The circumstances were that he emerged from the engine house at 10 AM on Monday the 17th, carrying a white flag, but was immediately shot, not by a soldier but by a townsperson.

Lying on the ground and with no medical treatment, he lived on in great agony, his father preventing him from killing himself to end the pain,[5] until about 3 AM on Wednesday the 19th, according to Edwin Coppock.

However, instead of using it for dissection and anatomy study, which was the fate of the other three bodies they also helped themselves to, it was prepared as a medical specimen or exhibit.

Using techniques that were innovative at the time, a doctor at the College, presumably its head and anatomy professor Hugh Holmes McGuire, stained the arteries, drained of blood, with red dye, treated the muscles so they resembled wood, and preserved the nerves with varnish.

The exhibit was labelled "John Brown's son—thus always with Abolitionists",[12][13] an allusion to Virginia's motto, "Sic semper tyrannis", "Thus always to tyrants."

[17] "A number of prominent citizens of Winchester called upon me at the hospital, and each and all declared that it was the remains of a son of John Brown.

In theory the body could have been sent to Watson's mother at her home in North Elba, New York, but he said he felt this would just add to her many sorrows.

Twenty-three years later, in 1882, Johnson read in a newspaper that John Brown's widow was visiting Chicago.

He continued to Martinsville accompanied by Indiana State Geologist John Collett, "a recognized authority on ethnological subjects"[22] and an expert in phrenology.

[29][30] Oliver Brown was called "a strange character" by a man who knew him, "the most original perhaps of them all", who had burned a pulpit when a church would not allow an abolitionist meeting to be held there.

[4]: 547 The body of Oliver Brown, and those of 7 others who also died during the raid itself, were thrown in packing crates and buried in a pit in an obscure place (so it would be forgotten), without ceremony, clergy, or marker.

Forty years later, in 1899, a scholar studying Brown located one of the two Black men who had been paid $5 each to bury the crates, and he led him to the spot; it was confirmed by "the memory of a number of older citizens who witnessed the burial".

To avoid complications the bodies were surreptitiously spirited out of Virginia; the remains were put in an ordinary trunk, which was carried as luggage on a train.

They were all reburied in a single handsome casket, donated by the town of North Elba, next to the graves of John and Watson Brown.