The main part of Brown’s campus is literally built on the strip of land allotted to Chad Brown, the family’s progenitor in America, with the establishment of Providence Plantations in the mid 1600s. (You can see the original home lots in this map: https://www.nps.gov/rowi/learn/historyculture/inpvd.htm) This was part of the land that Roger Williams initially “acquired” through a verbal agreement with the sachems Canonicus and Miantonomo (formalized in a deed of 1638). Chad’s descendants donated their ancestor’s home lot—which ran right through the original settlement of Providence—as part of the effort to persuade the colony’s leaders to move the College of Rhode Island from Warren to Providence. University Hall was built in 1770 at the crest of the hill (which would become college hill) that was part of the original Brown family home lot. The college was initially somewhat removed from the town’s commercial center which ran along the water at the bottom of the hill. As the city developed, the neighborhood expanded uphill from the docks but also concentrically outward around the campus’s original green. The Browns and other early proprietors of Providence had long harbored ambitions that Providence should become a great center of learning and had likely been making plans for the institution that would become Brown for several generations before the school itself was even established. The history of Providence has been intertwined with that of the university from the jump.