As Civil War historic figure Florella Adair’s great-great-grandaughter and reenactor, Mary Buster didn’t always embrace her father’s side of the family.

“I felt they overshadowed my mom’s side of family,” Buster said. “I grew to resent how the Browns and Adairs got all this attention.”

From the age of 20 to about 40, Buster shunned that side of her family history, she said. But when the teacher, who now lives in Emporia, started teaching a Civil War section and took her students to John Brown Museum, she started to change her tune.

“I saw another person do Florella and didn’t like it,” she said of a reenactment.

She had visited the museum and its Adair Cabin with her class just before it was robbed and set on fire in 1995. Afterward, she worked with the museum and the Kansas State Historical Society to reopen it.

Finally, in 1998, after a year of putting together her story and her costume, Buster performed as Adair.

“She would be thrilled to think her stories are still being told 150 years after her death,” Buster said.

But for Buster, her ancestor has taught her a lot about herself. Buster said she admires her for her strength and belief in God and the abolitionist cause.

“She knew what it was like to be a second-class citizen as a woman,” she said. “It made her a stronger abolitionist.”

Adair lived in extremely difficult conditions; bread and milk commonly froze between meals. She died at age 48, Buster said. Although Buster shares some of her great-great-grandmother’s traits, she thinks Adair was much stronger than she is.

“I’ve never risked everything to right a wrong,” she said. “I wish I had a little more of that in me.”

Adair was the one who demanded they take slaves into their home, no matter the danger, and she once took a nine-month journey all the way to New York to raise money for their cause. Her husband, Samuel Adair, had to write her begging for her return, Buster said.

“I have a lot of fire in my spirit,” she said. “I hate injustice. I think that in some ways we’re a lot a like.”

Through Buster’s research, she has grown close to a woman she never knew. She has gotten to do some of the things Adair always wanted to do, but never had the chance to, such as being a teacher. John Brown Museum has become a sort of “holy ground,” Buster said.

“There have been a few times I’ve had the pleasure of sweeping that cabin floor,” she said. “I think what that must have been like for Florella.”