Mayhew Cabin, 1855

Before Harpers Ferry, Kagi had already fought, written and been shot for the free-state cause. In 1856 he served under James H. Lane in Kansas, joined the August 16 attack on Fort Titus, and was jailed at Lecompton and Tecumseh. On January 31, 1857, he was wounded in a gunfight with the pro-slavery judge Rush Elmore, and a memorandum book in his pocket stopped a bullet. He wrote for the National Era, signing himself K, and for the New York Tribune. At Chatham, Ontario, on May 8, 1858, Brown's convention named him secretary of war.

What the plaque says

Mayhew Cabin, 1855 This cabin, one of Nebraska's oldest structures, was built in the summer of 1855 as the home of Allen B. Mayhew, his wife, Barbara Ann (Kagy) Mayhew, and their sons, Edward and Henry. John Henry Kagi, Barbara Mayhew's brother, lived briefly with the Mayhews before joining abolitionist John Brown in Kansas. In February 1859 Kagi helped Brown lead eleven Missouri slaves to freedom in Iowa via Nebraska City. During the trek Kagi narrowly avoided arrest while at the cabin. He was killed in October 1859 during Brown's raid on the Harpers Ferry, Virginia, arsenal to seize weapons for a slave uprising. Beginning in the 1870s, stories and recollections about this turbulent era credited the cabin as an Underground Railroad station. Edward Mayhew re- called Kagi once bringing fourteen black persons (possibly escaping slaves) to the cabin for breakfast. When the cabin was moved several feet in the 1930s due to highway construction, a "cave," allegedly used to hide freedom-seeking slaves, was recreated nearby. Legends connecting John Brown to the Mayhew cabin made it a popular tourist attraction devoted to the antislavery cause. Nelson Family Foundation Nebraska State Historical Society 2009

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Arbor Lodge State Historical Park — 0.8 mi
  J. Sterling Morton's estate in Nebraska City, a four-room house of 1855 grown to 52 rooms among the trees he planted, home of the man who proposed Arbor Day in 1872.
• Brownville — 22 mi
  A Missouri River town of 1854 that bet on a railroad and lost, kept its arts through the decline, and now has Nebraska's oldest repertory theatre and a 1932 steam dredge on the bank.
• Strategic Air Command & Aerospace Museum — 33 mi
  Two hangar-sized halls beside I-80 near Ashland holding the bombers and reconnaissance planes of the command that ran America's nuclear force from Offutt, south of Omaha, from 1948 to 1992.

More markers nearby

• Nebraska City — steps away
• The Kregel Windmill Factory — 0.4 mi
• Russell, Majors, & Waddell House — 0.6 mi
• The First United Methodist Church of Nebraska City — 0.6 mi