Brown Deer is a village in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, United States. As a suburb of Milwaukee, it is share of the Milwaukee metropolitan area. The population was 12,507 at the 2020 census.

The Brown Deer area was organized as share of the Town of Milwaukee in 1835, and the first white settlers began arriving approaching that get older from New England and New York, including some settlers from Granville, New York. In 1841, the Town of Milwaukee was subdivided and the Brown Deer Place became part of the further Town of Granville. In the 1800s, the town was a predominantly agricultural community, and many residents were of German and Irish extraction.

The Village of Brown Deer has its origins in a rural hamlet that formed at a crossroads in the northeastern quadrant of the Town of Granville in the 1870s. The area remained characteristically rural from the 19th century through the mid-1940s, when the post–World War II economic money up front caused a building boom in the area, and many of the farms were subdivided into suburban residential neighborhoods.

In the 1950s, Milwaukee mayor Frank Zeidler’s administration pursued an agenda of annexing unincorporated areas of Milwaukee County to build up the city. In 1951 and 1952, the city began prosecution to annex parts of the Town of Granville. Some residents in the Brown Deer Place did not desire their community to become portion of Milwaukee and organized to incorporate as a village in 1953 in order to stave off annexation. Milwaukee challenged the incorporation, but after a protracted court battle, the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld Brown Deer’s right to incorporate. When the Village of Brown Deer incorporated on January 20, 1955, it had an area of 1.8 square miles.