In late 1861 and early 1862, as Union and Confederate armies vied for control of Kentucky, the Brown-Lanier House, then owned by Thompson Brown, served at various times as headquarters for both armies. After the Union victory at the January 19, 1862, Battle of Mill Springs, it became a makeshift hospital where surgeons treated soldiers from both sides. Confederate General William H. Carroll made his headquarters here in early 1862, and tradition holds that Confederate General Felix Zollicoffer moved into the house just before the Battle of Mill Springs, where he lost his life. During the Confederate retreat, General George Bibb Crittenden crossed the Cumberland and came up the ferry road to make final preparations here for the long retreat into Tennessee. Soon after, Union General Mahlon Manson occupied the house, where he and his staff feasted on ham and other delicacies left behind when the Brown family fled. During the Civil War, artillery shells struck the house; one passed through it, and another smashed an inkwell before penetrating a hall door, which R.L. Lanier later displayed in his Monticello business until it was destroyed by fire in 1932. Thompson C. Brown built the house about 1860, but his finances declined during the war, and in 1869 he sold it to Lloyd Addison Lanier, Brown's brother-in-law, a merchant and successful river ferry owner. The house remained in the Lanier family into the twentieth century.