McDonough's historic Brown House Hotel is among the oldest surviving buildings in Henry County; Georgia. Built sometime about 1826, or soon there- after, for Andrew McBride, the Brown House was a private dwelling throughout most of the 19th Century and evidence suggests that it was originally a 1 !/2 story cottage of a type often found in the South in its day. The structure as built contained four major rooms with a center hall and likely a room or two in the long roof gable upstairs. These original rooms were floored, walled and ceiled with boards of heart pine. Beneath the southwest corner room remains the cellar, whose fireplace indicates that it may have served as a kitchen. (Southern kitchens, or cook houses, were usually located in separate buildings, but occasionally they were incorporated into the main dwelling.) The original portico on the front of the house would have been in a plain classical style and it occupied the same dimensions as the present covered porch, as indicated by the flush siding surrounding the window lights of the front doorway, and its flanking pilasters. Both the front and back entrances contained double doors which, when opened, allowed cooling breezes to pass through the house, thereby making the center hall a pleasant sitting room in hot summer weather.

Andrew McBride was a Revolutionary War veteran who came from Abbeville District, South Carolina, first to Jasper County, Georgia, where he was a prominent citizen, and then soon after its creation in 1821, to Henry County. He was among the original purchasers of town lots in the village of McDonough on 12 May 1823, and he has been described as a well-to-do gentleman of the community. Aside from his lot and house in town, he owned a farm of 127 acres, purchased in 1825, just beyond the southwest limits of McDonough on whatwas early called the Burnt Mill Road, now State Highway 20. There was a dwelling house on this place and it is possible that the old house still standing there is the same used by Andrew McBride during his lifetime.

McBride made his will in 1836, shortly before his death. References in the will to grape cuttings suggest that he grew improved varieties of grapes for wine making and it is possible that he did so for commercial purposes, although likely not on a large scale. At the time of his death, he owned one slave, a girl named Mary, who undoubtedly served as a cook and housemaid in the town house. This servant was left to his sister Sarah McBride Brown, wife of Andrew Brown. McBride was unmarried and left no children, whereby his property was divided among his nieces and nephews, the children of his sister Sarah McBride Brown. These heirs were: Hugh Brown, Robert Brown, Andrew McBride Brown, James Jefferson Brown, Mary Ann Raiford (wife of Capt. William H. Raiford) and Sarah Brown Moore (wife of John Moore). As had Andrew McBride, these Browns had come from Abbeville District, South Carolina, to Jasper County, Georgia, and to Henry County in its earliest settlement. Andrew McBride Brown was an early attorney of McDonough, a businessman and a wealthy planter whose lands were located on the west side of present; Luella in Henry County. He was the father of Major Sheridan Ragland Brown and ancestor of the late Judges Thomas J. Brown, Sr., and Jr., of McDonough. John and Sarah Brown Moore were planters whose lands were south of McDonough on the Griffin Road, immediately above the later rail station of Greenwood. They were the great-uncle and aunt of Arnold E. Moore of McDonough and of the late J. Marion Moore of Henry County. Most or all of Andrew McBride's other heirs left Henry County during the years after 1836. It

must be noted in this connection that these Brown heirs of Andrew McBride were an entirely different family frorn the Browns who later owned the McDonough house and who operated it as a hotel.

In 1837, Robert Brown, Esquire, of Jasper County, as Executor of the Estate of Andrew McBride, deceased, sold the town house to Henry W. Tindall for the sum of $1220. Tindall held the property until 1841, when it was sold at a Sheriff's sale to Hendley Varner, a wealthy citizen of the county. No doubt the fact that this was a forced sale accounts for the sale price of $700. Hendley Varner often bought and sold real estate as a part og his usual business activities and after less then three months, and for the sum of $8001 he sold the house to William Markham.

