Sumter County AlArchives Biographies.....Brown, Jeremiah H. 1800 - 1868
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Joy Fisher http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00001.html#0000031 September 15, 2011, 9:41 pm

Source: See below
Author: Smith & De Land, publishers

  JEREMIAH H. BROWN, son of an English father and English mother, was born in
Darlington District, S. C., in 1800. His father, Samuel Brown, was a minister of
the Baptist Church, and a man of great wealth.

  J. H. Brown graduated at South Carolina College in 1823 with the highest
honors, and soon after studied law and was admitted to the bar, but never
practiced the profession because it had no attractions for him, and the
management of his interests on his plantations occupied his entire time. At the
time of his graduation he found himself ready to start in life with more than
sixty field hands and a very large tract of land.

  He was married in 1834 to Miss Julia, daughter of Robert Hines, and in the
following year came to Alabama, brought his slaves with him, and settle near
Sumterville. In his treatment of his slaves, he is said to have been very kind
and indulgent. He gave them every Saturday the entire day for their own, and
furnished them with good churches and white preachers on Sunday, and saw that
they had a reasonable amount of instruction and religious training. His business
increased until he found himself the master of more than a thousand slaves, and
a plantation of more than eight thousand acres of land in the most fertile
portion of Alabama. He was a Baptist, and more devoted to his Church than people
ordinarily are, and his enormous wealth gave him opportunity for doing a great
deal of good. For many years he donated $15,000 every year to the missionary
cause. He furnished the means to educate forty young men in Howard College for
the ministry in his Church. In 1855 he endowed the Brown Theological Chair in
Howard College with $25,000: and his treatment of the poor of his neighborhood
was in a similar degree of beneficence. In the Baptist Encyclopaedia of 1881, he
is called "a princely planter, an intelligent and cultivated gentleman of vast
influence, and liberal with his money."

  Probably no man in Alabama ever did so much good with money as he. During the
war he furnished the means to equip and provide for, perhaps, more than a
regiment of soldiers, and after the emancipation, so great was the affection of
his slaves, that many of them declared that they had no desire for freedom, but
preferred to remain in his service.

  Mr. Brown died at the house of his daughter, Mrs. H. S. Lide, February 10,
1868. He left two sons and one daughter, all of whom are now living. Laura, the
elder child, was married in 1853, to Col. H. S. Lide, a successful farme and
aide-de-camp to Governor Shorter during the war, but he resigned that position
and took one of more active service in the army. He died in 1879. His widow was
married October 5, 1880, to Dr. James G. Forster, of Livingston, where they now
reside. She had five children by the first marriage, of whom three are sons and
two are daughters. Mrs. Forster is a stanch Baptist.

  Dr. Forster was born in Clarke County, Ala., in 1826. He merchandised in his
younger days, studied medicine and graduated at the University of Louisiana at
New Orleans in 1856, and has practiced medicine ever since. The Doctor was
married in 1847 to Miss Eliza M. Gilmore, and had five children by that
marriage, two sons and three daughters, one of whom is dead. One of the three
daughters is married to Samuel Ruflin, Jr.; one son, W. C. Forster, is
practicing medicine in Birmingham, and James M., the youngest, is with a
commercial house in Meridian. Dr Forster is a Methodist, and a Mason.


Additional Comments:
Extracted from:

Northern Alabama: Historical and Biographical
Birmingham, Ala.: Smith and De Land
1888

PART III.
HISTORICAL RESUME OF THE VARIOUS COUNTIES IN THE STATE.
COTTON BELT.


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