Brown, Uriah

Born: 1784-05-09 Connecticut

Died: 1853-03-22

Uriah Brown was an American inventor. Living in Baltimore during the War of 1812, he devised an ironclad steamship that shot "liquid fire." Brown first demonstrated his invention in Baltimore in 1814. In the years after the war, he repeatedly petitioned the U.S. government for funding to test and perfect liquid fire and his steamship. In 1837, Brown lived in Pike County, Illinois. In 1842, Brown moved to Rushville in Schuyler County, Illinois. During the 1840s, he was one of three non-Mormons to be appointed by Joseph Smith to the church's Council of Fifty. By 1850, Brown had moved to Pottawattomie County, Iowa. In 1851, Brown travelled to Utah in an attempt to sell his "liquid fire" invention to Mormon leaders, an attempt which was ultimately unsuccessful.

U.S. Census Office, Seventh Census of the United States (1850), District 21, Pottawattomie County, IA, 72; William P. MacKinnon, ed., At Sword's Point, Part I: A Documentary History of the Utah War to 1858, vol. 10 of Kingdom in the West: The Mormons and the American Frontier (Norman, OK: Arthur H. Clark, 2008), 45; David L. Bigler and Will Bagley, The Mormon Rebellion: America's First Civil War, 1857-1858 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011), 267; An Act to Incorporate the Quincy, Griggsville, Jacksonville, and Springfield Turnpike Company; Asbury Dickins and John W. Forney, eds., American State Papers: Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States, from the Second Session of the Nineteenth to the Second Session of the Twenty-First Congress, vol. 3: Naval Affairs (Washington, DC: Gales & Seaton, 1860), 141-42, 201-4; "Brown, Uriah," The Joseph Smith Papers, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/person/uriah-brown.