William Markham had come frorn Connecticut and was the maker of the well- know Markham Clock. He was married to Miss Amanda Berry of Henry County in 1839, and while there is no record, it is possible that they rented the house from Tindall and Varner until they purchased it in 1841. Several of the Markharn children were born there, but the house proved a rather temporary residence as a few years after buying it, Markham began construction of White Chimneys, his country estate on the Fayetteville Road several miles west of McDonough. In 1852, Markharn sold the house in McDonough, which he had undoubtedly rented out after his move to White Chimneys, and about 1853, the Markhams removed to Atlanta and became prominent in that citys early development. Their Properties included Atlant's noted Markham House Hotel.

The 1852 purchaser of the Brown House was Asa R. Brown, for whose family, the building acquired its present name. Asa Brown was a son of Benjamin Brown, a native of Scotland who had settled at Peachstone Shoals in Newton County, just across the Henry County line at South River. Asa Brown was married to the former Sarah Knott, daughter of James Knott who owned McDonough's Globe Hotel, one of the town's very first hotels and which still stands near the Court Square on Fayetteville Street. This fact proved significant in the later history of the Brown House. Asa Brown was a businessman with store property in McDonough, and as he had six daughters, it seems certain that the Brown House was a private residence for his family during his lifetime. Its use as a hotel appears to date from after his death in 1874. The Asa Brown family occupied the Brown House during the Confederate era when McDonough witnessed many stirring scenes and suffered the effects of invasion by Union forces in 1864.

The earliest known reference to the Brown House as a hotel is found in March of 1883 when the local newspaper noted that Mrs. Asa Brown was having a second floor added to the house, which was ideIltified as her "hotel building." Thus the history of this building as a hotel dates from sometime between Mr. Brown s death in 1874 and the enlargement of the house in 1883. In the process of installing the full second floor, Mrs. Brown had the old heart-pine walls and ceilings removed from several of the original downstairs rooms and used their boards to make flooring for the new additions. This causes the second floor rooms to appear older than they really are. The 1883 changes undoubtedly in- cluded the construction of the two-tiered front porch, with Victorian trim, which marked the facade of the house until it was removed in 1954. Balusters from this 1883 porch are incorporated into the present upper level of the porch as it now (1987) stands.

An item in the Henry County Weekly of 21 July 1893 states:

"The old reliable Brown House is voted by the traveling public to be the most hospitable and home like hotel between Macon and Atlanta. There is no better hostess than Aunt Sallie Brown and no more genial and clever gentleman than Alex Lemon."

Alex Lemon had married Eudora Brown, Mrs. Brown's daughter, and he assisted in the hotel's operation. It is clear that as the daughter of McDonough's old hotel-keeper James Knott, Mrs. Brown was well qualified to conduct her business at the Brown House. This business no doubt prospered when the East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia Railroad was opened through McDonough in 1882, bringing a burst of commiercial activity to the town which it had not experienced since it had been bypassed by the old Macon and Western Railroad in 1843. Between 1843 and 1882, McDonough business had been in decline while the railroad towns had prospered, but in 1882 this completely changed and it accounted for Mrs. Brown's enlarging her hotel in 1883. McDonough continued to prosper, with sev- eral relatively minor economic interruptions, until the great Cotton Crash of 1921 and subsequent depression.

Among Mrs. Brown's additions to the hotel was the large upstairs back room which served a needed and historic purpose for Henry County during the year 1897, when the county court met there while the new Court llouse was under construction. This room was undoubtedly built to contain several beds which could be rented at lower rates than the private rooms. Under later ownership by the Fouche family it is known that six or seven beds were kept in this room. Such facilities were common in old taverns and hotels and Mrs. Brown had undoubtedly seen this done at the old Globe Hotel in McDonough's early history. Early travelers accounts often refer not only to several beds in a common room, but often, at crowded times, to several occupants in each bed.

The popular "Aunt Sallie" Brown died in 1898. The Brown children, all reared in the house, were: Mary Brown, wife of James W. Alexander; Mattie Brown, wife of Silas Moseley Oglesby; Jessie Brown, wife of Robert Humphrey Tomlinson; Ida Brown, wife of Charles Linn; Miss Lillian Brown; and Eudora Brown, wife of A. A. (Alex) Lemon. In addition to these six Brown daughters, a niece of the family, Elizabeth Hartsfield Dickerson, also grew up in the house during this time. She was the grandmother of Adair Dickerson of McDonough.

