Hello, and welcome to the John Brown House Museum audio tour. We will begin the tour standing at the front entrance of the house facing the 1st floor hallway. If you are not there yet, please press pause and resume the player when you are ready.
Workmen built this house for John Brown and his family between 1786 and 1788. Future president John Quincy Adams wrote in his diary that it was “the most magnificent and elegant private mansion that I have ever seen on this continent.” Family friend Susan Lear, while on a visit from Philadelphia in 1788, described the house as such:
It is situated on a very high hill and commands a prospect of the town and county for many miles with a delightful view of the river. The house is very large and furnished in the most extravagant manner. ‘Tis built after the plan of some of the Noblemen’s Seats in England, and far surpasses any I have seen.
From where you are standing, the view of this marvelous house is much as it was at the time of John Brown. You are participating in a two hundred year old tradition of visiting one of the grandest homes in the state of Rhode Island. Although this tour will focus on the people who lived here while it was owned by John Brown and his immediate family, the house has gone through other periods of inhabitance since then.
In 1852, a cousin to the Browns, Elizabeth Amory Ives Gammell, received the house as a wedding present. She owned the home until the time of her death in 1899, and in 1901 the house was purchased by Marsden Perry, a powerful businessman at the turn of the twentieth century. Finally, John Nicholas Brown, a descendant of John Brown’s brother Nicholas, purchased the house in the 1930s, and less than a decade later presented it to the Rhode Island Historical Society; we have occupied it ever since. Throughout the house, there are additions from the Gammells and Marsden Perry, such as the floorboards here on the 1st floor, which Perry had installed.