"CLOUDSPLITTER": HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY AND GEOLOGY OF JOHN BROWN'S WAR AGAINST SLAVERY

On his soulful march to infamy and immortality, American abolitionist John Brown (1800-1859) had a remarkable knack for marking time at places of significant geographic and geologic interest. Brown’s life-long war against slavery touched many places, from New England west to Kansas and south to West Virginia. Most significant from a geographic and geologic standpoint were his sojourns in New Richmond, PA, North Elba, NY, eastern Kansas, Chambersburg, PA, and Harpers Ferry WV (then in VA).

Born in Torrington, CT and raised in Hudson, OH, he moved to New Richmond in Crawford Co., PA, in 1826. Living there until 1835, he built a tannery of Devonian Berea sandstone quarried just to the east. The stone first floor of the tannery is still extant.

In 1849, Brown moved to North Elba in the Adirondack Mountains to aide a struggling farming colony of black freedmen. From a huge Proterozoic quartz monzonite erratic in front of his farmhouse Brown contemplated the majestic mountains he grew to love, particularly anorthositic Mount Marcy (“Cloudsplitter”) to the south and Whiteface Mountain to the north.

After passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, Brown went to Kansas in 1855 to battle pro-slavery forces. Violent encounters involving Brown took place at Pottawatomie, Black Jack, and Osawatomie—all located on the Osage Plains, a region of rolling prairie underlain by Pennsylvanian limestones and shales of the Kansas City and overlying Lansing Groups.

In August 1859 Brown met with Frederick Douglass in an Ordovician Chambersburg Limestone quarry in the Great Valley at Chambersburg. He made an unsuccessful attempt to convince Douglass to join in a raid on the Federal Arsenal at Harpers Ferry that would foment and arm a slave rebellion. On the night of 16 October Brown and 18 men set out from a farm in Maryland and marched to Harpers Ferry. Their fate awaited them at the junction of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers in a Blue-Ridge cul-de-sac framed by precipitous “heights” of conglomerate, quartzite, and phyllite of the Cambrian Chilhowee Group. On the 18th Brown and his surviving men were captured, then taken to nearby Charles Town, where they were tried for treason, slave insurrection, and murder. Brown was executed on 2 December 1859, his body transported to North Elba where he is buried near the glacial boulder on which his name is engraved.