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| Frontier Housing No Walk In The Park |
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| Opinion | |||
| Written by Grady Atwater | |||
| Wednesday, 21 October 2009 08:00 | |||
Osawatomie’s founders lived in rustic housing and endured rough times to work to found the town. John Everett reported on the condition of their cabin in a July 27, 1855 letter, stating the Everetts were adjusting to life in Osawatomie well.  He cheerfully wrote that “we now fell tolerably comfortable (I more than Sarah) and happy (both I think) although we are 1¼ miles from a neighbor and live in a cabin with a carpet for a door, mowed grass for floor, a leaky roof and no windows at all. But then there are plenty of cracks where the light comes in.” Everett’s wife, Sarah, viewed the Everett’s situation through the lens of her deep, Christian faith. She wrote her sister Cynthia on Sept. 1, 1855: “Our cabin is still in a dilapidated condition — our sickness preventing us from fixing it up. The rain and sunshine of heaven can both alike visit us, but we murmur not at either — why should we murmur at anything that comes from Heaven. The worms are working in the logs at the side & overhead so that we have a continual dust dropping in every part of the cabin. Sometimes it gets an inch thick on things that are not moved for two or three days, etc.” John Brown’s families, who had emigrated to the Osawatomie area before Brown, were living in more primitive conditions in 1855. Jason Brown, one of Brown’s sons, wrote back east to John Brown and the rest of his family: “We are all living together in tents, and in the wagon, and have no house yet.” When John Brown came to Kansas in October of 1855, he found, that his son’s were still living in tents. John Brown wrote to his wife, Mary Day Brown, and his children who had stayed in New York state that “we found our folks in a most uncomfortable situation with no houses to shelter one of them; no hay or corn fodder of any account secured shivering over their little fires all exposed to the dreadfully cutting Winds Morning Evening & stormy days.” Therefore, John Brown spent his first days in Kansas working to build shelter for his children he wrote in the same letter, “we have been trying to help them in all our power and hope to get them more comfortable soon.” John Brown reported to Mary and his family in New York on Nov. 2, 1855 that the Browns’ housing situation had improved somewhat, but was still primitive. Brown wrote: “We have got shanty three logs high, chinked & mudded & roofed with our tent & a chimney so far advanced that we can keep a fire in it for Jason.” John Brown further wrote of his son, John Brown Jr.’s dwelling that “John has his shanty a little better fixed than it was, but miserable enough now.” John Brown aptly described the primitive housing that the town’s founders endured when he wrote to his family: “I do not send you this account to render you unhappy, but merely to let you know that those here are not altogether in Paradise.” — Grady Atwater is administrator of the John Brown State Historic Site.
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