As an industrialist, he supported the development, design and construction of some of the first factories for spinning machines during the American industrial revolution.

While he was an abolitionist since before the Revolution, the New England textile industry was dependent on cotton produced by enslaved African Americans in the Deep South.

The brothers were co-founders of the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, later renamed Brown University after Nicholas's son.

His brother John Brown was arrested in the Gaspee affair, which helped to trigger the American Revolutionary War.

He hired English immigrant Samuel Slater to help build a similar mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

In 1793, the factory became the first water-powered spinning mill in the United States, a seminal event generally considered the birth of the American Industrial Revolution.

[6] Brown played an important role in collecting documents relating to colonial Rhode Island, many of them inherited through his own family.

He collected biographical information about his contemporary and fellow abolitionist Jemima Wilkinson, who was known as the Public Universal Friend.

[7] He was a founding member of the Rhode Island Historical Society, served as its chairman, and had most of his papers left to it after his death.

Brown is buried in the Quaker section of the North Burial Ground at 5 Branch Avenue, Providence, RI.

He began a long crusade against slavery after becoming a Quaker, and he became Rhode Island's leading opponent of the slave trade.

[2] He solidified his opposition to slavery during the Revolutionary War, in the company of ministers and teachers from the college in Providence, which had closed temporarily because British troops were billeted in its campus.

He unsuccessfully petitioned the General Assembly for that cause in 1783, wrote frequently in the local press, and helped distribute antislavery pamphlets throughout New England.

He later helped pass a law in Congress to forbid foreign slave ships from being equipped in American ports.