History of Detroit, a chronicle of its progress, its industries, its institutions, and the people of the fair City of the straits, / by Paul Leake ... [Vol. 3]

HISTORY OF DETROIT

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home ties and set forth on an independent career. Very soon afterward, however, he responded to the call of higher duty, as he tendered
his services in defense of the Union, whose integrity was in jeopardy
through armed rebellion. His youthful loyalty and patriotism thus
prompted him to enlist as a private in an Ohio regiment of volunteer
infantry, with which he went to the front and with which he gave
faithful and gallant service until the expiration of his one hundred
days' term of enlistment, when he received his honorable discharge.
In later years he manifested his continued interest in his old comrades
in arms by retaining membership in the Grand Army of the Republic.
After the close of his military career Mr. Brown located at Bellefontaine, the judicial center of his native county, where for a time he
was employed as clerk in a dry goods store. He finally purchased the
business and after conducting the same for a considerable period he
removed to Rushsylvania, near his old home farm, where he engaged in
the same line of enterprise. After a short time he disposed of his
stock and store and turned his attention to the life-insurance business.
Later he took up the fire insurance line, and in this field of business
he attained unqualified success and high reputation. He became known
as an authority in the matter of fire insurance and both as an underwriter and adjuster was identified with leading insurance companies
for many years, this important line of enterprise continuing to constitute his principal vocation until the close of his active career and his
retirement having come only when impaired health demanded a cessation of his activities.
About the year 1885 Mr. Brown removed to Detroit, where he passed
the remainder of his life and where he became one of the most prominent and influential factors in the field of fire insurance, in connection
with which his services were much in requisition as an adjuster. Soon
after he established his home in Detroit, Mr. Brown became associated
with his brother J. H., who had previously located here, in the organization of the Brown Brothers Tobacco Company, in which concern he
was not an active executive, as his brother, a practical man of business,
assumed the supervision of the enterprise. The company erected a
large factory building on Monroe avenue and built up a large and
substantial business, the products of the establishment finding a wide
sale throughout various sections of the Union. Mr. Brown continued
to be one of the interested principals in this important industrial enterprise until the same was sold to the American Tobacco Company, about
the year 1900.
During the last eight years of his life Mr. Brown was virtually an
invalid, and he bore his sufferings and enforced inactivity with characteristic fortitude and equipoise until death released the weary spirit
and he was summoned to the life eternal, on the 23rd of February,
1903, secure in the high regard of all who knew him and with a record
for high achievement as one of the world's noble army of productive
workers. Through his well ordered endeavors he accumulated a competency, but he had none of the bigotry and intolerance of the average
"self-made" man, as he was too broad-minded, kindly and generous to
permit the assumption of such attitudes. He was a man of buoyant,
genial and optimistic qualities, and his was the faculty of winning to
himself stanch and appreciative friends. His death occurred at St.
Augustine, Florida, where he had passed the winter, and his remains
were brought to Detroit for interment in Woodmere cemetery, where
a fine monument marks his last resting place.
Though never animated by aught of ambition for the honors or
emoluments of political office, Mr. Brown was insistently progressive
and public-spirited and took a lively interest in all that touched the