The body of Oliver Brown, and those of 7 others who also died during the raid itself, were thrown in packing crates and buried in a pit in an obscure place (so it would be forgotten), without ceremony, clergy, or marker. They were briefly dug up at Governor Wise's request to permit Mary Brown to recover her son's decaying body (at that point it was not known which Brown it was), but she did not feel up to it, so they were reburied. Forty years later, in 1899, a scholar studying Brown located one of the two Black men who had been paid $5 each to bury the crates, and he led him to the spot; it was confirmed by "the memory of a number of older citizens who witnessed the burial". While the identities of those buried there were known, the remains could not be clearly distinguished. To avoid complications the bodies were surreptitiously spirited out of Virginia; the remains were put in an ordinary trunk, which was carried as luggage on a train. They were all reburied in a single handsome casket, donated by the town of North Elba, next to the graves of John and Watson Brown.
