To continue the tour, please go back into the hallway and up the grand staircase to the first room on your left.
You should now be in the room at the top of the stairs. This room is interpreted as John and Sarah’s bedroom. Just as flexible as the other rooms downstairs, this room could have been used for reading, washing up, eating, or entertaining close friends and family, not to mention sleeping. Especially in the winter months, upstairs rooms were used more frequently for all activities because they were much warmer. When John and Sarah lived in this house, there was no room behind this—the room you see was added by future owner Marsden Perry. At the time when John and Sarah were living here, this room would have had one more window on the north wall.
Two effective ways to keep warm in bed were the use of a bed warmer and bed hangings. A servant would fill a bed warmer pan with coals and run it between the sheets to take the chill off of them before the sleepers climbed in. The hangings, when drawn closed, helped retain the bed’s warmth. Servants working in the house were in charge of warming the bed sheets at night, as well as helping the Browns get dressed, washing their clothes, and emptying their chamber pots in the morning. Such intimate chores, especially regarding personal hygiene, were required of servants and slaves in early America. Therefore, a much closer relationship existed between servants and their employers at this time than in later years.
Because of the bed hangings, sometime called bed curtains, such furnishings had to be kept away from fireplaces, and one needed to exercise caution when using candles and lamps around them. Starting in the early nineteenth century, bed warmers and hangings began falling out of favor due to fire and health risks.
While we are in this room, we can imagine the scene of John Brown’s deathbed. John Brown died on September 20, 1803 at 67 years old, in his bedroom. The cause of death was given as “Dropsy of the Breast,” which today we would call congestive heart failure. Daughter Abby recorded the somber event in her diary:
My dear father expired on the Eveng of the 20th of Sept 1803 … His malady was first observed by us in the beginning of the preceeding July & it continued most alarmg at night time until at last symptoms of a Dropsy of the Breast, were I believe consider’d by his physician to be the cause of his disorder, although he had other most distressing complaints Notwithstanding which his Sweetness of temper was such as I never before witnessed in a sick room. Blessed be God without a struggle on Tuesday Even the 20th of Sept 1803 after having past an eveg with us in good harmony of Spirits, without bodily pain.
Upon John Brown’s death, the house remained in his widow’s, Sarah’s, possession until she passed away in 1825. The home stayed within the Brown’s immediate family until 1852 when the house was given to a cousin as a wedding present.