John Nicholas Brown Center - Brown University

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About the Nightingale-Brown House

Built in 1792 for Captain Joseph Nightingale, the Nightingale-Brown House was one of five mansions constructed on Providence's College Hill shortly after the Revolutionary War. In 1814, wealthy investor and industrialist Nicholas Brown Jr. purchased the home from Nightingale's heirs, the first of five generations of the Brown family to live in the house.

Over the years, the Brown family adapted the Georgian-style mansion and its surrounding property to meet the needs and tastes of each generation. The Nightingale-Brown House now includes additions built for scholar and bibliophile John Carter Brown by architects Thomas Tefft (1853) and Richard Upjohn (1862-64). The landscape was designed for John's wife Sophia in 1890, by the Boston landscape design firm of Frederick Law Olmsted.

During the 1920s, John Nicholas Brown, redecorated the house in the Colonial Revival style using traditional American motifs. John Nicholas's interests included architecture and historic preservation, art, history, sailing, and philanthropy. His wife Anne S.K. Brown used the house to store and display her world-renowned collection of military books and toy soldiers.

For images and further information about the Nightingale-Brown House, see the Historic American Buildings Survey.

John Nicholas Brown standing proudly in front of 357 Benefit Street after purchasing the family seat from his aunt Sophia, 1921.

John Nicholas Brown died in 1979, and Anne in 1985. According to Anne's will, the house was to be transformed in her husband's honor as a public study space for scholars and students in all fields of American Civilization.

In 1985, work began to transform the Browns' ancestral home into a building meeting the practical realities of public use. The building's painstaking renovation took nearly eight years to complete. The original wooden structure was dismantled and rebuilt to correct extensive structural problems including rot, termite infestation and unintended damage from successive alterations. Even the engineering of the original post-and-beam framing was discovered to be inadequate. Rotten timbers were replaced and woodwork and other interior details were restored. The formal rooms on the ground floor were returned to their mid-twentieth-century appearance; a new set of scenic wallpaper in the entrance hall was printed in France from the original wood blocks. The second floor was restructured for use as office and library space.

During the mid-point of the renovation in 1989, the Nightingale-Brown House became a National Historic Landmark. In 1993 the John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization, located within the Nightingale-Brown House, officially opened to the public. Two years later, in 1995, the Center became part of Brown University.