Mount Clare

Mount Clare is an outstanding Georgian mansion built between 1754 and 1768 as the home of Charles Carroll, Barrister, a framer of Maryland’s first Constitution and Declaration of Rights. Carroll and his wife Margaret Tilghman made it a center of enlightened colonial living and the heart of a flourishing plantation that once supported wheat fields, orchards, racing stables, flour mills, brick kilns, and a shipyard. Standing loftily atop the hill, the mansion was an impressive sight to ships sailing up the Patapsco, with rolling pastures and fields stretching up from the river to wide terraced gardens leading to the house. The gardens and the exotic fruit trees cultivated in the orangery were the work of Mrs. Carroll, a noted horticulturist who supplied George Washington with trees and plants for Mount Vernon by sending them down the Patapsco on a sailing vessel. In the 19th century, industrial development began to encircle Mount Clare as railroad tracks crisscrossed the northern section of the property and the Washington Turnpike sliced through the southern portion. The mansion and remaining acres were purchased by the City in 1890 for a public park, and in 1917 the Colonial Dames of America opened Mount Clare as Maryland’s first historic house museum. Since 1977, Mount Clare has been the subject of a major archaeological investigation into life in the Tidewater region between 1750 and 1850.

Baltimore, Maryland · United States