William Thomas Brown, born in 1848 in Illinois, married Martha "Mattie" J. Housewright in 1871, and they moved to Wylie soon after its establishment on a newly constructed railroad line from Paris to Dallas built by the Gulf, Colorado, and Santa Fe Railroad company in 1886. In 1887, Thomas Brown and his business partner John H. Burns purchased more than 31 acres, including this site, from Nancy and James Vaughn Russel. The Browns secured this home site in 1888 and in 1905 replaced their original residence with an ornate Queen Anne style house featuring six rooms downstairs and one large room upstairs. Typical of the Victorian era, the house has an asymmetrical plan, an elaborate roofscape, and an unusual variety of materials, with the gables of its four dormers covered in original fishscale shingles. Its prominent features include a wraparound porch with slender paired Doric columns, a dentil frieze, Palladian windows, and polygonal bays with cutaway corners on their side elevations. Thomas Brown died in 1907, two years after the house was built, but Mattie Brown remained there until her death in 1922. The house then passed to the Browns' adopted daughter, Tennie Lee (Rattaree) Creel, and stayed in her family until 1931.