Neill S. Brown

Neill Brown was the Whig who opposed the Mexican War, and that helped make him governor. By 1847 Tennesseans had grown weary of the fighting, and he narrowly beat Aaron Brown, no relation, who had been a strong supporter of it. He opposed the Wilmot Proviso, which would have banned slavery from the territory taken from Mexico. During his single term the state completed its school for the blind in Nashville and its school for the deaf in Knoxville. As minister to Russia from 1850 he warned American leaders that Lajos Kossuth, the exiled Hungarian leader, was a troublemaker.

What the plaque says

Neill S. Brown Three miles N.E. Neill S. Brown was born April 18, 1810. Veteran of Seminole War, in 1837 became member of State Legislature; in 1847, Governor of Tennessee. In 1850 he was U.S. Minister to Russia and 1870 member of the State Constitutional Convention. He died in 1886.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Pulaski Public Square and the Giles County Courthouse — 9.6 mi
  The 1909 courthouse and nineteenth-century storefronts on Pulaski's square, in the town where the Ku Klux Klan was founded and where the architect Moses McKissack III was born.
• James D. Vaughan Southern Gospel Music Museum — 25 mi
  A museum on the third floor of the Vaughan Municipal Building on the Lawrenceburg square, honoring the shape-note publisher who built a songbook, quartet and radio empire here from 1903.
• David Crockett State Park — 27 mi
  A Lawrenceburg park on Shoal Creek where Davy Crockett ran a gristmill, a powder mill and a distillery from 1817, and later broke with Andrew Jackson over Indian removal.

More markers nearby

• John Calvin Brown — steps away
• Aaron Venable Brown — 1.8 mi
• Walter Herschel Beech — 9.5 mi
• Donald Grady Davidson and John Crowe Ransom — 9.6 mi