May 09, 2025 —
A North Country organization is hosting its annual birthday celebration for John Brown on Saturday. The famous abolitionist spent the later years of his life in the Adirondacks. He was executed in 1859 in Virginia, but his body was buried at his Adirondack home, now the John Brown Farm State Historic Site just outside the village of Lake Placid.
Ceremonies for John Brown Day 2025 kick off at 2 p.m. Full event details can be found on the John Brown Lives! website.
David Escobar went to the farm to talk with Martha Swan, executive director of John Brown Lives!, the group behind the event. They spoke about Brown’s legacy in the region and what to expect at this year’s installment of John Brown Day.
Their conversation has been edited for space and clarity.
MARTHA SWAN: John Brown, first of all, was a white man, and a lot of people are surprised to learn that a white man sacrificed his life, dedicated his entire adult life, to end slavery and for the lives and dignity and full humanity of Black people. Over the course of his life, he became involved with the Black community in different parts of the US and Canada. He was very active on the Underground Railroad. And as the country was not loosening its grip on slavery or loosening its commitment to the expansion of slavery, John Brown became more and more convinced that more dramatic action than moral suasion or Underground Railroad activity was needed. So he joined the fight out in Kansas to help ensure or to help guarantee that Kansas would be admitted as a free state where slavery was not allowed into the Union. And then he went on to Harpers Ferry with the goal of seizing weapons and inspiring people who were enslaved to flee into the Appalachian Mountains and set up, I guess you would call them guerrilla encampments. And when this 1846 “scheme of justice and benevolence,” as it was called, the distribution of 120,000 acres of mostly Essex County land to free Black New Yorkers to try to circumvent a discriminatory property voting rights law of the few dozen families, Black families moved here from Troy or New York City and settled here. John Brown got wind of this, and he talked to Garrett Smith, who is the one who donated all this land, and said, “I want to move up there and be a friend and a neighbor and a support to this community.” And he lived in a multi-racial community, and that was something that was very important to him.
DAVID ESCOBAR: So we’re here at John Brown’s farm in Lake Placid, and I know there’s been a tradition stretching back several, many years of people coming up here to honor John Brown, which will be happening on Saturday. Can you talk a little bit about how that tradition started and how it translates into today?
SWAN: So in 1922, Black leaders from the Philadelphia chapter of the NAACP concluded that here was this white man who laid down his life for Black people. And this was the height of the Jim Crow era, and lynchings and horrific discrimination and segregation in that moment. Still, they had this vision that this is a man who needs to be recognized, who needs to be acknowledged and needs to be honored. So they began in 1922, this tradition of making an annual pilgrimage on or around his birthday, which is May 9, of coming to the grave site here where we are, and laying a wreath on his grave. And best we can tell, that continued for decades. And then in 1999, the late novelist Russell Banks and some other people revived the tradition. They said we need to revive this annual rededication to the values that John Brown stood for.
ESCOBAR: Who are some of the people that will be honored tomorrow? And is there anything exceptional about this year’s event?
SWAN: I think what’s exceptional and atypical are the times we’re living in. The individuals that we are honoring are extraordinary. What makes Saturday and presenting Diane Noiseax, Kelly Metzgar and Peggy Shepard with the Spirit of John Brown Freedom Award is the timeliness of their work. They’ve been in the trenches doing work on behalf of immigrants and new Americans, on behalf of the LGBTQIA+ community and on behalf of people experiencing the brunt of environmental racism. And the communities they work with and are dedicated to are in the line of fire. And so to be able to honor them and thank them and draw inspiration from them.
