George Brown Mansion

The George Brown Mansion in Chesterton, Indiana, was built in eighteen eighty-five for George Brown, a successful farmer who ran a farm of about nine hundred acres and supplied cordwood to the Porter County brickyards. The house is Queen Anne in character, the asymmetrical Victorian style that announced wealth through its complexity, with contrasting red brick and white limestone, two-story bay windows, and decorative woodwork. In a town of modest frame houses, a mansion like this was a civic statement as much as a private home.

Brown became one of the significant landholders of Porter County, benefiting from the same railroad access to Chicago markets that had drawn settlers to the region in the first place. The building survives as a history museum administered by the Westchester Township History Museum, which means the house Brown built to project his success now serves as the archive of the community he helped build.