Alva Review-Courier -

Henry Brown was born a slave on a tobacco plantation in Virginia in 1815.When he was a teenager, Henry’s owner loaned him out to the operator of a tobacco processing factory in Richmond.

Eventually, Henry married a woman who was also a slave and they had three children. She was pregnant with the couple’s fourth child in 1848 when they received some devastating news.

Her owner – who was not Henry’s owner – decided to sell her and their children to a planter in North Carolina. This was despite the fact that Henry had been earning money and paying his wife’s owner to keep their family together.

The following year, Henry Brown, obviously despondent over the loss of his wife and children, plotted to escape. Freedom was, of course, something that many slaves eventually made an effort to attain. More often than not, however, their attempts were unsuccessful.

Brown decided not to try the usual method of escaping, which entailed obtaining help from free blacks and sympathetic Caucasians who operated a series of safe houses called the Underground Railroad.

Instead, Brown, with the help of two local abolitionists, devised a novel approach for escaping bondage. He would hide inside a wooden crate and ship himself to the North!

The conspirators decided upon Philadelphia as Brown’s destination. Abolitionists in that free northern city were notified to expect their unique cargo to be delivered to their office by a local freight company.

The crate they built was 2 feet and eight inches x 3 feet x 2 feet. They wrote “dry goods” on it and also drew an arrow with the words “this side up” to insure that Brown would not be upside down while being shipped.

On the day the plan was to be executed, Brown purposely burned one of his hands with acid so he could get the day off from work, supposedly to go to the doctor.

Instead, he went to the freight office – as we will see next week in part 2 of this (hopefully) interesting story.