When John Brown’s Body Is Wax

Admittedly, it was my own sense of morbid curiosity that propelled me through the front door, but the weird feeling that has lingered is what pushed me to write about it. A lot of ink has been spilled over the years about “John Brown’s Body,” but to my mind, not nearly enough had been said about this wax museum.

I ended up at the doors of this wax museum on a muggy, blue-skied summer afternoon in 2019. I had just come off a long and excellent tour of Harpers Ferry National Historical Park. I was energized by the discussion my husband and I took part in about monuments, commemoration, and the meaning of John Brown’s legacy. I had also huffed up a steep hill to see a breathtaking vista that Thomas Jefferson had once visited. Deeply impressed with the interpretive signage, preservation work, and museum spaces I had visited, the JBWM seemed like a logical way to end the day.

All photos by the author

Notably, the JBWM does not boast of its eccentricity from the outside. It fits well into its surroundings, set among cafes and shops selling historically accurate candies in a well-maintained historic center. A large, white sign offers an almost quaint greeting at an entrance punctuated by the creak of an oversized wooden door. But carefully covered glass windows give away nothing from the street. In the great tradition of American spectacles, if you want to see, you are going to have to pay.

After stepping over that threshold, a lone attendant in a very small lobby asks you to make a $14 financial investment. There is literally and figuratively almost no chance to turn around. I had already heard the basic outline of John Brown’s raid six different ways (before lunch). Still, I was curious what else there was to know. As it turns out, this cramped introductory space proved to be a preview of what was to come.

The museum is laid out in a style more befitting a labyrinth, though upon entering, visitors are unsure what they will find at the center. The museum’s designers made the most of the space they had; more than 80 wax figures fill the dioramas spread strategically across the museum’s three floors. From a design standpoint alone, the winding staircases and small rooms provide a disorienting experience.

The overall narrative focuses on the planning of the raid, what Brown and his conspirators did in Harpers Ferry, and the consequences they faced. There is little backstory about slavery or Brown’s life prior to the raid. The tableaus are tightly focused on telling what most would see as Harpers Ferry’s main drama, beginning with Brown’s secret meetings.

Once the action moves to Harpers Ferry itself, the dioramas do not shy away from depictions of violence, some more “graphic” (the museum’s term) than others. Visitors follow Brown and his raiders as they come into the town and mount their invasion. One diorama pays tribute to Heyward Shepherd, a free black man killed during the raid while acting as watchman. Others show the ferocity with which this relatively small band sought to overthrow a government arsenal, a feat so daring that Frederick Douglass politely, if firmly, declined involvement. At each turn, visitors can activate overhead narration with the push of a button to learn more about the black and white abolitionists who came with Brown. The remaining areas of the museum show Brown’s capture, imprisonment, and death by hanging. My husband and I were the only visitors inside.

All morning, I had been looking for a place to wrestle with what Brown had done. I had yet to find it in the perfectly manicured landscape of Harpers Ferry. Though it is a town with modern conveniences, the very careful restoration of shops, boardinghouses, and other historic structures (including the guard house, now called “John Brown’s fort”) all felt too neat for some reason. Walking around historically significant streets and seeing mounted artifacts in an air -conditioned museum building was not enough.

While there was more than enough messaging around the landscape to provoke me into seeking nuance and complexity, what still seemed to be missing for me was a sense of the gravity of Brown’s life, decisions, and actions. To be clear, I appreciated the professional, balanced, and thought-provoking tour I had been on. Yet in a place filled with Brown stories, I felt like he was still missing.

There is an element of chaos in Brown’s story that is perhaps best suited to a strange museum. Tony Horwitz’s excellent book, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War emphasizes Brown’s fanaticism without dismissing the importance of his radical ideas for social justice. This tension is part of what makes him fascinating. It can feel as easy to condemn him for his actions as to admire him for the strength of his convictions—and to do both at the same time.

We go to historic places not just to be “in the room where it happens” in a literal sense, but also to take time out of the present to be with history. On my pleasant summer’s day, Harpers Ferry seemed almost too tidy and institutionalized. The landscape of pristine restoration had a curious effect—it left me feeling disconnected from the messiness of Brown’s story. I’d felt this uncanniness before, seeing a runner blissfully pass through a Civil War battlefield.

Perhaps this is why I had entered the wax museum. The JBWM offers something off-the-beaten path even though it is right in the middle of the museum district. It is more evocative of a Madame Marie Tussaud exhibition from 200 years ago than anything presented in her name around the world today.² This was a space to think about Brown while confronting eerie figures. It all made me squirm, and the unconventionality was the point. Walking between dioramas, I saw a hastily framed sign with aggressively sized Word Art. The central word was “dysentery,” and the names surrounding it marked Brown family deaths. I can’t explain why, but this moved me in a way that a carefully rendered panel did not. The homemade-ness made me pause. I was glad that someone had cared enough to make it.

The museum concludes with a diorama showing Brown’s martyrdom. To be frank, it’s graphic and it’s upsetting. These to-scale figures were powerful reminders of the real people, flesh and blood, who had occupied this place and in Brown’s case, had died violently at the hands of an executioner. The scale of what these conspirators had tried to do hit me hard here. The tightness of the space forces a confrontation with a large-as-life Brown, not just a two-dimensional mural or a dramatic narration laid over a series of historical images.

I found myself appreciating the fact that this space felt marginal within Harpers Ferry. Sometimes it is easier to handle this history in a smaller group, and without facilitation. I say this as someone who does exactly this kind of facilitation work, and also as a person who was deeply moved by the site tour I had been part of that same day. Still, one wonders what Brown would think of the federal government interpreting his story today, or of the commerce of “selling” his raid.

Professionally researched, balanced, and evidence-based interpretation should form the bedrock of most public history sites. Without a doubt, the tour I was part of offered a deep and thoughtful interpretation of Brown. One might imagine that a wax museum could feel crass in this context, but it didn’t. There was an abiding earnestness to tell this story right. The dioramas were very successful at inciting confusion, horror, and dread. I started this piece by focusing on the strangeness of this trip, though maybe uncanny is the better word. When you really think about it, it is probably only right that something feels wrong while walking through a wax museum about an invasion and execution.

Like the Europeans of centuries past who wanted to come face to (wax) face with revolutionaries and royals in Madame Marie Tussaud’s London showroom, I suppose that I too wanted to see a different representation of an American radical. The JBWM offers a simple explanation for why you might want to visit—it is among “the most economically priced wax museums!” This is objectively true, but not why I think you should visit.

“John Brown Song” Library of Congress, Rare Books and Special Collections Division, America Singing: Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets

John Brown’s body is still “moldering in the grave” while some Confederate monuments are showered with protective details. If we accept that there was anything righteous about “his truth,” we must also confront the fact that very few memorials to white supremacy have been disturbed. Brown’s legacy is still charged because the questions raised by his life and death are not resolved. Hallowed grounds and museums about one of the bloodiest conflicts in United States history should have more space for the uncanny, for figures that make us uncomfortable.