Brown House

Ephriam Legrand Brown built this house in 1900. Born in Americus, Georgia, in 1859, he came to Florida at age sixteen and worked as a surveyor. In 1882 he married Julia Roberts of the Roberts Plantation on Lake Mills. He purchased a forty-acre parcel of land, where he built a log home and planted an orange grove. After the log home was destroyed by fire, the family lived in the barn while a new home was built, using charred but sound timbers from the earlier house for the floor joists. Citrus trees planted by Brown bore fruit until the freeze of 1985, when the Brown family was recognized by the Florida Department of Agriculture as a pioneer farm family under the One Hundred Year Farm Family Program.

Christmas, Florida · United States