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The road is named for the half-mile-long stone wall that George Brown, a freed African American from Vermont, skillfully laid without mortar for Dwight Merriman. It won a Michigan Agricultural Society award in 1869. The road runs along the spine of Jackson's most prestigious twentieth-century residential section. Many of its huge period revival houses, which rival the earlier houses on W. Michigan Avenue, were built to the plans of Jackson architect Forrest A. Gildersleeve (d. 1977) for Jackson's prosperous industrialists and businessmen.