The William Brown House, built between 1758 and 1764 overlooking the South River, remains one of the mysteries of the lost town of London. William Brown intended it as both his dwelling and an upscale tavern, but he built it when much of London Town had already been deserted, leaving open questions about whether he hoped to restore the town’s standing, profit from the remaining ferry trade, or display his wealth and ambitions. He never finished the building and lost ownership in the 1780s because of debt. In 1828, Anne Arundel County bought the house and 10 acres to use as an almshouse, or county poor house, and poor and mentally ill residents lived there until 1965, when the Welfare Act reformed treatment of the poor. Concerned citizens saved the house in the early 1970s, and it became a National Historic Landmark. Measuring 50 by 40 feet and 49 feet high, it is the only known structure in the Chesapeake Bay region with header bond brickwork on all four walls, an expensive technique that usually signified the owner’s wealth. The front facing what was once Scott Street and the riverside have uniformly colored brick, while the other two sides have mixed coloring, suggesting they were less important; a brick on the lower right front bears the initials “PS,” possibly those of an unidentified brick mason. The house also has an unusual floor plan that supports the idea that it was meant mainly as a tavern or inn, with four elevated corner rooms that may have given lodgers more privacy and an arched opening in an interior brick wall that may have passed beverages from a corner bar to a larger public room. Brown was a ferrymaster, tavernkeeper, joiner, cabinetmaker, and building contractor whose shop stood nearby, and he supervised construction of the Dr. Upton Scott House in Annapolis, completed in 1764 and closely resembling his own. He also owned slaves and indentured servants, and in 1753 he advertised a reward for the capture of a runaway convict servant named Edward Merriott.