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Government House/Governor's Mansions
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By Jean Russo
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Maryland.com
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One was unfinished for forty years and never lived in by any governor. One was demolished as part of the expansion of the Naval Academy in the early 1900s. One was a Victorian building that received a 1930s facelift that transformed its front facade into a Georgian mansion. All three were planned to be or have been the official homes of Maryland's governors.
The earliest is the building Annapolitans now know as McDowell Hall, the first building of St. John's College. But when construction of the building began in the 1740s, the legislature had appropriated money to erect a residence for the colonial governor, Thomas Bladen. Bladen's father, William, emigrated to Maryland from England in the 1690s. Thomas, the daughter of William and Anne Van Swearingen, was born in Annapolis in 1698. After the death of his father in 1718, Thomas returned to England where he married Barbara Janssen, whose sister Mary was the wife of Charles Calvert, 5th Lord Baltimore.
Thomas Bladen returned to Annapolis after Lord Baltimore appointed him as governor in 1742. At the time, the colony had no official residence for its governor. Bladen's sister Anne had married Benjamin Tasker so the Bladens may have lived with the Taskers or may have rented a home in town. At Bladen's urging, prompted by his instructions from Lord Baltimore, the assembly voted the large sum of £4,000 to build a suitable mansion. The plans proved to be more grandiose than the appropriation could support, however. The project ran out of money before the building could be roofed and the interior finished. Nevertheless, the assembly – by this time feuding with Bladen over various policy issues – refused to authorize the £2,000 needed to complete the work. The unfinished building soon became known to Annapolitans as "Bladen's folly," using folly to mean "an excessively costly or unprofitable undertaking."
Simon Duff, who came to Maryland for the purpose of constructing this building, served as its architect and the contractor for its construction was Patrick Creagh, who also built the Old Treasury, Maryland's oldest surviving public building. Duff's original design, in the style of James Gibbs, called for wings, which were never built. The building's promise impressed at least one visitor to Annapolis. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1766 that "They have no publick building worth mentioning except the governor's house, the hull of which after being finished, they have suffered (i.e., allowed) to go to ruin." Bladen's successors, as had been true for earlier governors, had to provide their own housing.
The last colonial governor, Sir Robert Eden, bought an elegant home to serve as his residence after he arrived in Maryland in 1769. For £1,000 sterling, Eden purchased Edmund Jenings' "capital mansion house with the garden, yards, coach house, stables and outhouses." Jenings' home had already been used as a governor's residence, having previously been rented by Horatio Sharpe, Eden's predecessor. Five years after his arrival, Eden left the colony as Marylanders took the first steps toward independence. Eden's mansion became one of the properties belonging to English citizens or to loyalists that was confiscated by the state government. On Thursday, 17 May 1781, the Commissioners to Preserve Confiscated British Property noted in their journal that "the Board took possession of the property which belonged to Governor Eden in Annapolis, & having taken an inventory thereof, leave His Excellency Thomas Sim Lee Esq. in possession of the same." Maryland's governors thus acquired "one lot with a commodious dwelling house and many other valuable improvements." Those improvements included an elaborate garden, depicted in both the Frenchman's map of 1781 and the two "Bird's Eye View of the City of Annapolis," published by lithographer Edward Sachse in ca.1858 and in the early 1860s.
By the 1860s, major changes had taken place in the neighborhood surrounding the governor's mansion. Governor's Pond, a large inlet which lay between the house and the end of King George Street (reaching as far inland as the back corner of William Paca's garden) and which is clearly depicted on the Frenchman's map, had been filled in by the 1850s. The establishment in 1845 of the Naval Academy led to the development of the land directly north and west of the mansion. As the Academy continued to grow, the city and state faced the loss of the institution if it were unable to expand further.
Persuaded that the Academy would indeed move if it did not acquire Government House and its grounds, in 1866 the legislature passed an act authorizing the sale of the property to the United States government. The Board of Public Works accordingly in August 1866 sold "the square or lot of ground with the mansion and appurtenances lying between the Harbor, Hanover Street, Governors Street, and Scott Street" for $25,000 and the right to continue using the house until the second week of January, 1869.
