At the south edge of Nebraska City, a log cabin of hand-hewn cottonwood stands beside a small cave, and from 1938 to 2002 the pair was sold to tourists as John Brown's Cave, where people escaping slavery were said to have hidden. The cave was built in 1937. The real history of the cabin is stranger and better, and it does not need one.
Allen Mayhew and his wife, Barbara, built the cabin in the summer of 1855, the year after Nebraska Territory opened, and it is one of the oldest buildings in the state. Barbara's younger brother, John Henry Kagi, a schoolteacher from Ohio who had been forced out of a teaching job in Virginia for opposing slavery, lived with them for about a year. In 1856 he went south into Kansas Territory, met John Brown, and became one of his most trusted men.
The road north
In December 1858 Brown's men raided into Missouri, killed a slaveholder and freed eleven enslaved people. In January 1859 they started north on a journey that took eighty-two days and covered more than a thousand miles, and a baby was born on the way. In February the party came up through Nebraska City toward the Missouri crossing into Iowa. Kagi went alone to see his sister, and a deputy marshal with a small posse tried to arrest him at the cabin; he got away. Edward Mayhew, who grew up in the cabin, remembered his uncle bringing fourteen Black people to the house for breakfast. On March 12 Brown saw the group onto a ferry to Canada. On October 17, 1859, Kagi was shot dead at Harpers Ferry. He was twenty-four.
The cave
Stories that the cabin had been an Underground Railroad station circulated from the 1870s on. In 1937, when a highway project threatened it, the owner, Edward Bartling, moved it a few feet and had a cave built to tell that story. The National Park Service, which lists the cabin in its Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, says there is no proof the cave sheltered anyone and no evidence that Brown himself was ever on the property. The History Nebraska historian James E. Potter called the cave folklore, and said the folklore shows how much Nebraskans wanted the fight against slavery to be part of their own past.
The town around it
It was part of it, without the cave. Slavery was legal in the territory in those years and practiced in this town. Two people held by a Nebraska City man escaped in November 1858, and on December 5, 1860, two people were sold at public auction here. The territorial legislature abolished slavery in 1861 over the governor's veto. Kagi's crossing was a real escape, through a slaveholding town.
The Missouri River flood of 2019 closed the site for seven years. Volunteers and a hired craftsman repaired the logs, the roof and the cave, and the Mayhew Cabin Foundation reopened it for Juneteenth in June 2026.