Today, the name Abraham Brian will be memorialized for as long as the United States exists. Brian’s former house sits near the apex of the Union line that bore the brunt of Pickett’s Charge—explanatory signs from the National Park Service tell you that Brian was a free black man living with his family in this house with a small amount of acreage, that he fled at the time of the battle, that he returned home to a devastated property, and that the government gave him very little restitution.

This summary misses so much of the man’s life. Even the record we have, as slender as it is, shows a much more complex picture. Brian was born in Maryland, whether in slavery or not is hard to tell. At least one genealogist suggests his father was a William Paige Bryan and his mother was a mulatto enslaved woman. This is difficult to verify in any records. An article in the 1979 states that Brian cared for a family of five and an elderly parent at the time of the battle, though Census records show no elderly parent living with him.

We know a tiny bit more about his adult family life and his work. In 1850, he was married to Catherine Payne and had a house full of children:

Anna and Matilda are believed to be from a marriage to Harriet Lewis who died in 1847. Catherine Payne, of course, had endured the trauma of kidnapping, imprisonment, and court cases to secure her freedom. All of her children were too much to bring into the small Brian house, and at least two of the girls, Eliza Jane and Mary, were sent to live as foster children with local white families in the area. Catherine had settled back in Gettysburg only to die later in 1850 from tuberculosis.

The 1979 article characterized Brian as “prosperous by the standards of the day.” Records at the almshouse suggest that the “standards of the day” weren’t high.

Here we see that the almshouse was receiving payments from Brian for goods he likely purchased from the almshouse.

By 1860, Brian had married again, this time to a woman named Elizabeth whose only record seems to be the 1860 Census. They lived in the small white farmhouse on the south side of Gettysburg when the war descended upon them. As did most other black residents, Brian and his family fled the Confederate army. When they returned, they found devastation—four tons of hay had been eaten by Union horses, their orchards had been ravaged and destroyed, their house was pockmarked with bullet and shell damage. Brian put in a claim to the government for $1,028 . . . and received $15 for the hay.

Hence, by July 1863, Abraham Brian had escaped the South, buried two wives, and seen his meager farm property decimated. But Brian, like many others, persisted. He rebuilt the farm and got it back to working order. He kept on with that labor until 1869 when he “retired” from farm labor and took a job as a stable keeper at a local hotel. In 1875, he passed away and was eventually interred in the Lincoln Cemetery near wives Harriet and Catherine.