Brown, Jim, House

About this property

The Jim Brown House, also known as the Brown-Bender House, sits east of Ira and Akron-Peninsula Roads in Peninsula, Ohio, United States. Constructed in 1840, it sits back off the road, up a hidden, winding and steep driveway. The house is a four over four Greek Revival House. This simply means the layout of the house has four rooms over four rooms. This style of house was popular in the 19th century in America as the country greatly identified with Greek philosophy and politics. The house is white, supposedly resembling the great marble architecture of Greece. Also typical of this style, the roof has a lower pitch and the entrance door is framed with wide trim. The two story house has a commanding presence, sitting upon a hill with two chimneys and nine windows with green shudders. The land also includes several over buildings. The big raised bank barn was built in 1886. This barn, the house, and Jim Brown's grave marker have all been listed in the National Register of Historic Places. A greenhouse that was built in 1930 is located approximately one hundred feet south of the house. A small part of the farmstead is the orchard. There are a variety of fruit trees and grapevines in this small area. Thirty-five acres of farmland are also included in the property. Most of this acreage is located west of Akron-Peninsula Road. This land lies in the Cuyahoga flood plain since the river flows through a section of the land. It has been flooded numerous times. The house has not been affected by flooding since it sits a lot higher than the fields. More notable than the actual house is to whom the house belonged. Jim Brown, the owner, was a notorious counterfeiter. This man generally sold five thousand dollars of fake, counterfeit bills for one thousand dollars of legitimate money, taking advantage of the contemporary economy. During the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress authorized issuing American currency. This was a further step to gaining independence from England, no longer relying on English money. At the time, paper money was produced by banks (approximately sixteen hundred nationwide), regulated by state charters. With seven thousand different types of banknotes, it was extremely difficult for anyone to determine which ones originated from legitimate sources. Brown needed printing plates and other expensive equipment to start, and Brown was determined to use legitimate money to purchase them. One night, he took five horses from his stables and rode towards Pittsburgh, leaving the horses at thirty-mile intervals. In the afternoon, he walked into a Pittsburgh bank with a fraudulent credentials and certified bank draft; upon receiving his money, he rushed home, changing horses at each interval. Upon returning home, he immediately began splitting wood under his neighbor's window, and when the neighbor's wife came to investigate the noise, he learned from her that the time was 7:30AM. Investigators suspected that Brown had been responsible for defrauding the bank, but when the neighbor's wife testified that he was at home, the investigation was dropped: surely Brown could not have been responsible if he were already at home on the following morning. Brown employed an identical strategy several additional times, defrauding banks as far away as Boston, Massachusetts.

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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