Henry ‘Box’ Brown: Tobacco Worker, Stage Magician, Tourist Attraction

Henry ‘Box’ Brown had a variety of identities in his life-tobacco factory worker, escaped slave, abolitionist, lecturer, and touring panoramist and entertainer on the English stage. In recent years, a variety of artists, performers, and writers have carried on his legacy via the performing arts. However, one aspect of his career is better documented and easier for public historians to trace. Remembered in the United States for his 1849 escape from slavery by having himself mailed from Richmond, Virginia to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, his newest identity might be as a tourist attraction and symbol of enslaved resistance and black empowerment. Today there is a statue near Richmond’s James River waterfront in his memory alongside other historical waysides and markers, as well as historical tours and a smartphone application that include the statue and other sites associated with his 1849 escape along their routes.[1]

Brown’s transformation into a modern tourist attraction documents the important role and resilience of black resistance in Richmond’s shifting commemorative landscape.[2] In the 21^st century, Richmond has distanced itself from a Lost Cause interpretation of its history to include other eras of its past as well as the voices of those long forgotten. Tourists and visitors in the Richmond, Virginia area can now experience Brown’s journey to freedom and hear his story for themselves, simultaneously placing Brown and his narrative of enslaved resistance within the realms of entertainment and public history education. Drawing on my own experience as a tour guide and public historian in Richmond, as well as using my original tour material and the guests’ responses to it along with a digital tour via the CLIO smartphone application, and the secondary works and guidebooks of other local history guides, I argue that the story of Henry ‘Box’ Brown and his escape continues to resonate with the public in the twenty-first century.

The legacy of ‘Box’ Brown and his struggle for freedom is inextricably linked to Richmond’s landscape. Along Richmond’s historic riverfront Canal Walk, near the former location of William Barret’s tobacco factory sits a monument that resembles Brown’s wooden crate. Built in 2001, the statue is accompanied by a nearby marker with interpretive text, telling the story of Brown’s escape including several passages from his 1849 slave narrative. It is the same dimensions that Brown gave in his memoir for the crate that carried him to freedom, ‘three feet tall by two feet wide and two and a half feet deep.’ Inside the metal statue is a life-sized outline of the six-foot-tall Brown sitting in a a fetal position during his journey. [3]

 

The life-sized, box-shaped monument dedicated to Henry “Box” Brown, located along the Canal Walk at ‘Box’ Brown Plaza, downtown Richmond, Virginia. Photo by author.

 

 

The inscription on the box reads “My friends… managed to break open the box , and then came my resurrection from the grave of slavery… I rose a free man.” Photos by author.

 

 

Visitors to the monument are frequently amazed and horrified by the stark image of the statue and Brown’s unique method of escape. Local tour guides include it as a stop on tours of the area. On my tours, I emphasize the drama by pointing that Brown lost his family and became an abolitionist after his escape. Guests often chuckle when I inform them that Brown later became a performer and stage magician in London, England who incorporated boxes as part of his act.[4] Many guests empathize with Brown. I am often asked whether Brown reunited with his family; I respond that unfortunately he did not, however he did remarry while living in London.

A tourism-oriented local history guidebook entitled A People’s Guide to Richmond and Central Virginia by Melissa Ooten Jason Sawyer discusses Brown’s escape and his commemorative memorial alongside other historical and contemporary examples of social justice and resistance movements. Born enslaved in either 1815 or 1816 in Louisa County, Virginia, Henry Brown was one of eight children owned John Barret at his plantation The Hermitage. When he was about fifteen years old, in 1830, Barret’s son William inherited Brown and sent him to work in a tobacco factory he owned in downtown Richmond.[5]

After witnessing the sale of his pregnant wife Nancy and three children, Brown decided to escape from slavery. In 1849, Brown and his landlord enlisted the help of local shoemaker Samuel Smith to mail Brown to an abolitionist meeting house in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. On March 23^rd, 1849, Brown climbed inside a wooden crate marked ‘this side up with care’ and was carried to the offices of the Adams Express Company in downtown Richmond, where he was mailed to Philadelphia.[6] After a grueling twenty-seven-hour journey by rail and water requiring several stops along the way, Brown reached his destination the following day. When four abolitionists received the crate and pried it open, he greeted them with a “how-do-you-do, gentlemen?” before singing a psalm in celebration of his successful escape to freedom. The astonished abolitionists then dubbed him “Box” Brown.[7]

 

With the open door and only an outline of a man in a crouched position inside. Photo by author.

 

Brown soon became a prominent antislavery speaker and performance artist. In 1849 he published an autobiographical slave narrative entitled The Narrative of Henry ‘Box’ Brown and made a panorama showing scenes of slavery and his escape, which he exhibited throughout New England. When Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, Brown moved to London, England where he continued to exhibit his panorama and performed as a hypnotist, actor, and magician until his death in Toronto, Canada in 1897.

