Abel Brown: Forgotten Hero of the Underground Railroad

My rediscovery of a tragic hero of the Underground Railroad.

Abel Brown’s grave in Canandaigua, N. Y.

I’ve been researching the Underground Railroad for more than 30 years. Probably my most important discovery, at least to those who are hardcore Underground Railroad researchers like me was my accidental rediscovery of Rev. Abel Brown.

You could say I discovered him like Columbus discovered America — there had been many voyages from Europe to America long before he made his “discovery.” It’s also possible another historian had “rediscovered” him about the same time, Stanley Harrold, whose work I highly esteem.

What makes it memorable for me is that I wasn’t looking for him.

In fact, Abel Brown was a well-known radical abolitionist during his time who not only contributed letters and articles to The Liberator and other abolitionist publications but published his own newspaper, the Tocsin of Liberty, later the Albany Patriot, in association with another radical abolitionist of his time, Charles T. Torrey.

How I Rediscovered Abel Brown

I learned of him in the Patriot, also largely forgotten and which the New York State Library found after a two-month search in a misplaced box in their storage warehouse. It was a two-year roll of a weekly tabloid browning with the years…