Treasured Triad historian Fam Brownlee has died at 80

The Triad has lost a cherished storyteller.

Historian and Winston-Salem native Fam Brownlee has died. He graduated from R.J. Reynolds High School, received an English literature degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, fought in the Vietnam War and returned to his hometown where he eventually became its most respected chronicler.

For more than 14 years he worked in the North Carolina Room — the local heritage space at the central branch of the Forsyth County Public Library. Supervisor Karen Feeney worked alongside Brownlee for years and says he went above and beyond when it came to sharing history with patrons.

“People would come into the North Carolina [Room] and look for him to ask him questions about the city,” says Feeney. “And some people would just come just to want to talk to him, and he’d kind of hold court in the room and people would sit there and he would tell the stories and you know he’d be talking to one person, and the next thing you know there would be two or three people there, and he’d be telling them the history of something and it was just ... yeah, he was just a fountain of information.”

Feeney says when Brownlee wasn’t fielding questions or giving talks at local churches, senior groups and other community events, he was doing the work to prepare his well-known blog on local history.

“Fam was all about research,” she says. “He was on his computer. He was in the vertical files. He was reading. He was looking for images online. Like he was fully researching. Those blog posts, they would take months to do the research. They took a long time.”

The blog, called North Carolina Room, with hundreds of his posts, lives on.

Michael Wakeford is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and directs Winston-Salem’s Museum of Understanding, Storytelling and Engagement (MUSE). 

He says Brownlee was a one-of-a-kind.

“He was an encyclopedia of knowledge and an encyclopedia of stories, but in the shape of a man,” says Wakeford. “He was deeply engaging and very generous with his time and expertise. And he wasn’t someone who communicated through more traditional means of books. When you think about the period in which he was writing his blog entries — somewhere between 2009 and 2021 — that made him, for some of those years at least, almost avant garde as a historian.”

The topics of Brownlee’s blog entries reflected the variety and reach of his interests, from serious stories about early 20th-century race riots to playful ones about the day Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show came to town. Brownlee himself grew up straddling the Jim Crow South and the Civil Rights Movement.

Wakeford says that perspective led to what he describes as Brownlee’s extremely candid recounting of local history.

“He didn’t necessarily tell the stories about our community that some might expect a person of that era and background to tell,” says Wakeford. “He told honest and broadly-gauged stories about our incredible and also complicated community. It was truthful and accurate, and I guess above all, based on evidence. Evidence was at the heart of everything Fam did. And when you look at his blog entries and you see the degree to which they relied on photographic evidence and newspaper-based evidence, you really see that.” 

Fam Brownlee lost his battle with cancer on Wednesday. He was 80 years old.