“John Brown’s Family In Red Bluff, California 1864-1870”

In 1833, John Brown married Mary Ann Day, just seventeen. In the first two decades of their marriage, writes Wilbert Phay, “she bore him thirteen children…. Of these, seven died in early childhood. Four of the children were taken by disease of some nature in one year. Two of her children, Oliver and Watson, were killed during the Harper’s Ferry episode.” 

Brown, drawn by the abolitionist movement, was increasingly absent from their North Elba home near Lake Placid. His “attempted seizure of the United States Armory at Harper’s Ferry failed.” Found guilty of “treason, murder, and conspiracy” he was hanged December 2, 1859.

The family’s story is told in a 1969 Chico State master’s thesis by Wilbert L. Phay, who passed away in 2020, but not before giving permission to Chico-based ANCHR (Association for Northern California Historical Research) to republish his work and include historical photographs and additional essays from ANCHR members.

“John Brown’s Family In Red Bluff, California 1864-1870” ($19.95 in paperback from anchr.org and local book outlets) includes contributions from Josie Reifschneider-Smith, Ron Womack and Nancy Leek. 

In late 1864 Mary Brown “and her four surviving children arrived in Red Bluff” after an earlier encounter with a “rebel” wagon train on the Oregon Trail. But why Red Bluff, with its “Copperheads,” “its nucleus of pro-Southern sympathizers, the most ardent haters of her dead husband,” Phay writes, “and by association, herself, and her family”?

The book answers that question, and more. Others in Red Bluff built a small house for the family in 1865, so family life was complicated, made more so by the attacks of the Red Bluff Sentinel and defense by the Red Bluff Independent. Phay and the contributors create a compulsively readable narrative that makes the past live again. It’s essential reading.

The story continues to unfold. Reifschneider-Smith, ANCHR Publications Manager, has unearthed details about why the “rebel” wagon train was so hateful of Brown and his kin, some of whom are buried in the Paradise Cemetery; she will present her findings to the Paradise Genealogical Society, 1499 Wagstaff Road (530-762-7105) on Thursday, February 15, at 3:00 p.m.; the presentation is open to the public.