As the violence between free-state and proslavery factions increased along the Missouri-Kansas border, one family placed itself in the vortex of the conflict. Florella Brown Adair and her husband, Samuel Lyle Adair moved to the Kansas Territory from Ohio as missionaries of the Congregationalist Christian Church. Passionate abolitionists in their own right, Florella’s half-brother, John Brown, would involve her family in the border violence in ways that the Adairs had not anticipated.