John Scruggs Brown’s bequest built UT’s first university center. At his request, it was named for his wife, Carolyn P. Brown. Carolyn Powell Rumbough was the daughter of a successful hotel and spa operator in Hot Springs, North Carolina. She attended Convent Visitation in Abingdon and St. Mary’s in Raleigh. In 1888 she married George Lanford Marshall, the son of Minnesota Governor William Rainey Marshall, and their daughter, Alice, was born in 1889. George Marshall died in 1892, leaving her well off. She married John Scruggs Brown in 1900.
In 1906 the Browns purchased Bleak House (now known as Confederate Memorial Hall) from its builders, the Robert Armstrongs. Carolyn Brown planned the updating of the 1858 structure, removing the original verandas and adding arcaded loggias and terraces. She also changed the entry of the house from the east to the north so that it would face Kingston Pike, and she insisted that Kingston Pike be called Kingston Way. She renamed the house Casa Modena. Outside, she engaged in her love of garden design and gardening by designing and having planted the terraced gardens from the house to the river.
Carolyn Brown had the means to make things happen. She designed, and she and her friends planted, the grounds of 10 city schools. She also arranged for continued maintenance of the grounds. She did the same for the grounds of the Home for Friendless Babies and the John Tarlton Orphanage. She designed and had planted the south entrance to the Henley Street Bridge, and she established a botanical garden at the Melrose Arts Center.
She founded the Knoxville Garden Club and shepherded it into membership in the Garden Club of America, and she spearheaded the formation of 38 junior garden clubs in city schools, whose members competed for prizes (which she supplied) in an annual essay contest on conservation. She also spearheaded the establishment of garden clubs in all areas of the city.