our historic building

About the Nightingale-Brown House

Built in 1792 for Joseph Nightingale, the Nightingale-Brown House, a National Historic Landmark, serves as the headquarters of the John Nicholas Brown Center and Brown University’s program in public humanities. Nicholas Brown purchased the home in 1814 from Nightingale's heirs, becoming the first of five successive 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 firm of Boston landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted designed the garden and grounds in 1890; and during the 1920s John Nicholas Brown redecorated the house in classical European and American colonial motifs.

From 1985 to 1993, the Nightingale-Brown House underwent extensive renovation to correct structural problems including rot, termite infestation, and unintended damage from past alterations. Structural engineers reinforced the inadequate original post-and-beam framing with steel; carpenters restored interior woodwork and decorative details; and the living spaces and furnishings on the first floor were returned to their early-twentieth-century appearance.

The Center is named after John Nicholas Brown II, whose interests included art and architecture, historic preservation, and philanthropy. His widow and children established the Center in his memory after his death, and it became part of Brown University in 1995.

The Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record of the Nightingale-Brown House

Museum Collections

The museum collections at the Nightingale-Brown House include more than 900 objects that range from a seventeenth-century Spanish Baroque refectory table collected by John Nicholas Brown during his travels in Europe, to a hand-painted albumen print of “Pike’s peak from the Garden of the Gods” obtained by John Nicholas Brown’s father during his travels in the west. Brown recounted this trip in his travel diaries, included in the family archives (see below): “Yesterday, Saturday September 15th [1888] I went up Pike’s Peak…the highest carriage road in the world. The views from the road going up and from the summit were magnificent.”

Other items in the museum collection include eighteenth-century portraits by Joseph Blackburn; a 1940 Steinway series “B” piano purchased by John Nicholas Brown; and fine and decorative arts including a Wedgwood porcelain three-branch candelabra, circa 1775, and a Louis XVI black and white marble mantel clock, made by Gavelle of Paris, circa 1800.

The museum collections in the Nightingale-Brown House represent and link each of the five generations of the Brown family that lived in the house. The butler’s pantry contains more than 100 pieces of Canton China, possibly imported to Providence aboard Brown family merchant vessels in the eighteenth century and used by the family of John Nicholas Brown in the twentieth century for their everyday meals.

The Nightingale-Brown House contains several pieces of furniture made in the shops of Newport’s famed eighteenth-century furniture makers. These pieces include a Chippendale-style drop-leaf table with ball and claw feet, circa 1759-1760; two armchairs recovered by Natalie Bayard Brown in needlepoint upholstery displaying the Brown family crest and motto; a mahogany kneehole chest of drawers with a fold-down writing surface and compartments, circa 1775; and a companion piece probably made by the son of John Goddard, circa 1810. The collection also includes a reproduction of a block and shell desk and bookcase made by Alan Breed in 1993; the original eighteenth-century “secretary” was sold by an heir of John Nicholas Brown to finance the restoration of the Nightingale-Brown House.

For more information about the Center’s museum collections, please contact Ron M. Potvin, assistant director and curator.

Brown Family Archives

As part of its stewardship of the Nightingale-Brown House, the John Nicholas Brown Center from 1985 to 2007 oversaw a collection of archives created by members of the Brown family, spanning the period from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. The Center’s staff coordinated a project to organize, properly store, and catalog these records along with complementary collections located at the Rhode Island Historical Society and the John Carter Brown Library. Together, these collections comprise one of the most complete archival records of any American family, illuminating a wide range of issues including colonial-era trading, nineteenth-century manufacturing, and twentieth-century philanthropy.

These archives contain personal and business correspondence, corporate records, and a variety of other archival media such as photographs, maps, architectural drawings, and film relating to members of the Brown family and their contemporaries. The Brown Family Archives, especially the twentieth century materials, remain a virtually untapped resource for students of American social, cultural, and economic history.

In 2007, the John Nicholas Brown Center transferred the archival collections in its care to the John Hay Library’s state-of-the-art library collections storage facility.

For more information about how to access the Brown Family Archives at Brown University, please visit the Web site of the John Hay Library, or contact Holly Snyder, Scholarly Resources Librarian and North American History Librarian.