James Cunningham Jordan (1813–1891) and his wife Melinda were the earliest settlers in Walnut Township, Iowa, now West Des Moines. When he was thirty-three, Jordan built a log cabin for his young family just southeast of here, and within the next twenty years he constructed a much larger frame house, finishing the front in 1850 and adding the large back or west section in 1870. A successful farmer, livestock dealer, and bank director, he supported the Methodist Episcopal Church and belonged to the Republican Party, which under Abraham Lincoln first drew breath opposing the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Jordan despised slavery, spoke vehemently against it, and was directly involved in sheltering and aiding fugitive slaves. In a time when participation in the Underground Railroad was dangerous and illegal, and when some wanted to avoid the slavery issue and keep Black settlement out of Iowa while others saw the state as a beacon of antislavery hope, Jordan became known as a quiet, modest man with a gruff voice and great kindness and generosity. On February 17, 1859, abolitionist John Brown led thirteen men, women, and children escaping enslavement in western Missouri to the Jordan homestead from Civil Bend, a rural Iowa hamlet near Nebraska City that was an Underground Railroad stop. After resting overnight in timber near the Jordan farm, the group traveled the next day to Hawley's farm east of Des Moines, then continued over three months to Grinnell, Iowa City, Detroit, and finally across the Detroit River to freedom in Windsor, Canada, in late summer. Later that year, on October 16, 1859, Brown led an eighteen-man army of liberation in a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, hoping to seize weapons and spark a rebellion among enslaved people; he was captured, convicted of treason, and hanged on December 2, 1859, and his action ignited great controversy and became a catalyst for America's Civil War.