Almost 147 years ago, abolitionist John Brown sold his horse to Tom Lindsley’s great-grandfather, A. K. Lindsley.

The elder Lindsley kept the bill of sale.

Brown, after all, was an up-and-coming celebrity.

After three generations, the hand-written receipt ended up framed and sitting on a shelf in Tom Lindsley’s home in Bainbridge Island, Wash.

“My father talked about giving it to the (Kansas) State Historical Society, but we – my brother, my sister and I – always talked him out of it,” Tom Lindsley said.

But now that the three Lindsleys are in their 60s, and none of their children have shown much interest in holding on to the heirloom, the siblings decided it belonged at the historical society after all.

“Actually, we tried to give it to them about 20 years ago, but they weren’t interested,” Tom Lindsley said. “Since then, they’ve started a John Brown collection and they’re very interested.”

An 1859 bill of sale from John Brown to A. K. Lindsley of Cleveland, states that the horse being sold to Lindsley was

Tom Lindsley’s grandfather, Herbert K. Lindsley, served as historical society president in 1934.

The historical society announced the Lindsleys’ gift last week.

“The family did a really nice thing,” said Matt Veatch, state archivist.

Plans call for transcribing the document and posting its contents on the historical society’s Web site, www.territorialkansas.org. It will not be put on display anytime soon.

“There’s been talk about putting together an exhibit of the John Brown letters that are in the collection. This could be part of that,” Veatch said. “Until then, it will be kept in the most secure part of our most secure storage area.”

In its collection, the historical society has 46 letters written by John Brown.

Veatch said the bill of sale – dated March 24, 1859, in Cleveland, Ohio – helped pinpoint Brown’s whereabouts in the months before his ill-conceived and ill-fated raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Va.

“John Brown left Kansas in January of 1859, heading east,” Veatch said, noting that tracing the abolitionist’s movements has been “tricky” because Brown often used aliases.

An 1859 bill of sale from John Brown to A. K. Lindsley of Cleveland, Ohio, helped pinpoint Brown's whereabouts in the months before his ill-conceived and ill-fated raid on the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Va. The document was recently donated to the Kansas State Historical Society.

“And at the time, the president had put a $250 bounty on him,” he said. “So he hid out a lot.”

Brown didn’t bother hiding in Cleveland, Veatch said, because the city was considered an abolitionist stronghold and, at the time, was in an uproar over the pending trials of several men, black and white, who had freed several fugitive slaves.

The horse sale is mentioned on page 289 of the latest Brown biography, “John Brown: Abolitionist” by David S. Reynolds: “A few days after (Brown’s) speech (in Cleveland) he auctioned off the horses he had stolen in Kansas. To a purchaser who asked about title, he said the horses were to him as slaves were to a Vermont judge who insisted he would not view a slave as property until the owner produced ‘a bill of sale from the Almighty.’ Besides, he chuckled, these were good ‘abolitionist’ horses now; he had converted them.”

The horses sold for $250. The bill of sale indicates A. K. Lindsley bought only one horse, a stallion described as Brown’s riding horse. It doesn’t say how much he paid.

It’s not known whether A. K. Lindsley was active in the abolitionist cause.

“There’s nothing in the family lore that says or implies that he was,” Tom Lindsley said.

A.K. Lindsley moved to Sterling, Kan., in 1878.

Following the bill’s trail

According to the receipt, the horse “was taken near Fort Scott in Kansas about the middle of Nov. 1858 during the border troubles of the last Fall & Winter,” and was Brown’s riding horse throughout his “entire movements in Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, & Iowa.”

Karl Gridley, a Lawrence historian who’s considered an authority on Brown, said it was likely the horse was the one Brown rode through Lawrence in late January 1859, escorting 11 slaves freed during a raid in Vernon County, Mo., which is across the border from Fort Scott.

Using the Underground Railroad, Brown accompanied the slaves to Canada.

Gridley said the fact Brown admitted the horse was stolen from Missouri underscored his contempt for slavery.

“He always felt any property that was taken during a slave raid rightly belonged to the slaves themselves since they had never been paid a dime for their hard labor,” Gridley said. “He thought it was ‘proper payment’ on the part of their masters for their slaves’ passage to freedom.”

The Lindsleys donated the bill of sale to the library.

“We didn’t pay for it,” Tom Lindsley said. “So we didn’t think it was right to get paid for it.”

That’s as unusual as it is refreshing, Veatch said.

“We were recently offered a letter that Glenn Cunningham wrote during the 1936 Olympics – it’s on Olympic Village stationery and it shed light on the events going on around him,” he said. “It would have been a nice addition, but the owner wanted $4,500. That’s understandable, certainly, but we don’t have that kind of money.

“And with eBay, more and more of these kinds of documents are ending up in the hands of private collectors.”

Cunningham, an Elkhart native, was the world’s fastest miler from 1934 to 1936.