The Naval Academy used the former governor's mansion as its library until the building (and others of the early campus) was razed to permit construction in the early 1900s of the Beaux Arts campus designed by Ernest Flagg. With reference to the present Academy grounds, the former home of Maryland's governors was located in the square formed by Bancroft, Dahlgren, and Ward halls and the Superintendent’s Quarters. When archaeologists from Archaeology in Annapolis (a project of Historic Annapolis Foundation and the University of Maryland Department of Archaeology) excavated at the Naval Academy in 1993, they located portions of a foundation believed to be that of the first official governor’s residence.
As the expiration of the State's right to continue using the building drew near, the legislature passed an act in 1868 appointing a committee to buy a lot or lots in Annapolis and to construct "a mansion for the Governor of this State" on the land or to remodel an existing building if a suitable one could be found. An appropriation of $100,000 covered both the cost of the lot and the remodeling or construction. In 1870, the committee reported back that they had purchased three properties, razed the buildings that had been on the land, and built a new governor's residence.
The committee acquired from three owners land adjacent to the State House, bordered by School Street, College Avenue, and State House Circle. These three properties constituted lot 74 on the 1718 Stoddert plan of Annapolis. During the 1700s, most of the lot remained in the hands of a single owner, passing from Amos Garrett, first mayor of Annapolis, to Charles Carroll, to Dr. George Steuart, to Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer. By the early 1800s, Absalom Ridgely had acquired ownership of the entire block. No later than 1795, John Wilmot had built a three-story brick house with a twelve-horse stable on a leased portion fronting on School Street. The 1798 Federal Direct Tax documents a second house, a two-story stone residence.
After Ridgely's death, under the terms of his will written in 1816, his heirs divided the property. Catherine Ridgely received the house and lot on School Street that had been John Wilmot's. John Ridgely acquired the balance of the lot, which contained the Ridgely family residence and its garden. These and a third house can be seen on the Sachse prints of ca.1858 and the early 1860s. Both properties changed hands a number of times over the next half century, with the larger piece being subdivided into two lots. By 1868, Matilda Green owned the Ridgely home, George and Maria Franklin the house on School Street, and James and Elizabeth Allen the lot at the corner of College Avenue and School Street. The committee acquired the properties from their three owners for a total of slightly more than $31,000.
The State hired Colonel R. Snowden Andrews of Baltimore to design and build the new governor's residence. Snowden's estimate for construction of his plan amounted to a few hundred dollars more than the $68,000 remaining from the appropriation. As in the case of Bladen's mansion a century earlier, however, actual expenditures exceeded the estimate, but the additional expenses were paid this time. The extra charges included the cost of a heating plant when it proved impractical to use the central heating facility as originally planned, the expenses of enclosing the grounds with an iron railing, and charges for construction of a stable (located on Bladen Street) that had been omitted in the original plans. Further appropriations covered the cost of paving the carriage way to the house and "a sum of money to purchase additional furniture for the use of the Governor's Mansion."
In the years since 1870, bathrooms have been added, the location of the kitchen has been changed, and an elevator was installed. The most significant alteration, however, occurred during the administration of Governor Harry Nice. Inspired perhaps by the colonial nostalgia that surrounded celebration of the three hundredth anniversary of the founding of Maryland, Nice "conceived the idea of converting what was a mid-Victorian house into a Georgian country mansion," through the addition of two hyphens and flanking wings. The project, completed in 1936, proceeded along a familiar path. Once more, governor and legislature were at odds as the eventual cost of the remodeling, $136,000, far exceeded the sums allotted. As with the initial construction of this residence, however, the legislature voted to cover the expenses; no incomplete renovation was left to become "Nice's Folly."
The stylistic transformation of the governor's residence is best appreciated from the front of the building. The back facade, facing College Avenue, retains much of its original Victorian character and thus provides an appropriate background for the most noticeable recent addition to the grounds, the neo-Victorian fountain added during the administration of Governor Schaefer.
Bladen's Folly, never used by any governor, remained empty and unfinished for fifty years before St. John's acquired it. Governor Eden's home served the state's governors for nearly ninety years before its sale to the United States Government. The present residence has housed Maryland governors for a century and a quarter. Will it continue in that role into the next millennium or is there a fourth governor's mansion somewhere in Maryland's future?
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Republished courtesy of Publick Enterprise.
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