artist Ian White. Ian’s father, by the way, is the legendary artist Charles White, who has a retrospective at the MoMA now. Apparently #CharlesWhite depicted only two white men in his artwork over the course of his career. #JohnBrown was one of them. Today Owen Brown’s stone marker is hidden in a secure location until the community can figure out how best to protect it. A hollow replica was installed by residents last year in a small park in t