Isaac H. Brown

Isaac H. Brown (1812-1880) married with SARAH M. STOWE, dau. of Stephen Stowe and Harley Sage, on Sept. 28, 1834. She was born in Milford, Connecticut on Nov. 1, 1811. He was the well-known Sexton at Grace Church in New York City.

• 1850 census: Isaac H. Brown (37, b NY) and wife Sarah M. Brown (36, b Ct); in New York City, Ward 17, NY. He is sexton.
• 1855 census: Isaac H. Brown (42, b NYC) and wife Sarah M. Brown (37, b Ct); in New York City, 6th Election Dist, NY. He is a sexton.

Note is made of age discrepancies.

NY TIMES 8/23/1880: Death of Sexton Brown, the Veteran of Grace Church Dies in Connecticut. Malarial Fever the Cause.

"Isaac H. Brown, the venerable sexton of Grace Church, died yesterday morning at Branford, a little village a few miles north of New-Haven, Conn. He had been a leading figure in Metropolitan society for nearly half a century, having had the charge of most of the fashionable weddings and many of the funerals of noted personages among the Knickerbocker families."

Way Back Machine | A Sycophant’s Sycophant (7/11/2010)

By ALAN FEUER

Courtesy New York Public Library Isaac H. Brown was a sort of handyman to the smart set.

You could certainly make the argument that New York’s upper classes hardly want these days for personal attention, surrounded as they are by helicopter pilots who fly them to the Hamptons and private stylists who make haircut house calls. But even with today’s apparently recession-proof forms of conspicuous consumption, it would be hard to find a servant with the all-encompassing talents — the cradle-to-grave service — of Isaac H. Brown.

Mr. Brown, who died 130 years ago, was the longtime sexton at Grace Episcopal Church in Greenwich Village, an official title that belied his real role as the amanuensis to, and the arbiter of fashion in, Knickerbocker society. Working at the church from 1845 until his death in 1880, he was a handyman to the smart set: planning their weddings, arranging their soirées and seeing to their funerals when they died.

“Brown’s efficiency and authoritative manner lent plausibility when he offered to greet guests at the front of a home for a distracted hostess, and make sure the carriages were ready when the guests departed,” Eric Homburg wrote in “Mrs. Astor’s New York: Money and Social Power in a Gilded Age” (Yale University Press, 2004). “Brown knew just the right merchants from whom tables, chairs and the appropriate linen could be rented. He also ran a carriage-hire business, and those in society knew there was no reason to wait for the return of their own when one of Brown’s fleet was at hand.”

Weighing in at a prodigious 339 pounds, Isaac Brown was himself from the lower classes and worked as a carpenter until the Rev. Dr. Thomas H. Taylor appointed him sexton. In that role, he was responsible for keeping up the church: for lighting furnaces, sweeping aisles clean and collecting rents from pew-holders. At the same time, Mr. Homburg writes, “he cultivated the cooks, domestic servants and butlers of the wealthy, and learned what services were needed by the residents of Washington Square, Bond Street and Fifth Avenue.”

Mr. Brown’s specialty, of course, was planning parties; these he oversaw with a despotic manner and a contemptuous disdain for parvenus. According to his obituary in The New York Times (see below), “his office was besieged by fashionably dressed women” who all but begged him to manage what were known at the time as their “crushes.”

“To meet the emergency,” the paper wrote, “the popular sexton effected the organization of a corps of handsome young fellows, clerks in wholesale houses — sometimes styled ‘Brown’s Brigade’ and sometimes ‘Brown’s Five Hundred.’ They were bound to dress fashionably. Good dancing was a necessity, and there were certain rules that had to be observed.” (For one thing, no lifting of the hat next morning to a pretty lady the handsome young buck had flirted with the night before.)

Given his position, wealth and power, Isaac Brown — who was known as Brown, not Mr. Brown or Sexton Brown — cut an outsize figure in 19th-century New York, enough so that anecdotes about him have entered the city’s lore. There was, for instance, the night he carried Baron Rothschild on his back, across a muddy street, from one engagement to another. Later, at a ball in honor of the Prince of Wales at the Academy of Music, he commandingly took charge when a section of the dance floor collapsed.

Like others who have risen from obscurity, he was a snob. “The sexton’s supreme accolade was the description of a social occasion as ‘thoroughbred’ ” — or unmixed with social climbers, Mr. Homburg writes. He was his society’s Decider, ruling who was in and, of course, who was out. He endlessly complained about the sad decline in manners; no one dared breach etiquette around him. There was frequent gossip that well-timed bribes could win the sexton’s favor, but nobody could ever prove a thing.

At Mr. Brown’s funeral — on Aug. 26, 1880 — eight Knights Templar bore aloft a coffin made of polished Spanish cedar that was, as The Times reported, “large enough for two ordinary men.” Mr. Brown was as splendidly turned out in death as he always was in life: his body was attired in “a fashionably-cut full-dress suit of broadcloth, stand-up collar and white necktie.”

The crowd, however, was somewhat less elegant. It was mostly composed of “tradespeople, servants and persons from the humbler walks of life.” There were neighbors from his old block on East 21st Street, and many curious strangers. What there were not, however, were socialites.

“Most of the wealthier members of the congregation, whose marriages and feasts Mr. Brown had superintended for 30 years,” The Times reported, “were away at Newport,” and did not come back to attend

• http://archive.org/details/baldwingenealogy00bald. pg. 332
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_H._Brown. Sexton of Grace Church in New York City.
• http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/way-back-machine-a-syc...