The NYT and Oswald Garrison Villard Came to Torrington in 1937 to See Covey’s Murals

A forgotten newspaper dispatch reminds us that three remarkable murals hang in our post office, and that our most famous native son was right

On December 2nd, 1937, reporters from the New York Times made the trip up to Torrington, Connecticut, to cover the unveiling of three murals at the local post office. The murals, painted by artist Arthur S. Covey and commissioned by the federal government, depicted scenes from the life of John Brown, Torrington's most famous son. The Times ran the story. And then, like so many things, it got filed away and mostly forgotten.

That dispatch is a primary source of Torrington history: a contemporaneous account of a civic ceremony in our town, preserved in the newspaper of record, now digitized and searchable. It tells us who attended (civic leaders, clergy, the local postmaster), who spoke (abolitionist biographer Oswald Garrison Villard), and who did the unveiling (a Mrs. Stuart Cleveland and a Mrs. Buonocore). History, in other words, with names attached.

"Litchfield County, Connecticut, had contributed two leaders to the abolitionist movement — John Brown and Harriet Beecher Stowe."
— John N. Wadhams, president of the John Brown Association, 1930

Litchfield county was a hotbed of abolitionism

Two of the three murals depict Torrington directly: one shows Brown's birthplace, with Brown as a young boy alongside his mother; the other captures him in a schoolhouse, according to the Times, making "his first public denunciation of slavery." The actual facts don’t align with the Times’ declaration.

The third and largest mural shows Brown leading a group of a dozen freedom seekers to Canada from Missouri in winter. A child was born on the trip, so they left with twelve and arrived with thirteen. Incidentally, word has it that Brown and the mother of the newborn, Jane Harper, had regular arguments about who was the better cook, and how best to prepare supper. Also, of note, but not clearly indicated in the painting, Brown armed Mrs. Harper with a revolver (a “pepperbox,” as she called it), because he believed that all people have an equal claim to freedom and an equal responsibility to back up one another. The image DOES show Black men with weapons—absolutely unheard of in the time—but hot the revolver under Jane’s apron.

All three paintings are still there (along with a smaller fourth painting), in the Torrington post office—waiting for you to go look at them. They are legitimately wonderful. If you have not stood in front of them recently, you should fix that. Two are in the main room and the other two are in the room where the PO boxes live.

Fun fact from the article: it notes that The Rev. H. Francis Hines, rector of Trinity Church, opened the exercises with the invocation. The Trinity Episcopal church is still to this day a strong partner of John Brown’s legacy, and the John Brown Project.

The article also makes a point worth pausing on. John N. Wadhams, president of the John Brown Association and presiding officer at the 1937 ceremony, reminded the audience that Litchfield County produced not one but two giants of the abolitionist movement: Brown, born in Torrington, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, born in Litchfield. Two towns. Two world-historic figures. One small county in northwestern Connecticut. That is not a trivial thing to carry around in your civic identity, it is worth wearing on your sleeve.

And then there is the matter of John Brown's legacy itself. History has vindicated him on the central question of his life: slavery was wrong, it had to end, and the people who fought to perpetuate and expand it were on the wrong side. John Brown was right.

People like Villard obfuscated Brown’s legacy

However, for complicated reasons, America paints Brown as being on the wrong side of the violence question. It is really a conspiracy of non-like-minded people. Southern racists, Lincoln enthusiasts, and northern pacifists among them. For example, the speaker at the 1937 ceremony, Oswald Garrison Villard, urged Americans to rededicate themselves to Brown's ideals while cautioning against the violence of his methods. A friend of mine, Shawndel Fraser, recently remearked “When in history have enslaved and oppressed people ever gained their freedom except through violence?” Maybe it was easy for a wealthy white man to cast about such advice about the equality of others.

Villard was the grandson of William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist leader who became eclipsed by Brown. A pacifist, he believed that brutal Southern enslavers could be persuaded to stop being brutal enslavers—through a process of moral persuasion, or “moralsuasion,” as they called it. I’m sorry, I like making up words as much as the next guy, but moralsuasion is idiotic both as a word and as a concept.

If someone is hitting your mom with a bat, you can try to persuade them to stop because it is the wrong thing to do, but you’re going to fail, and your mom is going to get hurt. You need to either place yourself between your mom and the bat, as John Lewis did, or you need to pick up a bat, and whack the guy who is hitting your mom, like John Brown did.

Our resident scholar, Dr. Louis DeCaro Jr. calls this kind of hand-wringing an example of “straining gnats while swallowing camels whole.” People completely ignore that slavery is terrorism; it requires violence to enforce. They ignore that it is a system built on rape, exploitation, and brutality, instead becoming vexed at the fact that self defense is usually as ugly as the attack.

John Brown understood that those who enforced this terrorism would never negotiate in good faith. Read more about the so-called “Caning of Charles Sumner” for more insight into their thinking.

Next time you're mailing a package or buying stamps at the Torrington post office, look up. Two panels of painted American history are right there on the walls, and if you go past the foyer and into the mailbox room you’ll see the third—installed by the federal government in 1937, documented by the New York Times, and rooted in the story of a kid from Torrington who changed the world.

Primary Source "Three John Brown Murals Unveiled At Torrington, Conn., Post Office — Oswald Garrison Villard Speaks At Ceremony" —The New York Times, December 3, 1937.