An albumen carte-de-visite photograph of John Brown's cabin in Franklin County, Kansas, photographed and published by A.W. Barker of Ottawa, Kansas, and copyrighted in 1871 by Barker in the office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. John Brown, the radical abolitionist whose 1859 raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry made him one of the most polarizing figures of the antebellum era, occupied this cabin during the most active period of his Kansas years in the late 1850s, when Bleeding Kansas placed the question of slavery's westward expansion at the center of American political life.

The image shows a rough-hewn log cabin of substantial size, its walls built from unpeeled stacked logs with visible chinking, set on an open prairie with sparse scrub vegetation in the foreground. Three or four figures stand at the sides and rear of the structure, one identifiable by the printed reverse as Judge Hanway, described as one of the oldest citizens of Kansas and a follower of John Brown, shown with his hat off. A partial wooden structure or fence is visible at the right rear of the cabin.

The printed description on the reverse, titled An Old Land-Mark of Kansas, identifies the cabin as the site where Brown's well-known Parallels were written for the Lawrence Republican and the New York Tribune, where Kagi, Anderson, and others who later fell at Harpers Ferry found refuge, and where Brown concealed eleven fugitive slaves from Missouri for a full month while hunters searched the surrounding country. The cabin is located one mile southwest of Lane P.O. in Franklin County. The copyright line, publisher imprint, and sale notice for A.W. Barker of Ottawa, Kansas appear on the lower reverse.