Meet the Browns
The history of Mount Blaine features two owners, a father and son, who in turn feature prominently in the history of Washington County.
Washington & Jefferson College students and alumni know Matthew Brown (1776-1853) as the first president of what then was Washington College. He had arrived in Washington in 1805 to become First Presbyterian Church pastor, and by the following year he had made a sufficient enough impression to be chosen as head of the local institution of higher learning.
Religion and education didn’t necessarily mix, though. From the pulpit, the Rev. Brown denounced such leisure-time activities as dancing and card playing, and that didn’t sit well with certain influential townspeople.
Matthew Brown (1776-1853)
“An agreement was reached between the church and college, by separate voting, that one man should no longer undertake both the responsibilities of the church and college,” Helen Turnbull Waite Coleman wrote in “Banners in the Wilderness: The Early Years of Washington and Jefferson College.”
Brown resigned from his presidency in 1817 and left the congregation a few years later. He was about to move to Kentucky in 1822 when his friend Daniel Ralston, who was on the board of trustees at Jefferson College in Canonsburg, proposed he take over the top position there.
“The next morning, Commencement day in Canonsburg, Ralston’s committee escorted an understandably breathless and bewildered Matthew Brown to Jefferson College to accept formally its presidency,” Coleman wrote. “Before nine o’clock Brown had taken the oath of office, and by nightfall he had conferred diplomas on the students and made an impromptu baccalaureate address!”
At some point between then and his retirement in 1845, Brown set up residence at Mount Blaine in Peters Township, about four miles away from the college. He sold the property to his only son, Alexander Blaine Brown (1808-63), the following year.
The year after that, Alexander became Jefferson College’s president.
“When informed of his election, he was greatly surprised, and most earnestly remonstrated against it, as he entirely distrusted his own qualifications,” J.H. Beers & Co.’s “Commemorative Biographical Record of Washington County, Pennsylvania” reports.
“It was the desire of the trustees that he should be inaugurated the same evening while they were present, which gave him but an hour or two to prepare for the occasion. To a friend, he said that when he was being escorted to the college, he felt like one going to the gallows rather than to a scene of triumph.”
The younger Brown also doubled as a clergymen, including two stints at Center Presbyterian Church in Peters Township. He is buried in the church’s cemetery.