After Mrs. Brown's death, Mr. and Mrs. Alex Lemon continued to-operate the Brown House unitil they both were deceased in 1904, whereupon their children Asa A. Lemon, Alexander- Fouche Lemon and Annie Lemon (Mrs. Claude Spencer), sold the place to Mr. and Mrs. J. A. Fouche of Dawson, Georgia. Under the Fouche ownership, and according to the needs of the times, the Brown House served as a private residence for the Fouche family, as a hotel and boarding house. After the Great Depression, it was primarily a private residence and boarding house, and a major feature of the establishment: was the Brown House Dining Room which occupied a kitchen and dining wing added off the south rear of the house and connected by the back porch. (This wing was removed in 1954.) During the years of its service the large dining room contained three long tables and one family table, all covered with white linens, and seated perhaps as many as fifty persons

at one time. The Henry County Grand Jury habitually took meals there as did many businessmen of the community. According to the custom of the day, it primarily served gentlemen, as ladies seldom took meals in public or even serni- public establishments. Breakfast and dinner, as the large mid-day meal was then called, were the meals customarily served to the public. A standard and popular feature of Mrs. J. A. Fouche's breakfast table was her corn cakes, and a regular item on her dinner table was a particularly good pickled coleslaw. This mid-day dinner was a substantial affair consisting, not only in public rooms, but in private houses as well, of several large platters of meats of different kinds, a large variety of vegetables, fresh breads, sweetmeats and a variety of cakes and pies.

Servants of the Fouches, kriown and loved by all the conimunity, included Aunt Doll who was the cook for many years; Blind Bob (Bob Tomlinson), who was water-boy and wood-cutter to supply wood for cooking and heating; and Lottie, upstairs maid, who was brought from Butler, Georgia, to assist in the house.

A feature of the grounds for generations has been the big magnolia tree which still flourishes beside the front porch and which Mrs. Fouche remembered as being in full bloom in the year of her 18th birthday. Mrs. Fouche's inter- ests included ornamental gardening and one of her prizes was a green rose, so called because its blooms bore a green cast. Under the Fouche ownership, the house contained fine and valuable pieces of old furniture and porcelain which had been passed down in the Fouche family since the 18th Century.

Mr. J. A. Fouche, fondly remembered as a tall, slender bearded gentleman, served Henry County as Clerk of the Superior Court from 1906 to 1914, and again from 1922 until his death on 4 March 1923. His daughter, Miss Bess Fouche, a beloved lady of Henry County, served as Court Clerk from 1923 to 1929, and again from 1950 to 1968. She became the heir to the Brown House and resold it in 1954 to Mr. and Mrs. Marshall Goodhue, who used the building as their resi- dence and as a law office for Mrs. Goodhue, who was the well-known Hattie Goodhue of McDonough. The Goodhues made several changes to the house, including the removal of the long Victorian porch and its replacement by the present two-tiered portico. Interior walls were covered with paneling, the kitchen and dining wing was removed and other changes were made.

In 1982, Marshall Goodhue sold the Brown House to Deitrick Spille, who with his wife occupied the house for four years. In 1986, the Spilles sold the property to Mr. and Mrs. William R. Smith of McDonough, who have offered the historic building to Henry County Landmarks, Inc., for use as a county museum and as a memorial to their daughter, Frances Smith Belcher.

[References: Vessie Thrasher Rainer, Henry County, Georgia; The Mother of Counties, published by the Henry County historical Foundation, Inc., 1971, and Henry County, Georgia, Landmark Houses, privately published by Dr. K. A. Rainer, Jr., 1986; research notes of Nell Cook Lovell, McDonough, Ga.; and research of Joseph Henry Hightower Moore, Towaliga Farm, Henry County, Ga. 5 Nov. 1987.]