19,000 square feet, six bedrooms, seven bathrooms, three kitchens, and an acre of land compose the Nightingale-Brown House. Constructed in 1792, the house was purchased from the original owners, the Nightingale Family, by Nicholas Brown in 1814. Five generations of Browns would inhabit the house until 1985, when the home was donated to Brown University. The house, however, was far from ready to support the scholars who were meant to take over the space. The all-wood home had serious structural problems that would take eight years and eight million dollars to fix. Now alive with students and staff, the building has made the transition from home to the Brown Center for Public Humanities. (Caption written by Alex Goodman for the course, “Museum Collections and Collecting,” Fall 2012)

The Nightingale-Brown House was built in 1792 for Providence merchant Joseph Nightingale. One of the grandest houses in the city, it served as a testament to the wealth of its owner, who was founder of the merchant partnership of Clark and Nightingale. The location of the house on College Hill gave Nightingale a commanding view of the Providence River and its myriad ships, wharves, and warehouses filled with goods shipped from ports around the world. Nightingale was one of the first Providence merchants to build a house of this scale on College Hill, along with his neighbor John Brown, whose home – now a museum – John Quincy Adams considered "the most magnificent and elegant private mansion that I have ever seen on this continent.”

In 1814, Nicholas Brown, after whom the university is named, purchased the home from Nightingale’s heirs, becoming the first of five successive generations of the Brown family to live here. Over the years, the Brown family adapted the large Georgian-style home and its surrounding property to meet the needs and tastes of each generation. The Nightingale-Brown House includes additions built for scholar and bibliophile John Carter Brown by architects Thomas Tefft (1853) and Richard Upjohn (1862-64). (His books are now at Brown’s John Carter Brown Library.) The firm of Boston landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted designed the garden and grounds in 1890. During the 1920s, John Nicholas Brown redecorated the house in American colonial revival motifs.

From 1985 to 1993 the Nightingale-Brown House underwent extensive renovation to correct 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 living spaces and furnishings on the first floor were returned to their mid-twentieth-century appearance. Upper floors were converted for academic uses.

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