In our second episode tied to The Current‘s series on the Black history of the Highlands, historian Myra Young Armstead discusses the life of James F. Brown, who was the longtime gardener in the 19th century at Mount Gulian and may have been the first Black man to vote in what is now Beacon. Armstead’s book, Freedom’s Gardener: James F. Brown, Horticulture, and the Hudson Valley in Antebellum America, details what we’ve learned about Brown’s life and times from a meticulous journal he kept for 37 years, from 1827 to 1866.
