Watson Brown (abolitionist)
Watson Brown (October 7, 1835 – October 19, 1859) was a son of the abolitionist John Brown and his second wife Mary Day, born in Franklin Mills, Ohio (today Kent, Ohio). He was married to Isabell "Belle" Thompson Brown, and they had a son Frederick W., who died of diphtheria at age 4, and is buried in North Elba. His death at Harpers Ferry. In the 1850s, he moved to Kansas with his brothers, part of his father's efforts to prevent Kansas from becoming a slave state. He participated in his father's famous raid on Harpers  Ferry, Virginia (since 1863, West Virginia), where he was killed. The circumstances were that he emerged from the engine house at 10 AM on Monday the 17th, carrying a white flag, but was immediately shot, not by a soldier but by a townsperson. At 3 PM he was still able to fight. Lying on the ground and with no medical treatment, he lived on in great agony, his father preventing him from killing himself to end the pain, until about 3 AM on Wednesday the 19th, according to Edwin Coppock. According to his father, "our poor Watson lingered until Wednesday  about noon of the 19th of October." The following was written by Watson and found on the floor of the engine house: His body at Winchester Medical College. His body, one of the many victims lying in the road in Harpers Ferry, was taken by students and faculty of the Winchester Medical College, in Winchester, Virginia. However, instead of using it for dissection and anatomy study, which was the fate of the other three bodies they also helped themselves to, it was prepared as a medical specimen or exhibit. Using techniques that were innovative at the time, a doctor at  the College, presumably its head and anatomy professor Hugh Holmes McGuire, stained the arteries, drained of blood, with red dye, treated the muscles so they resembled wood, and preserved the nerves with varnish. The skin, half of the skull, and the brain were removed. It became a teaching exhibit in the College's one-room museum. This took place almost immediately after his death (there was no refrigeration). An anti-abolitionist exhibit. From papers found in a pocket they found that he was a son of John Brown, but they never learned which one. Nevertheless, the body was used as  a means of showing the pro-slavery, secessionist city and College's attitude toward abolitionists. The exhibit was labelled "John Brown's son—thus always with Abolitionists". The lips were "purposely distorted in disrespect." The skin was used to make moccasins. Small pieces of the skin were held by doctors and others locally as souvenirs. Four of the finger joints on one hand and all the toes on one foot had also been taken by souvenir hunters. Teeth had been deliberately broken. In retaliation for this insult to the great Union icon and to their cause, Union forces burned the  College just before leaving Winchester. It never reopened. Rescue of the body by Dr. Jarvis Johnson. At the outbreak of the Civil War the College closed, as both students and professors were occupied in the war effort. (Dr. Hunter McGuire, Hugh's son and also a professor, was the personal physician of Stonewall Jackson.) The College was used as a hospital, although it was evacuated when Confederate troops withdrew in advance of the Union troops. When Union troops under Gen. Nathaniel Banks entered Winchester in March 1862, Banks turned over management of the hospitals in the city to an Army  doctor from Indiana, Jarvis J. Johnson. Johnson found the exhibited body, which he called "one of the most beautiful specimens he ever saw". "A number of prominent citizens of Winchester called upon me at the hospital, and each and all declared that it was the remains of a son of John Brown." What to do with the body, how to rescue it from this dishonor, was a problem for Dr. Johnson. If it had been buried in Virginia, which Virginians did not want, it would have been dug up immediately by the doctor or his agent. In theory the body  could have been sent to Watson's mother at her home in North Elba, New York, but he said he felt this would just add to her many sorrows. So he shipped it to his home in Indiana, and kept it there. Identification and burial of Watson's body. As reports on the Harpers Ferry raid began to appear, it was determined that this body had to be either Oliver or Watson Brown, John's two sons killed during the raid. But no one knew which. Twenty-three years later, in 1882, Johnson read in a newspaper that Brown's  widow was visiting Chicago. Through an intermediary he wrote her, saying that he had the body of one of her sons and that he wanted to turn it over to her for burial. He emphasized that he was not selling the body and would not accept any reward or other compensation. This added to his credibility. At Mrs. Brown's request, their son John Jr. traveled, with pictures, to the doctor's home in Martinsville, Indiana, and was the guest of the governor of Indiana for dinner. He continued to Martinville accompanied by Indiana State Geologist John Collett, "a recognized  authority on ethnological subjects" and an expert in phrenology. (John Jr. traveled for a time as a lecturer on phrenology; this may be how they knew each other.) From the pictures and the bullet hole, they both concluded the body was Watson and not Oliver. Mrs. Brown took Watson's body to their former home and her husband's tomb in North Elba, New York, the John Brown Farm, where a funeral was held. Owen and John Jr. were present, as was Franklin Sanborn. She buried him next to his father's grave in October 1882, 23 years after his  death. The body of Oliver Brown. The body of Oliver Brown, and those of 7 others who also died during the raid itself, were thrown in packing crates and buried in a pit in an obscure place (so it would be forgotten), without ceremony, clergy, or marker. They were briefly dug up at Governor Wise's request to permit Mary Brown to recover her sons' decaying bodies, but she did not feel up to it, so they were reburied. Forty years later, in 1899, a scholar studying Brown located one of the two Black men who had been paid $ 5 each to bury the crates, and he led him to the spot; it was confirmed by "the memory of a number of older citizens who witnessed the burial". While the identities of those buried there were known, the remains could not be clearly distinguished. To avoid complications the bodies were surreptitiously spirited out of Virginia; the remains were put in an ordinary trunk, which was carried as luggage on a train. They were all reburied in a single handsome casket, donated by the town of North Elba, next to the graves of John and Watson Brown. Watson Brown (abolitionist