In 1881, a spokesman for the African American community called Daniel Brown “a pioneer of the colored people in Lafayette.” Brown and his family settled in Lafayette in the 1830s. Born in Maryland in 1796, Brown worked as a white washer, laborer and sexton at St. John’s Episcopal Church.

In the 1890s, older members of Saint John’s Church remembered Brown as a faithful, earnest Christian. The Rev. Samuel R. Johnson, the first rector of St. John’s, said that in times of disheartenment, he found strength and hope in the Browns’ strong faith.

Brown embraced religion in 1821 and became a deacon in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1843, Brown chaired Lafayette’s Colored People’s Convention. As a trustee of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, he solicited funds to purchase land for church buildings in 1846 and 1866. In 1870, Brown organized a celebration of the extension of suffrage to African American men.

The Rev. Robert McDaniel of Fort Wayne, who visited Brown in his last days, acknowledged Brown’s religious service to the Lafayette community. “About two months before he died, a (Lafayette) school teacher said to me, …. ‘If he could come back to Lafayette, his old home, and the people get to know it, the church could not hold the people who would come to see and hear him,’” McDaniel said in a copy of the Christian Recorder in March 24, 1881. “… (W)e shall still remember him as a Christian believer who was always full of sweetness and light.”

This article originally appeared on Lafayette Journal & Courier: Lafayette’s Daniel Brown considered a pioneer in Black community