Last week I decided to take a local trip to the Historic London Town and Gardens, which is located in Edgewater, Maryland. It was during the Maryland Day Weekend where the admission is free. (The usual price is $12 per person.)
London Town, which was named after London in England, was founded in 1683 and it was initially prosperous for most of the 100 years that it was in existence. The town's fortunes started to decline due to a change in trade routes and people began leaving in droves. The majority of the buildings in that town were made from wood and they eventually deteriorated after the town was abandoned. The sole surviving house from that period is now known as the William Brown House. The main reason why the building survives is because it was made from brick.
When I was checking out the grounds one of the employees casually mentioned the misadventures of the builder of that brick building that now bears his name, William Brown. His misadventures reminded me of the current misadventures of a person who is now running for president. After I returned home I did a few Google searches and I came across this document titled Ambition in Brick: The William Brown House, 1758-1785. It's essentially someone's dissertation on the William Brown House and the man responsible for building it. Most of this document focuses on the technical specs of the William Brown House, which is great if you’re someone who is interested in the 18th century architecture styles of Great Britain and its colonies. But there is a section, staring on document page 23 (PDF page 26), dedicated to the life and career of William Brown. There are so many parallels between Brown and Donald Trump that it seems unreal at times.
William Brown was born in 1727. His father, Robert Brown, was a moderately well-off tobacco planter. Robert Brown's father, Abel Brown, came from Scotland. Donald Trump's mother came from Scotland so both Trump and William Brown had Scottish ancestry.
William Brown decided against following in his father's footsteps for a few reasons. The tobacco market was erratic with boom and bust cycles. On top of that, due to the tradition of primogeniture, William Brown, as the youngest of 12 children, had very little chance of actually inheriting his father's business and property. So Brown took up carpentry and he initially worked in London Town as a cabinet maker. This is way similar to how Donald Trump's father, Fred Trump, started out in real estate when he took night classes and correspondence courses in carpentry, blueprint reading, plumbing, masonry, and electrical wiring.
Both Donald Trump and William Brown grew up in more modest surroundings but they aspired to be part of the elite. Donald Trump grew up in Queens but he aspired to be among Manhattan's old money elite. William Brown grew up in middle class surroundings and he wasn't from the wealthy class that formed the social and political power base in the 1700s but he aspired to be among them. They both built ostentatious buildings as a way of making a name for themselves.
Donald Trump managed to save money on his building projects by not paying his contractors, many of whom were local family-owned businesses. William Brown used a way to save money on his building projects that was perfectly legal at the time—employing indentured servants and convict servants, which was much cheaper than actually employing apprentices and journeymen.
Both Donald Trump and William Brown engaged in side ventures. Trump had Trump Steaks, Trump University, Trump Vodka, and several others, many of which ended up bankrupt. William Brown operated his own ferry business. He also started his own tobacco farm when he purchased 300 acres of a tobacco field.
Both Trump and Brown frequently borrowed money, which sometimes landed both of them in the courtroom. There's Trump’s ongoing civil fraud case regarding the values of his properties, which also happens to be one of the many civil and criminal cases that Trump is dealing with. William Brown is mentioned 98 times in the Judgement Records of the Provincial Court for Anne Arundel County. Thirty dealt with the renewal of licenses for the operation of his South River Ferry. Fourteen comprised of miscellaneous civil cases. The rest involved the collection of money and the payment of debts.
Just as Donald Trump manipulated a complex scheme of credit and borrowing in order to build Trump Tower and his many other building projects, William Brown managed a similar complex scheme of credit, which enabled him to buy two adjoining lots in London Town in 1758 so he could build his most ambitious project. Then he borrowed an additional $500 (which was a huge sum back then) to make his ambitious building project a reality. The brick building, now known as the William Brown House, was completed in 1764.
If you look at the photo at the beginning of this post, you'd think that it's a small building. While it would be considered small by today's standards, back in the late 1700s it would be considered as state of the art opulent building. It was made from brick, which was a more expensive building material at the time but it was more durable than the wood structures that made up the bulk of London Town. The brick structure also made that building stand out from the others.
At the time it seemed like an ideal location to have a business that was both a tavern and an inn. It was located on the main road that connected Philadelphia to Williamsburg, Virginia. It was also located on the route of the ferry line that Brown owned.
The basement of the house was where the food was cooked and the servants slept at night. The ground floor included a tavern where people could stop by, have a drink or two, eat a meal, play cards, and gossip about the news of the day. The ground floor also included a couple of rooms where people could rent to spend the night. (I learned that it wasn't unusual to end up sharing a bed with a stranger.) The upper floor was where William Brown lived with his family and it was off-limits to the general public.
While it may have seemed like a great idea for William Brown to start his business, unfortunately the timing was not great. The building was built when London Town itself began to decline. So the tavern and inn attracted fewer customers than it would have if it had been built about 10-20 years earlier.
Just as Donald Trump faced bankruptcy, William Brown also faced bankruptcy. Building the William Brown House had put him in a lot of debt that he struggled to pay. Eventually Brown not only lost his brick building in London Town but he also lost his 300-acre plantation known as Covel's Cove. William Brown subsequently moved to Annapolis but not much is known about his life after he lost his properties.
As for Donald Trump, he was way more fortunate than William Brown. He has gone through multiple bankruptcies and he acts as if they were nothing. He kept on acting as if he was a successful businessman and, unlike William Brown, he had the mainstream media that was willing to provide fawning coverage to Trump while looking the other way on his failures. Trump was even given his own reality TV show for him to host. Of course there is his foray into politics, where he is now the single biggest threat to democracy that America has ever known.
While there was no broadcast media in William Brown's time, one could only speculate on what if William Brown was lucky enough to have the newspapers provide deferential and fawning coverage while overlooking his debts. He might have become the 18th century equivalent of a celebrity. It's quite possible that he would have gone on to create new businesses that may have also gone bankrupt. One could only guess if William Brown would have even attempted a political career and, if he did, would he have been as successful as Donald Trump.
As for the William Brown House, the state of Maryland took it over and converted it into an almshouse for the poor. It ran as an almshouse until 1965 and it is now run as a museum. You can take a virtual tour of the William Brown House right here. You can learn more about visiting London Town in person right here.
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