While it may not be the same James Brown most of us are more familiar with, papa did regularly have a brand new bag filled with thousands of dollars in counterfeit bills. Don’t worry, I’ll see myself out after I tell the story. 

High atop a hill in the Cuyahoga Valley, just east of Ira and Akron-Peninsula Roads, sits a crumbling, historic home known most popularly as the Jim Brown House or the Brown-Bender House. This Greek Revival home was built in 1840 by Jim Brown, one of the most notorious counterfeiters in United States history.

The house is built in four over four style, meaning it has four rooms over four rooms. This style had grown quite popular across America during the 19th century. This popularization mainly came about as Americans became heavily interested in Greek philosophy and politics. The two story home was constructed on a hill in order to give it more of a dominating presence over the area surrounding it. 

Aside from the main home, other structures on the property include a barn built in 1886, and a greenhouse built in 1930. The barn sits at the bottom of the hill near the end of a long, winding driveway leading to and from the house. The greenhouse, which sits about 100 feet south of the home, is now in a heavily dilapidated state.

The property also includes 35 acres of farmland, with parts of the land containing a variety of fruit trees and grapevines. Most of the farmland sits lower, positioning it within the Cuyahoga flood plain. Due to this, the area has been flooded numerous times, but the house, being at a much higher elevation, has never been affected.by the floods.

It was in the early 1800s when Jim Brown first stepped into the picture.

Brown would regularly sell $5,000 of counterfeit bills for $1,000 of real money to residents of the Boston area, taking advantage of the economy at the time. During this time, it was so difficult to even come by money, that residents would purchase the counterfeits, seeing it as though bad money was better than almost no money at all. During this time, many bills were simply bills of credit or IOUs that would be used for bartering. During the Revolutionary War, only a few decades before Brown started his operations, the Continental Congress had authorized issuing American currency. No longer needing to rely on English money, this pushed for the United States to gain further independence from England. Approximately 1,600 banks nationwide were producing paper money, which resulted in around 7,000 different types of banknotes. With this many floating around, it had become very difficult for people to differentiate fake notes against legitimate ones.

Brown hatched an idea to produce counterfeit money, and set out to secure printing plates and other equipment needed to start his operation. He had started his counterfeiting ironically enough using legitimate money he made off with from a Pittsburgh bank. The story goes that he left on route to Pittsburgh in the dark of night with five horses from his stables. He left each horse at manageable thirty-mile intervals. When finally arriving at the bank, Brown provided them with fraudulent credentials, along with a certified bank draft. The bank gave him the money, and he was quickly on his way back home. At each interval he would change horses, as each one he left would be fully rested and not slow him down. Brown made it home before sunrise the next morning, and immediately began splitting wood beneath a neighbor’s window. Soon enough, investigators had caught on to Brown, but when all of his neighbors testified that it could not possibly have been him, as he had been home splitting wood, the investigation was dropped. With this same plan, Brown continued to defraud banks all the way to Boston, Massachusetts. 
  

Somewhere between 1810 and 1820, Brown was up and running a smooth counterfeiting operation. Summit County sheriff Sam A. Lane knew what Brown was up to, and had made it his goal to see Brown arrested. This was quite difficult as nobody could truly pin Brown down for a crime. The law very specifically stated at the time that it prohibited passing bad money as good, and given that Brown would disclose that his money was fraudulent, they could not charge him with passing counterfeit currency. Eventually though, things caught up to him, and he was arrested upon returning from New Orleans to the town of Boston, Ohio attempting to resell goods. However, Brown was let off as his crime was seen as hardly significant at the time. By 1834, he had been elected a justice of the peace, though he had still continued his counterfeiting operations during this time.

Over the years following, Brown was arrested and tried numerous times. Between 1837 and 1840, he was arrested twelve times, but it would not be until 1846 that he was finally sentenced to ten years in prison. It wasn’t long before his sentence was reduced to only three years for good behavior after he helped nurse numerous patients during a cholera epidemic in the prison. Over the years following, he would spend time in and out of prison on numerous counterfeiting charges. On December 9, 1865, Brown fell while walking on a canal boat while passing through the Peninsula lock while attempting to make his way from the stern to the bow. He fell to the bottom of the boat, fracturing his shoulder and skull. The injuries eventually led to his death. Brown died at Yellow Creek Basin on Sunday evening, December 10, 1865 at the age of 67. He is buried in the Boston Cemetery in Boston, Summit County, Ohio, next to his parents.

A legend still floats around that Brown hid some of his money somewhere in the Cuyahoga Valley, but to this day nobody has found it…or at least nobody has come forward to say they have.  

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