Beginning at 9:30 a.m. with the placing of a wreath at the Memorial Arch in the Village, the ceremony will continue at Madronia Cemetery at 10 a.m., with attendees invited to walk the distance between. That's part of the tradition.

As described in the club announcement, there will be laurel sprays and miniature flags placed on the graves of the more than 800 veterans, dating back to the Civil War. Participating will be Saratoga Brownies, Boy and Girl and Cub Scouts and 4-H Club members.

The ceremony itself will include selections by the Saratoga High School band, directed by Michael Boitz; singing by the high school a cappella choir, directed by Jim Yowell; and a Memorial Day address by Lt. Col. Angela Alexander, commander of the Logistics Readiness Squadron, 129th Rescue Wing of the Air National Guard, based at Moffett Federal Airfield. The invocation will be given by Archpriest Basil Rhodes, pastor of St. Nicholas Orthodox Church. "Taps" will be played by Kevin Lee and Roy Han.

The Memorial Day observance is an opportunity for people who might not otherwise have an occasion to visit Madronia to see this truly historical burial ground, which dates back to the middle of the 19th century. There are some notable grave markers, such as the boulder with a bronze plaque that is the headstone for the Rev. Edwin Sidney "Sunshine" Williams, who founded the Saratoga Blossom Festival in 1900.

The grave of perhaps the most historical significance is that of Mary Ann Day Brown, wife of John Brown of Harpers Ferry. The Brown family has been a subject of previous Stereopticon columns, but new attention has been focused on this historic and controversial figure by a recently published biography, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights. As one reviewer put it, author David S. Reynolds "has taken on the difficult and probably unpopular task of rehabilitating Brown."

The prevailing Brown image, of course, is that of a fanatic who turned to bloody violence, first at Pottawatomi, Kan., and then at Harpers Ferry, W. Va., in his campaign to do away with slavery. While Brown himself never came to Saratoga--it was still McCartysville when he was executed in 1859--his second wife and some of his progeny did.

While on the subject, it seems appropriate to mention the Saratoga Historical Foundation's first publication, After Harper's Ferry (the apostrophe was a mistake; there is none in "Harpers"), produced in 1964. It was mainly the effort of the late Florence Cunningham, Saratoga's first real historian.

Of particular interest in this little book is a reprinted San Francisco Chronicle interview with Mary Ann Day Brown published on April 10, 1881. The reporter described visiting her at her home at the top of the Santa Cruz Mountains ridge, reached by the present Bohlman Road, and he called the road of the time "the steepest, most winding, roughest and uncompromising mountain trail ... the reporter in all his news gathering wandering had ever encountered."

Mary Ann Brown lived in a modest cottage with two daughters, a son-in-law and four grandchildren. I understand that this cottage later was made part of a larger dwelling that was known in the days of my youth as John Brown's Lodge, even though the man himself was never there. It was a popular hiker's destination, and the view of the valley was awe-inspiring.

Mary Ann Brown, incidentally, was the second of John Brown's two wives and bore 13 of his 20 children. Brown's first wife was Diantha Lusk Brown, who died in 1832. He married Mary Ann Day in 1833 when he was 33 and she was 17.

As to Brown's "fanatacism" on the matter of slavery, his widow said in the1881 interview that "he was anything but a fanatic." There is much more on the matter, which I will describe in a later column. Meanwhile, you can pay your respects to the widow Brown on Memorial Day.