Franklin County distinguished itself mainly by its agricultural wealth: It was the seventh-largest wheat-producing county in the United States in 1859. The rural population had grown steadily for the last twenty years, marked neither by the flight that eroded rural New England nor the flood of newcomers that rushed into western counties. Increasing numbers of people, largely born in the county, filled the 722 square miles of Franklin. Two-thirds of the farmland in the county rested under cultivation; the rest remained in forest to help supply the relentless need for wood.

[John Brown's] first wife was nineteen-year-old Dianthe Lusk, whom he married when he was twenty. Like him, she was solemn and puritanical. She was also a manic-depressive: sensitive, scared, easily tearful. Dianthe suffered at least one nervous breakdown and was afflicted with what a friend called "an almost constant blueness and melancholy." Some neighbors called her a madwomen. She was capable of silences that lasted for days, these interrupted by only the submissive "Yes, husband" that the domineering John Brown expected and got whenever he asked anything of her.