http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/900762985

Freedom's gardener James F. Brown, horticulture, and the Hudson Valley in antebellum America

In 1793 James F. Brown was born a slave and in 1868 he died a free man. At age 34 he ran away from his native Maryland to spend the remainder of his life in upstate New York's Hudson Valley, where he was employed as a gardener by the wealthy, Dutch-descended Verplanck family on their estate in Fishkill Landing. Two years after his escape, he began a diary that he kept until two years before his death. In Freedom's Gardener, Myra B. Young Armstead uses seemingly small details from Brown's diariesoentries about weather, gardening, steamboat schedules, the Verplancks' social life, and other large.

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