Franklin Benjamin Sanborn was buried in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery of Concord, Massachusetts near the graves of his friends and mentors Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Ellery Channing, and Henry Thoreau. Concord's flags were flown at half-mast for three days.

At the end of the month, February, 1917, just prior to America's entering World War I, the Massachusetts House of Representatives recognized Sanborn’s dedication to the unfortunate, the diseased, and the despised. The formal resolution cited Sanborn's role as a confidential adviser to John Brown, for whose sake he was arrested, mistreated, and nearly deported.

People loved and hated him. Walt Whitman described John Brown’s young defender, Sanborn, as a fighter, up in arms, a devotee, a revolutionary crusader, hot in the collar, quick on the trigger, noble, optimistic. Henry David Thoreau feared the passionate Concord schoolteacher was only too steadfast and earnest, a type, as Thoreau put it, that calmly, so calmly, ignites and then throws bomb after bomb.

Sanborn lived a long life. He was revered, finally, in the end, as a relic from a golden age gone by -- a tall and venerable figure moving picturesquely through Boston and Concord.

In 1946, writing on Thoreau, Edwin Way Teale remembered a summer evening spent in one of Concord's stateliest homes. He’d interviewed its occupant, the descendant of a man who'd absolutely despised the home’s original owner. Outside the house, a violent thunderstorm was raging, ripping branches from trees, sending sheets of water crashing against windowpanes. The storm seemed perfectly fitting, Teale reflected, regarding the uproarious drama from within the lovely brick house by the Sudbury River that had once been the home of the passionate troublemaker, Frank Sanborn.