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Constructed around 1790, Taille de Noyer sits today on the campus of McCluer High School.
Today, the name William Wells Brown is mostly remembered by historians studying slavery in pre-Civil War America. But the memoir Brown published in 1847, which detailed his 17 years of bondage before escaping to freedom, was widely read in his day. Like Frederick Douglass (whose own memoir beat Brown's to publication by just two years), he also became a popular lecturer.
But only recently did researchers with the Florissant Valley Historical Society realize that some of the most harrowing incidents in Brown’s memoir took place in north St. Louis County. Brown was forced to work for a slave trader who worked a circuit including Missouri, and he details both the horror of facilitating the trade of other people like himself and the stories of enslaved people in the area whose paths intersected with him.