The Joseph R. Brown House was the first house built of quarried granite in the Minnesota River valley during the 1860s. Construction began in early summer of 1861, after Brown lost his position as Indian Agent, and ended in late spring of 1862, after which the Brown family moved in. The three-and-a-half-story, 19-room stone house used pinkish granite blocks from a nearby quarry and had lime-plastered interior walls tinted different colors in each room. Its first floor contained a wide central hall, kitchen, pantries, and storerooms, the second and third floors held parlors, sitting rooms, and bedrooms, and the attic had a billiard table and Joseph Brown’s desk. It was furnished with upholstered furniture, heavy curtains, bronze and crystal chandeliers, a piano, kerosene lamps, and the latest cooking and serving utensils, luxuries unusual for the time and place. Susan Frenier Brown, the daughter of a Dakota mother and French father, married Joseph R. Brown in 1836 and was also known by the Dakota name hin ya zi ce du ta win, or Soft Scarlet Down. They had 11 children, most of whom were at the house in 1862 when the war began. On August 18, 1862, some of the Brown children were warned of trouble near the nearby village of Little Dog, and the next morning Peter Roulliard, a friend living with the Dakota, came pounding on the door to warn the family to flee. Susan Brown, her children, hired help, and neighbors escaped in ox-drawn wagons while Joseph Brown was away in New York. Soon afterward the house was gutted by fire, nearly all of the family’s belongings were lost or destroyed, only the exterior walls remained, and the house was never rebuilt. Susan and her children were taken captive on August 20, 1862, held in Little Crow’s encampment, and released at Camp Release six weeks later. The destruction of the house occurred during some Dakota Indians’ failed attempt to drive European and American settlers from the Dakotas’ southern Minnesota homeland in the United States and Dakota War of 1862. In 1937, the remains of the foundation and a small parcel of land were bought by the state of Minnesota for a wayside park. Joseph Renshaw Brown had come to the Minnesota frontier in 1820 at age 15 with Colonel Leavenworth’s regiment to help build what is now Fort Snelling, later became a fur trader, lumberman, journalist, founder of Henderson and Dakota (Stillwater), and served in both legislative houses, helping create the Minnesota Territory. He learned Dakota language and customs, served as an interpreter for the 1851 treaty of Traverse des Sioux, and was Indian Agent from 1857 to 1861. He was an instigator of the 1858 treaty that sold almost half of the Dakota’s remaining reservation to the United States government in exchange for annual cash payments, food, and cultural assimilation programs, strongly backed assimilation policy, and authored the Traders Paper, which directed that traders’ claims be paid from treaty annuity funds before the Dakota received their payments, making him a source of resentment among many Dakota. Joseph Brown died in New York City in 1870 and was buried at Henderson, Minnesota. Susan later moved to the Sisseton Agency, South Dakota, to be near her son Joseph, died on December 23, 1904, and was buried there.