the latimer house the latimer house

Inside a brick house in Sumner County stands a log house raised in the 1790’s. A new nonprofit formed to bring it back, and it needed a name people would recognize and a place to send them.

Charles Latimer’s family cut the timber on this ground and raised the house in the 1790’s. Sometime in the mid 1900’s it was covered in brick, and for most of the last decade it sat empty. In August 2026 the county conveyed the house to the Friends of the Latimer House at the William and Martha Brown Park. I’d spent years helping get the house to this point, so when I left the county commission, the board asked me to join them and keep that work going. The first thing the organization needed was a brand and a website, so that’s where I started.

The house sits in the district I represented on the Sumner County Commission, and leading the effort to get it to the starting line is some of the work I’m proudest of.

When William Brown sold this land to the county, his will left five hundred thousand dollars to preserve the house as the centerpiece of a public park. Getting that gift to its intended use took years of pushing through red tape with a handful of fellow commissioners, Latimer descendants and citizens. In 2026 the house finally had a nonprofit of its own, ready to raise the money and start the restoration. What it didn’t have yet was a face, a voice, or any way for a neighbor to help.

One line carries the whole story: the Latimers built it, the Browns saved it, and the neighbors keep it.

I wanted a custodian’s brand, not a campaigner’s. Steady, warm and rooted in the record, so preservation feels like something the whole community shares.

ROOTED

Every claim is anchored to a document: a deed, a will, a resolution. The history does the persuading.

GENEROUS

The credit goes to the Latimers who built the house and to William Brown, who wasn’t kin and left the money anyway.

WELCOMING

Respectful without feeling dusty, and open enough that anyone can lend a hand.

The core audience is the neighbors who drive past the house every day and never knew what was inside. The growth audience is Latimer descendants, local historians and donors who want to help fund the restoration. The big idea is the Steadfast Storykeeper: grounded, resolute and welcoming.

The monogram pairs a classical L with a sprig of laurel and olive: honor for the family who built the house, and peace and restoration for the work ahead.

I wrote the brand strategy guide, did the sketches, vectorized the artwork and then designed every asset that carries it. The engraved wordmark carries the full name for signs and print, and the L mark holds its own as an app icon, a favicon or a stamp on a social post. Laurel is classical symbolism the Revolutionary generation used, not war insignia, so it honors Colonel Jonathan Latimer’s service without turning the house into a monument.

Deep forest and parchment carry the weight of a house that has stood for over two hundred years. Hewn brown is the log beneath the brick.

Sage softens the forest, and stone fills the quiet spaces in between. Playfair Display states the record and Inter keeps it readable. Every color is a variable in Figma and a token in code, with ramps for light and dark, and every text and background pairing was checked against WCAG 2.1 AA so the site reads clearly for everyone.

• FOREST
• SAGE
• HEWN
• PARCHMENT

The house sits right between the elementary and middle schools on the Liberty Creek Campus. What better way to teach history than a Revolutionary War era log cabin, built on the wild frontier, just steps from the classroom?

So the brand had to speak to kids as easily as it speaks to historians. I made a set of illustrated pieces for classrooms and families: a storybook guide, a history book and scenes that put a young face on the 1790’s, all in the same forest, hewn and parchment as everything else.

friendsofthelatimerhouse.org tells the story, shares the news and makes it easy to give, from a phone or a desktop.

I designed the site in Figma and built it in Astro as a fast, static site of about forty pages, from The Story and The Restoration to news, giving and getting involved. Colors come straight from the Figma variables as CSS tokens, news posts are simple Markdown files, and the fonts are self-hosted. Donations and memberships run through PayPal at the nonprofit charity rate, the newsletter signs people up through Kit with a double opt-in, and the site does no tracking at all. It’s hosted on Netlify and deploys from GitHub with every update.

Visit friendsofthelatimerhouse.org →

The mark had to work on more than a screen: on a tote at the farmers market, a cap at a work day and a banner on the fence.

Every piece starts from the same two marks. The engraved wordmark carries the full name where there’s room, and the L mark takes over where there isn’t. Social posts follow the same rules, with templates the board can fill on its own and one call to action: help uncover it.