Long forgotten in the United States, Brown’s story found a new audience in the post-Civil Rights era. Artists working in a variety of mediums including sculpture, opera, poetry, and other visual arts began to tell the story of his escape in their work. Sculptor Glenn Ligon’s 1994 installation To Disembark includes marked wooden crates alongside images of Brown and other abolitionists. Similar to the memorial statue installed along Richmond’s Canal Walk, To Disembark forces the reader to consider the symbolic meaning of the crate that carried Brown as an imaginative metaphor for the larger relationship between slavery, freedom, and black resistance. In The Many Resurrections of Henry ‘Box’ Brown, Martha J. Cutter provides an assessment of modern poetry and performance art devoted to Brown alongside an analytical historical biography. She argues that in later life Brown became an entertainer in order to subvert the mechanics of slavery and freedom. Further, Cutter argues that performance artists can transcend the limitations of museums to encourage audiences to actively engage with the history at hand. No longer trapped inside his box, Brown is free to entertain and inspire thought by incorporating certain elements of his life and story while remaining unknowable to readers. Having once been enslaved, the real Brown is therefore elusive and free.[8]

In the modern era, public historians using the tourism-oriented mobile phone application Clio have created a tour of sites related to Brown’s journey. A user-driven digital history project, Clio encourages uses to directly engage with history by creating and publishing their own tours. A tour entitled “Henry ‘Box’ Brown’s Journey to Freedom” takes users from a historical marker near Brown’s birthplace in Louisa County to various points along the mail route between Richmond and Philadelphia.

 

Henry ‘Box Brown’s Journey to Freedom digital tour. Screenshot by author

 

Stops include the former location of William Barrett’s tobacco factory in downtown Richmond, the Washington City Wharf, and the abolitionist Quaker meeting house in Philadelphia. Clio users can promote tours on social media, and an activity counter tracks the number of views the webpage for each stop receives.

According to the activity counter provided for every stop on the Clio tour, thousands of visitors have viewed the pages for the two most popular stops on the tour. Other stops along the route each received several hundred visitors. Many stops are in heavily trafficked urban areas near other historical markers and monuments.[9] The popularity of the various historic tours including those given by guides, through local guidebooks and on Clio, alongside resurgent historiographical scholarship and new, innovative artworks and other installations shows that memory of Henry ‘Box’ Brown is alive and well in the twenty-first century.

 

[1] Martha J. Cutter. The Many Resurrections of Henry ‘Box’ Brown, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023; Jeffrey Ruggles. The Unboxing of Henry Brown, Library of Virginia, 2003, 5.

[2] Melissa Ooten and Jason Sawyer, A People’s Guide to Richmond and Central Virginia, University of California Press, 2023, 26; Kristin T. Thrower-Stowe, A History Lover’s Guide to Richmond, The History Press, 2021, 72.

[3] Henry Brown and Charles Stearns, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown Who Escaped from Slavery, Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide. Written from a Statement of Facts Made by Himself. With Remarks Upon the Remedy for Slavery. Boston: Brown and Stearns, 1849. 60; Robbins, Hollis, “Fugitive Mail: The Deliverance of Henry Brown and Antebellum Postal Politics,” American Studies, 50, ½ (2009).

[4] The Era, promotional advertisement, Sunday, June 28^th, 1857. https://www.newspapers.com/image/387015435/?match=1.; Glasgow Daily Mail, promotional advertisement, Saturday, September 4^th, 1852. https:www/newspapers.com/image/805862901/?match=3; Lake’s Falmouth Packet and Cornwall Advertiser, promotional advertisement, Saturday, January 17^th, 1863. https://www.newspapers.com/image/1276608469/?match=1

[5] Ruggles, Unboxing, 5.

[6] Cutter, Resurrections, 231; Martha J. Cutter, “Will the Real Henry ‘Box’ Brown Please Stand Up?” commonplace.online, Issue 16.1, Fall 2015, accessed November 15^th, 2025, https://commonplace.online/article/will-the-real-henry-box-brown-please-stand-up/; Ruggles, Unboxing, 32; Robbins, Deliverance, 15; Thrower-Stowe, Guide, 72; Mills, Legends, 72; Ooten and Sawyer, People’s, 26.

[7] Mills, Lore, 72;

[8] Cutter, Resurrections, 225.

[9] Meredith Rogan and Casey Wellman, “Henry ‘Box’ Brown Plaza,” CLIO: Your Guide to History, April 9^th, 2024, accessed December 9^th, 2025, https://theclio.com/entry/43870; Haley Cannada and Meredith Rogan, “William Still: Pennsylvania Historical Marker (Also Briefly the Home of Henry ‘Box’ Brown)” CLIO: Your Guide to History, April 9^th, 2024, accessed December 9^th, 2025. https://www.theclio.com/entry/143438