Mary Leary Langston wrote this letter to Colonel Hinton after reading in the Kansas City Star about the August 1899 reburial of John Brown and his followers at Brown's farm in upstate New York. Her first husband, Lewis Sheridan Leary, whom she mentions in the letter, was a follower of John Brown who was mortally wounded in the raid on the arsenal at Harper's Ferry in 1859. Mary Leary married a second time in 1869 to abolitionist Charles Henry Langston and they settled in Lawrence, Kansas. Their daughter, Caroline Mercer Langston, born in 1872, became the mother of poet Langston Hughes in 1902. The boy spent his childhood with his grandmother in Lawrence, until she died in 1915.