After February 26, 1889, the public record goes dark. He continued to live — he died eight years later, in 1897 — but the shows, if he gave any, left no traces in the newspaper records that scholars have been able to access. He may have retired. He may have continued performing in venues too small or too local to generate press coverage. He may have been ill. The record does not say.
He spent the years between the last Brantford performance and his death in Toronto. The city was not, for him, an exile or a refuge in the dramatic sense; it was simply where he was, where Jane was, where Annie was. Toronto’s Necropolis Cemetery, where he was buried on June 15, 1897, is a non-denominational burial ground established in 1850. It is still in use today, a quiet park in the east end of the city, and Brown’s grave is there.
For more than a century after his death, the date and place were simply unknown. Older histories — the ones written before Martha J. Cutter’s 2015 archival discovery — ended with versions of ‘the date of his death is unknown.’ He had slipped out of the documentary record, a man who had been spectacularly visible for years and then simply vanished into ordinary life and ordinary death.
Cutter found him. The archival work that recovered his death date is the kind of patient, methodical research that makes history possible: checking municipal records, death registrations, cemetery records in a city he had reason to be in but no obvious documented connection to. The recovery of that date is its own small act of historical justice.