01
The Log House
Hand hewn logs, cut on this ground and raised in the 1790's. Somebody covered them in brick a hundred years later. We are taking it off by hand.
They were not family, and they took it on anyway.
William Brown owned this house last. He was not kin to the Latimers and had no obligation to any of it. He spent part of his final years finding out who had lived here before him, and then he made sure the house would outlive him.
- $1.95 million
- What the county paid in 2015
- $500,000
- What he left for the park
- 2026
- When the house changed hands
01 · The last owner
He wanted to know whose house it had been.
William I. Brown was the last private owner of this house. He was not a Latimer and had no family claim on any of it. In his final years he asked Tommy Latimer, a descendant of Colonel Jonathan, to trace the ownership back, and Tommy put together a documented chain of deeds running from 1787 into the 1920s.
A man can own an old house for years and never ask that question. Mr. Brown asked it, got the answer in writing, and then acted on it.
02 · The codicil
What he put in writing.
In 2015 Sumner County bought the land and the house from him for $1.95 million, and the Liberty Creek school campus was built on it. Mr. Brown sold it. He did not give it away and he never pretended otherwise.
What he did give was a codicil to his will, in 2016, leaving five hundred thousand dollars to the County to establish a public park on the property. He did not leave the house out of it. He named the house as the thing the park was to be built around.
“the historic home currently situated thereon being permanently maintained by the County as the park's centerpiece.”
The park was to carry both their names. The William and Martha Brown Park. Martha's name sits beside his on the sign and on the instrument.
The money was restricted. It was to be held in a separate account and spent only on the park it was given for. That restriction is the whole reason the record that follows matters.
03 · The record
What happened to the money.
That is not what happened to it. The five hundred thousand dollars was wrongfully confiscated and put into the school system's eight million dollar education technology trust, a fund it was never left to, and combined with it. Money given to keep this house standing could not be spent on keeping it standing, or even on maintaining it, while an alternate park plan moved ahead that left the house out entirely. For most of the decade after the gift the house stood empty and the work did not begin.
A small group of county commissioners caught it in 2023 and led the charge to correct it. They got the five hundred thousand dollars separated back out of that trust and returned to the county, which took until 2025. In 2026 the Commission voted to convey the house and its parcel to a nonprofit organized to care for it, and the deed was recorded on the twenty seventh of August. The Friends of the Latimer House have held it since.
- 2016
- The codicil was written, with the house named as the park's centerpiece.
- 2023
- A small group of commissioners caught the diversion.
- 2025
- The $500,000 was separated back out of the trust and returned to the county.
- 2026
- The deed was recorded on August 27, and the house changed hands.
While the alternate plan was still being pushed, Mr. Brown's niece wrote to the county mayor and to every county commissioner to say plainly what her uncle had wanted. She had been asked what a park meant. She answered that it meant the yard around the house.
“It is impossible to interpret what Bill thought or wanted beyond what he had stated in his will: to maintain the house and have a small park.”
Asked what would satisfy her uncle, she was specific. The grass mowed by the county. Invasive shrubs removed. Something that looked like the yard they had kept there. That is the park in the codicil, and the house is the middle of it.
04 · Keeping the promise
One sentence, and the work it makes.
The codicil is the reason there is a park here, and the reason the house is still standing in the middle of it. Everything this organization does is measured against the sentence Mr. Brown put in it.
He was not family and he owed this house nothing. He took it on anyway, and left it to the rest of us to finish.
Keep going
The rest of the story.
02
The Latimers
Charles Latimer built the house. His father Jonathan came home from Saratoga, put the family in ox carts, and brought them to Tennessee.
04
The Park
0.805 acres, with the house at the middle of it, named in the codicil as the park's centerpiece.
There is a lot of work ahead, and we would welcome your help.
Every gift goes into the house and the ground around it. Thank you.