Galveston Historical Foundation
March 3, 2010
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Molly Dannenmaier
Director of Marketing and Public Relations
409-765-7834

Lunchtime Lecture on History of the Brown Family to be Held Friday, March 19 at Ashton Villa

On Friday, March 19, 2010 at 12:15, Galveston Historical Foundation site manager Joseph Pellerin will host a lecture at Ashton Villa, 2328 Broadway in Galveston, on the history of the mansion’s famous first family, the Browns. The event is free and open to the public. Participants are invited to bring their own brown-bag lunch and enter the mansion through the front doors facing Broadway. The event is one of several events being held this year to celebrate Ashton Villa’s 150th anniversary.

Ashton Villa, Galveston’s oldest mansion, was built in 1859 in grand Italianate style by James Moreau Brown. At the time he commissioned the building of Ashton Villa, Brown was the third wealthiest man on Galveston Island and the fifth wealthiest man in the state of Texas. He was born in 1821, in New York State, the youngest of 16 children. At the age of 12 he ran away. He was found two years later, taken back to New York, and apprenticed to a brick mason for the next four years. At the age of 18, he left, and began to travel south, with a knowledge of architecture, brick masonry, and cisterns.

He first appears on a Galveston census record in 1843 in which he is listed as the owner of a hardware store on Strand. That hardware operation would eventually become the largest wholesale hardware dealer west of the Mississippi River.

He met and married Rebecca Ashton Stoddart, at Trinity Episcopal Church. He was 26 and she was 16 when they married and set up house on Market Street. The first three of the family’s five children would be born before the family moved to Ashton Villa.

The lunchtime lecture will provide many more details about the lives and fortunes of Ashton Villa’s first family and their children, grandchildren, and descendents—some of whom are still leaders in Galveston today. For more information about the Ashton Villa lunchtime lecture series, contact Denise Alexander, Director of Heritage Programs, at 409-765-7834 or education@galvestonhistory.org.