At Home With History

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Audio slideshow: A tour of Homewood House at the Johns Hopkins University

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By LAWRENCE BIEMILLER

Baltimore

Charles Carroll Jr. — spendthrift, drunkard, ne'er-do-well — would be long forgotten but for a single notable accomplishment: He built an exceedingly handsome house.

Begun in 1801 with money from his wealthy father — Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the only Roman Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence — the Federal-style home has near-perfect proportions and airy rooms. It boasts exquisite plasterwork, faux-marble baseboards, and, above its doorways, spectacular fan windows that usher light into the middle of the house. Even the privy is a gem, with chestnut paneling and a domed ceiling.

The house is called Homewood. In the early 1900s, after the Johns Hopkins University was given what had once been the younger Carroll's 130-acre estate, Homewood set the architectural tone for the university's new campus, to which the house lent its name.

There's just one problem, says Catherine Rogers Arthur, Homewood's curator: Hopkins students rarely venture inside, even though Homewood is now a museum that attracts tourists six days a week — and even though the house stands right next to the university library, and the privy is in plain view of several freshman dorms.

Now Ms. Arthur and a donor whose father paid for Homewood's renovation in the 1980s are working to make the house "an academic resource for students." Last fall Ms. Arthur and S. William Leslie, a professor of the history of science and technology, welcomed a group of undergraduates to Homewood's wine cellar for a full-credit course in which they researched and planned an exhibit that opened in the house this month: "Feathers, Fins, and Fur: the Pet in Early Maryland."

The show is rich with the bounty of the students' research. They turned up information about goldfish imported from China, about sheet music and even instruments sold especially for teaching caged birds to sing, and about remedies used to treat ailing pets in the years before veterinarians became common. Then the students figured out what would make sense for a show at Homewood, as well as how to borrow items for display — like antique goldfish bowls, bird cages, and dog collars — and how to publicize their exhibit. They even talked the local chapter of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals into bringing animals to Homewood every other Saturday for adoption.

Ms. Arthur and Mr. Leslie settled on pets as their topic this year because they thought it would appeal to students and would produce a popular exhibit. Plus, a painting shows Charles Carroll Jr. with his hunting dogs, and one of the early Homewood inventories lists a pony, presumably for the children of the house. But thanks to "all the teaching opportunities that are here," Ms. Arthur says, she sees no difficulty in finding other topics that will attract students as well as instruct them.

Homewood's story begins with the marriage, in July 1800, of Charles Carroll Jr. and a young Philadelphian named Harriet Chew. As a wedding present, Carroll's father bought them the property for a summer retreat, and added he would pay up to $10,000 for improvements to an existing dwelling. The elder Carroll had in mind "a plain and convenient house," he later wrote in a letter, but his son had other ideas. Plain they were not.

The five-part design — the square main block is flanked by wings, each consisting of a smaller block and a connecting "hyphen" — was inspired by the popular designs of Palladio. A number of interior details were copied from books. Ms. Arthur — who wrote a 2004 book called Homewood House with Cindy Kelly, the university's former director of historic houses­ — says there is no evidence that Homewood's design is the work of anyone other than Charles Carroll Jr. and two brothers, both talented carpenters, who were his builders, Robert and William Edwards. Carroll had no formal training in architecture, but he had been sent to Europe at age 10 for a Jesuit education, and he traveled enough to pick up a taste for stylish houses.

At 7,500 square feet, Homewood is not small, but its size is not imposing, either. It was clearly planned for entertaining, with a dining room and a drawing room placed on either side of a spacious reception hall. Parties could flow easily from one room to the next.

Ms. Arthur notes that the house was carefully situated to take advantage of both daylight and what would then have been a view of the Baltimore harbor, some four miles away. "The light in this house is extraordinary," she says. "Before electricity, you had to think very carefully about siting." She also notes that the windows on the front of the house have larger panes, which would have been more costly — and which would have impressed the Carrolls' guests.

The house has a number of unusual features, some of them practical and others decorative. For instance, the original roof, portions of which survive, was apparently designed to channel rainwater into a cistern mounted over the kitchen — an early attempt to provide running water. Much of the carving and plasterwork in the main rooms is exceptional. Even outside, Ms. Arthur says, woodwork is "carved within an inch of its life."

Because Charles Carroll of Carrollton was paying his son's bills and kept meticulous records, "the construction is very well documented," Ms. Arthur says. So are the costs, which eventually amounted to over $40,000, prompting scathing letters from father to son. Homewood was inhabited by 1802, but not finished for another four years. In addition to the main house and privy, the property had a carriage barn, which still stands, a bathhouse, a dairy, a smokehouse, an icehouse, and slave quarters. An inventory made after the death of Charles Carroll Jr. lists 17 slaves.

"We know a little about some of the slaves" who worked at Homewood, says Ms. Arthur. A man named Izadod was Carroll's manservant, for instance, and a slave named Charity came from Philadelphia with Harriet Carroll. Slaves were moved between various Carroll family properties in the area as needed.

By 1816, Harriet Carroll had given up on her husband, whose drinking had grown worse, and had moved back to Philadelphia with the couple's five surviving children. Charles Carroll Jr. died in 1825, seven years before his father. In 1838, Homewood was sold to the Wyman family, which owned the property until giving it to the university in 1902.

By then the house, which had been rented out for years, was being used as a boys' school. It became the university club and then the president's office before a 1987 renovation paid for by a Hopkins alumnus, Robert Graff Merrick, who had lived in the east wing of the house while he was a graduate student. His daughter, Anne Pinkard, has endowed Ms. Arthur's course.

"All of the various tenants were very respectful of the architecture," says Ms. Arthur. The major loss was in the kitchen, where a remodeling during the university-club years added a colonial-style fireplace that is entirely out of place. Otherwise, the house retains most of its original features, including its shutters, its yellow-pine doors painted to look like fine mahogany, its brass front-door lock, even a grill guarding a garret where Madeira was stored. Ms. Arthur suspects the grill was used to keep Charles Carroll from his wine, which at his death was worth $500 — far more than anything else in the house.

The furnishings are as elaborate as their setting, but almost none are original to the house. As Ms. Arthur explained to the students in her class, she knows of only one object that can be positively identified as having belonged to Charles Carroll Jr. — a copy of an 1817 book called The American Register. One in a series of almanac-like volumes issued every six months, it has his signature on the contents page and includes an obituary of John Carroll, a cousin who was the first Archbishop of Baltimore. Ms. Arthur bought the book on eBay for $77.

"The Pet in Early Maryland" will remain up through March. The students who took the class with Ms. Arthur and Mr. Leslie say they particularly enjoyed their research. "Ask me anything," says Laura L. Carrihill, who tracked down the information about teaching birds — canaries, parrots, cardinals, finches, and orioles — to sing "pretty complicated" sheet music. She says she also enjoyed learning about life in and around the historic house in the middle of the university's campus. "I didn't know that thing out back was their bathroom," she says. "I thought it was some sort of water-pumping station."