Column: Did a famous grave in the Altadena hills survive the fires?

On a hill above Altadena named Little Round Top, a grave stood for 136 years as the community below it blossomed.

Here lay the remains of Owen Brown, son of the legendary abolitionist John Brown. Owen moved to Pasadena in the 1880s and was greeted by locals as a hero for fighting alongside his father in the Bleeding Kansas wars and Harper’s Ferry raid. His funeral in 1889 attracted thousands of mourners, and he was put to rest near a cabin where he and a brother spent his last years.

The grave became a place of veneration, then a site of controversy in the early 2000s when Little Round Top’s owner began to shoo away the curious. Lawsuits were filed to push for public access. Brown’s tombstone disappeared for a decade before being found hundreds of feet down the hill.

His final resting place is now open to the public. A new owner gave a local group $300,000 to restore it in 2018, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors designated it as a historical landmark in December, and the site is now under the care of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy.

A view of the grave of Owen Brown, son of abolitionist John Brown on a hilltop in Altadena.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

The saga was supposed to get its most prominent airing yet on Wednesday at Mountain View Cemetery, where two of Owen’s siblings are buried and where a plaque is inscribed with his name and image. Altadena resident and filmmaker Pablo Miralles had been scheduled to debut a 20-minute documentary on Owen’s life.

Facebook is where I learned about the screening. Facebook is also where I learned that Miralles and his family lost their home in the Eaton fire.

He and his son fled with important documents, photos and a painting his grandmother took with her as she escaped the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands. Gone are Miralles’ production notebook and the final paychecks for his crew. The documentary was already saved online, though Miralles has no idea when it will screen.

“People need to find places to live — we need to find a place to live,” said Miralles last week at Stumptown Coffee in Pasadena. “I’m proud of my film, but it can wait.”

Few were better qualified to make a documentary about Owen Brown than Miralles. His parents, immigrants from Argentina, moved from Eagle Rock to Altadena in the 1970s after finding a home large enough for them and their seven children. They ignored friends who said Altadena was “dangerous” and financed the purchase through a Black-owned bank. Their regular bank had refused “because they told my father that our house would be on a Black street,” Miralles said.

He remembers a bucolic upbringing in a multiracial paradise that informed the rest of his life and eventually became his muse. The 60-year-old created a well-received documentary about how his alma mater, John Muir High in Pasadena, resegregated as white families enrolled their children in private and charter schools. Last year, Miralles wrote and directed a play that imagined a friendship between two of the City of Roses’ most famous natives, Julia Child and Jackie Robinson. (I appeared in his 2012 documentary about the intense soccer rivalry between the U.S. and Mexico).

“I didn’t know I would cover Pasadena like I have,” he said, “but when you recognize that you came from a place with a history of struggle, you kind of have to.”

Pablo Miralles, a documentary filmmaker who lost his home in the Eaton fire, hikes to the grave of Owen Brown, son of abolitionist John Brown. Miralles is completing a documentary about Owen and how he ended up in the Pasadena area.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Altadena’s charm lured Miralles back as a resident in 2019. By then, he had made a four-minute short for the Owen Brown Gravesite Committee about their cause.

“You learn about [John Brown] in school, that he’s a maniac and a madman intent on killing white slave owners,” said Miralles, who had hiked up to Owen’s grave but otherwise didn’t know much about him at the time. “But when you read his papers, he wasn’t that at all.”

Miralles’ short film impressed committee chair Michele Zack. She asked Miralles to make a longer film that the Pasadena Unified School District could show in classrooms.

Owen joined his father in the armed conflicts that made John Brown such a divisive figure in U.S. history. In Kansas, Owen killed a man in a skirmish between abolitionists and pro-slavery settlers. He stayed behind to guard weapons and horses while his father led the raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, which resulted in the deaths of two of Owen’s brothers and in John’s capture and execution.

“The 1850s resonate so strongly with what’s happening right now,” said Zack, who also lost her home in the Eaton fire. “You think we’re divided now? We were divided even more in the 1850s. Owen Brown is symbolic of all that, and here’s this history right in our backyard.”

She still wants to screen the Brown documentary to the public — but not any time soon.

“There’s so much suffering and loss and pain right now, and that’s going to go on for years — but we’re not going to postpone [the film] for years,” Zack said.

Miralles and his team were busy putting the final touches on the project. In fact, the sound engineer was working on it the day the Eaton fire forced him to evacuate (his house remains standing).

“The idea that the original radical abolitionists have their literal roots here — the man is still there, his bones are there — is just so important,” Miralles said. “We need to live up to the ideals of this nation like Owen, which means we locals will fight to maintain diversity here.”

He looked at his phone’s home screen to check the time. It featured a photo of him, his wife, their son and their two dogs at their home in early January.

We got into his SUV and drove into Altadena. The plan was to visit his incinerated home, then see if Brown’s grave came out unscathed. Neither he nor Zack knew its fate.

Miralles drove by his former school, Franklin Elementary — destroyed. A chimney was all that remained of the home where his brother lived. “Here are a lot of my friends,” Miralles said with a sigh as his head darted from side to side. “Just blocks and blocks and blocks.”

He decided to not stop at his home “because I don’t want to put on a hazmat suit again.” Instead, we passed through checkpoint after checkpoint — “Military vehicles in my hood. It’s kind of crazy” — before getting on a winding street that ended near Brown’s grave.

Signs all around warned people to proceed at their own risk. Another proclaimed, “Looters Will be Shot.” Others said the fire danger was “extreme.”

The paved street turned into a one-lane gravel road leading into the Angeles National Forest. Miralles parked near a long-abandoned car that occupied the spot “where Owen’s cabin used to be.” A worker from the California Conservation Corps soon approached us to ask what we were doing up there.

Miralles explained the purpose of our visit. The worker nodded.

“I wondered why there was a trail going up there,” he said, waving over to Little Round Top before walking back to clear more brush.

The first part of the trail is narrow, with a steep drop that forced me to look ahead instead of writing in my notebook. Vibrant yucca, scrub oak and sage stood alongside dried-out chaparral. Along the way were interpretive signs that told the stories of two pioneers of Black Los Angeles: Biddy Mason, a formerly enslaved woman who became a wealthy property owner downtown, and Robert Owens, a successful businessman and Mason’s relative by marriage who used to collect wood in the hills we were trekking through.

We eventually got to the base of Little Round Top, named after a famous Civil War battle, and looked down at a devastated Altadena of blackened trees and leveled properties.

I asked Miralles what he saw.

“It’s not what I see,” he replied. “It’s what I don’t see.”

From there, we hiked up a short but steep switchback that ended on a dirt plateau. Pine trees offered shade for two benches. Before us was Brown’s grave.

After a short hike up the hill, Miralles views the grave of Owen Brown, son of abolitionist John Brown.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Stones outlined where his body lies. Someone had drawn a heart in the dirt. At the head of the grave was a tombstone that listed Brown’s name, his years of life and the legend “Son of John Brown the Liberator.”

There were no signs of fire damage. Miralles looked relieved.

“There used to be way more vegetation here, but it’s all cleared,” he said as we looked down at Altadena again. To our right in the distance was La Cañada Flintridge. A streak of pink fire retardant soiled the valley below.

“I hope people recognize the importance of this grave and what Owen and his family represented for this country,” he said as we looked at Brown’s tombstone. Then he looked back to his Altadena. A plume of dust now rose from a neighborhood.

“I used to hike these hills growing up. There would be fires every three to four years, he said. “But I never thought what happened to us would ever happen.”