Farther and Gay Castle
Posted by: 
MNSearchers
N 44° 41.782 W 095° 19.354
15T E 315981 N 4951845
This house known as Farther and Gay was a center of hospitality and happy family life for the short time Brown, his half Indian wife and their 12 children lived in it.
Waymark Code: WM1TVW
Location: Minnesota, United States
Date Posted: 07/09/2007
Views: 100
On August 19, 1862 during the Sioux uprising the Brown's were forced to flee their home which was looted and burned by the attacking indians.
Joseph Renshaw Brown was born January 5, 1805, in Pennsylvania. Apprenticed as a lad to a printer, he ran away to join the army and came to Fort Snelling as a 15-year-old musician in 1820. When he died November 9, 1870, Brown had been a resident of Minnesota for most of those fifty years and was widely known as Minnesota’s oldest white settler.
During his half century in Minnesota, Joseph R. Brown was a significant figure in territorial and state politics and exercised great influence on how the region developed. Even amidst such noted contemporaries as Alexander Ramsey, Henry Rice, Henry Sibley and Franklin Steele (all of whom had counties named after them), Brown was hailed as “the brainiest of them all,” and “the chief counselor of the agents and the government.” Over the span of his long and varied career Minnesota evolved from a wilderness to a rapidly growing state with a population of nearly half a million. And Joseph R. Brown was always at the center of the action.
Enlisted in the army as a private, Brown quickly rose to the rank of first sergeant and Acting Sergeant Major. On his discharge from the army in 1828, he became a fur trader for the American Fur Company at posts in Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin, returning in 1830 to Minnesota as an independent trader on the St. Croix River. In 1832 he set up a trading post and farm at Oliver’s Grove, now Hastings.
He married three times, each time to a part-Indian woman, and his children were raised in both Indian and white worlds. Brown himself spoke Dakota and was at home in both worlds, an advantage that served him well during his tenure as Indian Agent (1858-1861) and in the years following the Dakota War (1862-1866).
“ was, all in all, one of the most remarkable men which our northwestern frontier has developed, and it would require literally a volume to give the leading incidents of his long and eventful career. In the various and contradictory characters of soldier, pioneer, legislator, lumberman, public officer, editor, politician, trader, inventor and town-site speculator, he showed the versatility of his genius and energy of his character.”
When the Dakota and Ojibwe treaties of 1837 opened the country east of the Mississippi to settlement, he was one of the first on the spot, opening a large farm, store and steamboat landing on Grey Cloud Island. He also had a townsite claim across from Fort Snelling (as well as claims in Prescott and Bayport held in the name of relatives). From an early date he had crews cutting timber in the St. Croix pineries, and was the area’s first Justice of the Peace, as well as a major in the Wisconsin militia.
Marker Type:: Roadside
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