“Let him who e’er in after days
Shall view this monument of praise,
For honor heave the patriot sigh
And for his country learn to die.”
Then this surely was an unusual man and such is the fact.
He was born of Quaker parentage, in the house long since known as the Warner mansion, about three and a half miles below Morrisville, on the banks of the Delaware River, where his father lived until the son Jacob was grown, and they removed to New York toward the close of the century.
From his eighteenth to his twenty-first year Jacob Brown taught school at Crosswicks, N. J., and passed the next two years in surveying lands in Ohio.
In 1798 he opened a select school in New York City, and at the same time studied law.
Some of his newspaper essays attracted the attention of General Alexander Hamilton, to whom he became secretary while that officer was acting General-in-Chief of the army raised in anticipation of a war with France.
When those war clouds disappeared Brown went to northern New York, purchased lands on the banks of the Black River, not far distant from Sackett’s Harbor, and founded the flourishing settlement of Brownsville, where he erected the first building within thirty miles of Lake Ontario.