The Four Mile Tree Plantation House is a brick structure, one-and-one-half-stories with hip-on-gambrel roof, pedimented dormers and four interior end chimneys.

Four Mile Tree's oldest interior woodwork is in the central stairhall where the turned balustrading on the stair, the heavy hand rail and the high dado place the date in the first half of the eighteenth century.

Four Mile Tree was the seat of the Brownes, a leading Surry family, from the Reign of Charles I until the death of their last male heir in 1799.

The plantation, named for its distance from Jamestown, was one of Surry County's more prosperous; its owners served as viewers of tobacco and had slaves from an early period.

In 1815 the plantation passed to William Browne, Jr.'s granddaughter, Sally Elizabeth Bowdoin, and her husband, General Philip St. George Cocke.