Concordia ? The three-story, Victorian-style home with a walkout basement, 23 rooms — including five bedrooms, a ballroom, four fireplaces — and a guest house with a double fireplace has been Caroline Gocke’s home for 34 years..

And now the Brown Mansion, built in 1883 for a Civil War veteran from Illinois, can be yours — for $200,000.

The mansion was built by former Concordia Mayor William Thomas Short, who also served in the state Legislature, for Col. Napoleon Bonaparte Brown and his wife, Kate Fitzgibbons Brown. Gocke and her husband, Anthony, are the home’s fourth owners, and raised 12 children there.

“It was just what we needed for our big family,” said Caroline Gocke, 78, who now lives there alone. Her husband died in 1995.

“People said, ‘Oh, you live in that mansion.’ It’s just home to me,” Gocke said.

The mansion has been Gocke’s home since 1969. She and her husband moved to the Concordia home from a two-bedroom house with a lean-to kitchen in Effingham.

The Brown Mansion, trimmed in limestone that was quarried south of town, has covered porches, a carriage entrance, tiered terraces and 45 stained glass windows. The cherry wood banister was imported, along with the crystal chandeliers, some from Italy. The original hot water heating system is still in use.

Only the house is for sale, but some of the artwork and antiques can be negotiated into the deal, said Larry Lagasse of Larry Lagasse Auction and Real Estate.

Among the antiques in the home is a light fixture in the entry hall, shaped like a teardrop. The fixture reportedly once hung in a New Orleans church, Gocke said, but was hidden in a well during the Civil War and brought by Brown to Concordia.

Owner Caroline Gocke is selling the Brown Mansion in Concordia. Her asking price for the house is 00,000.

‘Straight and true’

Although the home’s exterior needs scraping and painting, Lagasse said, the structure looks solid.

“Everything appears to be straight and true for as old as the home is,” Lagasse said.

Gocke said the home simply was too big for just one person.

“This is another step in my life that I have to take. It’s just time to move on,” Gocke said. “I hope the people who buy it enjoy it as much as we did.”

With a for-sale sign in the front yard, the house has drawn even more interest than usual.

The interior of the Brown Mansion reflects the Victorian style of the three-story building built for a Civil War veteran from Illinois.

“Everybody wants to go look,” Lagasse said. “It they’re qualified buyers, we’ll show it.”

Curiosity occasionally brings people into the Cloud County Courthouse, where there are records on the mansion, said Terry Ferguson, register of deeds. There have been recent inquiries.

“It’s a unique structure, and those kinds of things generate some interest in where they came from and who owned them,” Ferguson said. “If you were to drive down and see that structure, it would give you reason to pause.”

Long history

After Kate Brown’s death in 1942, the mansion stood vacant for eight years until Dr. and Mrs. C.D. Kosar rented it. The home had been given to the Sisters of St. Joseph at the Nazareth Convent, but they did not use it because they were prohibited from removing stained glass Masonic symbols in the living room.

The Kosars eventually bought the property and lived there until 1965, when Mrs. Kosar died. The home was then sold to Harry and Mamie Gottschall. The Gockes bought it after Harry Gottschall’s death in 1968.