Ashton Villa was built in 1859 as the private residence of Galveston hardware merchant James Moreau Brown and his family, and it functioned for generations as an elite family home reflecting the wealth generated by Galveston's antebellum and postbellum shipping and mercantile trade. As a domestic residence, the Italianate brick mansion hosted the everyday life of the Brown household along with the formal entertaining, receptions, and social gatherings expected of a leading merchant family, making it a hub of Galveston high society through the nineteenth century. The house is also traditionally associated with the site where, on June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger's General Order No. 3 was read, announcing the end of slavery in Texas, an event commemorated today as the origin of Juneteenth; this association has given the property a commemorative civic function well beyond its residential origins. In the twentieth century the Brown family sold the house, which passed through several private and civic hands before being restored and operated for decades as a historic house museum interpreting Victorian-era domestic life and Galveston's Juneteenth history. In more recent years its museum operations have been curtailed, and the villa and its grounds, including the Harris Garden, now primarily function as an event and wedding venue and occasional tour site, with its historic rooms used for public and private gatherings rather than daily residential use.