Springfield 1636-1886, History of Town and City, by Mason A. Green ...

50() SPRINGFIELD, 1636-18S6.
»growers of Ohio and the West. Perkins & Brown rented the npper
part of John L. King's warehouse, near the depot, and worl^ed with
his men daily, in sorting wool. He had changed to Chester W.
Chapin's new block, south of the railroad office, in 1848. The firm,
which owned fine flocks of sheep in Ohio, had been sent to Springfield
to represent the Western wool-growers in New England, where their
wool was to be graded. It worked well the first year, but failing-
markets, a want of proper cooperation in the West, and not over
commercial methods of business on the part of Brown himself, con-
tributed to financial disaster. He did over $50,000 worth of business,
however. Among John Brown's visitors at this time was Frederick
Douglass, who was surprised to find him living in a small wooden
house on a back street, furnished in a way to •' almost suggest des-
titution." In an attempt to save his fortunes Brown sent the whole
output of wool to Europe in 1850. He refused local offers of sixty
cents per pound, and away it went over the waters. A few months
later Mr. Brown stood in a Springfield freight-house and saw the self-
same wool, which had come back from Loudon, sell for fifty-two cents !
John Brown was in the Adirondack wilderness in 1851. It was
while visiting Springfield that year that he organized the "Spring-
field Gileadites," a "branch of the United States league of Gilead-
ites," an order among colored people to resist the capture of
fugitives. No less than forty- four negroes joined this league. B. C.
Dowling headed the list, and in the list was J. N. Howard, the
honored sexton of the South Church. His stories of slave-life were
of the " Uncle Tom's Cabin order," and when he was gathered to his
fathers a link connecting us with the slave-masters' era was broken.
Curiously enough Reuben A. Chapman, who was not a freesoiler
in those days, was Mr. Brown's attorney, and Chapman was always
enthusiastic in his tributes to Brown's integrity and sense of justice.
Mr. Chapman's character is well illustrated by a remark of his some
time after Congress had passed the fugitive slave law, which imposed
upon judges and the United States commissioners the dut}' of issuing
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