The Brown House was built about 1850 by Nathan Haynes and was purchased about 1851 by merchant and planter William Gainer Brown, whose family kept it for more than 125 years. Originally known as Woodlawn Terrace, the house became part of the North Harris Street Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places. During the 1850s, an itinerant artist painted portraits of William and Miriah Brown for $75 plus room and board. On Saturday, November 26, 1864, Union Major General William T. Sherman chose the house as his overnight headquarters while the Left Wing of his army, having entered Washington County on the 24th, moved into Sandersville and camped in a broad meadow across the road. The house was selected because it was spacious, and from its hilltop Sherman could see the road from the center of town as well as nearby tents and campfires. He ate supper with Mrs. Brown and her four children, a 15-year-old daughter and three younger sons. A story tells of Federal soldiers searching the yard for hidden valuables who began digging up what they suspected was a child's grave until the cook ran from the kitchen shouting and brandishing a large butcher knife, driving them away. The house contains a fainting couch on which Sherman is believed to have napped that afternoon and a small leather trunk that William Brown took to the war. While Sherman stayed there, Brown was working at the Savannah salt works, where he was captured when Sherman's army reached Savannah in December 1864. Brown had begun service in February 1862 as a sergeant in an artillery battery of the Georgia State Troops, became an officer in Company D of the 59th Georgia Volunteer Infantry Regiment by May of that year, and resigned from the Confederate army in January 1864. After the war he served in the Georgia Legislature, and he and Miriah Brown were buried in Sandersville's Old City Cemetery. Sherman held the Left Wing at Sandersville until he learned that the Right Wing, marching from the southwest, had come abreast of it near Tennille along the line of the Central of Georgia Railroad. On Sunday morning, November 27, he left Woodlawn Terrace with his staff and cavalry escort, rode through Sandersville, and moved south over a sandy road through pine woods to Tennille, where he met the Right Wing's 17th Corps and continued the march to the sea. Changes and additions were made to the house in 1905, and the Washington County Historical Society purchased and restored it in 1989.