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Brown Relation Speaks At Cabin PDF Print E-mail
News - Osawatomie
Written by Kevin Gray   
Wednesday, 24 June 2009 07:00
Sporadic heavy rain chased some John Brown Jamboree attendees under the green canopies of shade trees Saturday morning in John Brown Memorial Park. But at the Adair Cabin, Grady Atwater continued to give tours and tell the story of John Brown.

“While John Brown’s forces at the Battle of Osawatomie lined up at the base of the hill right over there, the pro-slavery forces lined the top of the hill. ... And Florella Adair, who stayed in the cabin, opened the door to see a cannon facing her,” said Atwater, museum curator at the John Brown Museum State Historic Site.

“John Brown did spark the Civil War from this place and help change history,” he said.
Mary Buster, Florella Brown Adair’s great-great-granddaughter, also spoke passionately about her family.

“Samuel Adair did not consider Florella his equal, intellectually. But after they came out from Ohio to Osawatomie, and she then had to go back to Ohio to settle her father’s estate and then on to New York to raise funds for the abolitionist cause, he realized how important she was to him in Osawatomie,” said Buster, a sixth-grade teacher in Emporia, Kan.

Buster told a story about Florella having attended Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio.

“It was the only college in those days to allow women and blacks to attend. Women and men attended classes together all morning. This wasn’t a problem,” she said. “But the men felt attending classes, the intellectual rigor would be too much for women in the afternoon. So the women were allowed to clean the men’s sitting area instead of attending classes.”

Mary (Ward) Buster grew up on a farm outside of Osawatomie, but in the Parker school district. She graduated from Parker High School in 1965.

Residents who missed her presentation will have another opportunity to meet her ­— she plans to be back in Osawatomie for Freedom Fest in September.

— Staff writer Doug Carder contributed to this report.
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