Alex. Brown & Sons: The Oldest Firm in the Ford Motor Company Syndicate

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Alexander Brown, 1827

Born in Ballymena, County Antrim, Ireland, Alexander Brown (1764-1834) was the son of William and Margaretta Davison Brown. Alex Brown became a linen auctioneer in Belfast. (Linen manufacture was a major industry in Northern Ireland in the late 18th century). His older brother, Patrick, changed his name to John and became an insurance broker in London. His younger brother, Stewart, moved to the United States after the American Revolution and founded a Philadelphia merchant firm called Falls & Brown. Alexander Brown sent linen consignments to Stewart’s firm, which moved to Baltimore in 1797. Alexander Brown and his wife, the former Grace Davison, had seven children. Four of the sons survived to adulthood: William Brown (1784-1864), George Brown (1787-1859), John A. Brown (1788-1872), and James Brown (1791-1877). In 1800, Alex Brown decided to leave Ireland for Baltimore with his wife and oldest son. (The other sons joined them in 1802).

Alexander Brown went into the linen import business under his own name soon after his arrival in Baltimore in 1800. In 1805, his son, William, became a partner in the firm, and the name of the firm was changed to Alexander Brown & Son. In 1808, when his son George became a partner in the firm, the firm’s name was changed to Alexander Brown & Sons. The following year, in 1809, William Brown visited Ireland and married the former Sarah Gihon, who was related to the firm’s correspondent in Ballymena, William Gihon. William Brown moved to Liverpool, England and opened a branch of the family firm called William Brown & Co. with his cousin, William A. Brown, who was the son of John Brown, Alexander Brown’s brother.

In 1811, William Brown resigned from Alexander Brown & Sons though his firm remained the American firm’s representative in Liverpool. William returned to the family partnership after 1814 and the house was renamed William & James Brown & Co. The other brothers, George, John A., and James remained in Baltimore until John A. Brown moved to Philadelphia in 1818 and opened a firm called John A. Brown & Co., which was a branch office of the Baltimore firm. When John A.’s wife, Isabella, died in 1820, he moved back to Baltimore and his brother James took over the Philadelphia firm. John A. returned to the Philadelphia firm in 1823 after he remarried to his cousin, Grace Brown, “a daughter of his mother’s brother-in-law Dr. George Brown.”

In 1825, due to New York’s prominence in international trade, the Browns opened an office there. Led by brother James, the firm was called Brown Brothers & Co. The following year, in 1826, Stewart Brown Jr., his cousin and the son of Alexander Brown’s brother Stewart, joined the New York firm. Stewart Jr. had started working in the Baltimore house in 1815 when he was 13 years old. That year, in 1826, Joseph Shipley, Jr. joined the Liverpool firm as a junior partner. Shipley was a native of Wilmington, Delaware and a Quaker by religion. The House of Brown expanded not only geographically in these years, it also expanded its activities. In 1827, when the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company was founded, Alexander and George Brown, who was the first treasurer, were among the founding directors. In addition to “the financing of imports and exports and running their shipping business…. From 1830 on, they did an increasing business in private banking and securities.”


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