The 19,000 square foot, three-story mansion - a historic landmark since 1989 and considered the largest American wooden frame structure surviving from the 18^th century - was the last of Providence’s large Georgian style houses.

Built in 1791 for the Providence shipping merchant Joseph Nightingale, it was located next to the identical 1788 mansion of his business partner, John Innes Clark (which burned in 1849) and across the street from the 1786 brick mansion built by John Brown (restored by John Nicholas Brown and donated to the Rhode Island Historical Society in 1942).

These houses, with commanding views of the Providence River’s ships and wharves, served as a testament to wealth built in an Atlantic economy fueled by the slave trade. In 1814, Nicholas Brown II, the university’s namesake, purchased the mansion from Nightingale’s heirs. Five generations of the Brown family lived in the house until 1985, adapting and modernizing the property to meet their needs and tastes.

The Nightingale-Brown House includes additions designed by architects Thomas Tefft (1853) to provide a brick carriage house and stable, and Richard Upjohn (1862-64) to house the library collection of John Carter Brown (1797-1874), who began in 1846 to assemble what is perhaps the premier collection of “Americana” in the world. His son, John Nicholas Brown I, provided the funds to endow the John Carter Brown Library to which he donated the collection upon his death in 1900. This library, whose collection was expanded beyond books to encompass maps, atlases, manuscripts, and prints, is now located at 94 George Street, on the corner of the main green at Brown University.

In 1890, the firm of Boston landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted designed the garden and grounds of the Nightingale-Brown House. During the 1920s, John Nicholas Brown II—who had graduated from Harvard University with a concentration in the History and Literature of Classical Cultures—began to restore and redecorate the building to emphasize its 18th century history, using classical European and American colonial motifs, which are still visible on the first floor.

Beginning in 1987 the Nightingale-Brown House underwent renovation to address problems including rot, termite infestation, and unintended damage from past alterations. Structural engineers reinforced the inadequate original post-and-beam framing with steel and carpenters restored interior woodwork and decorative details. The living spaces and furnishings on the first floor were returned to their mid-twentieth-century appearance while upper floors were converted for academic uses.

The house reopened in 1993 after a seven-year restoration. This extensive renovation was made possible by the sale in 1989 of a bookcase-on-desk, made in Newport by Townsend-Goddard in the 1760s, for $12.1 million—the highest price ever paid at auction for a decorative art object. The proceeds from the sale were used to restore the house and to endow the John Nicholas Brown Center. A replica of the desk is on display in the Parlor.