MacAlpine Farm

After marrying Eleanor Mackubin on November 11, 1867, Charles Baltimore Calvert built MacAlpine on the 203-acre portion of Riversdale that he inherited, naming it after the Mackubin family home in Scotland. Unlike Riversdale plantation, which was a large farm staffed by enslaved labor and devoted to tobacco for export, MacAlpine was a general farm worked by hired labor that raised varied crops and livestock for home use and sale. Its large but comparatively modest house stood with a carriage barn, livestock barn, corncrib, and icehouse. Supported by family wealth and professional pursuits, Charles Baltimore Calvert lived as a gentleman farmer, and although the farm provided the family and its servants with a wide range of foodstuffs and services, the modern world was already encroaching on the property by the time of his death in 1906. His daughter Charlotte and her husband Thomas H. Spence, a dean at the nearby University of Maryland, which her father had cofounded, lived there from 1917 to 1934, and in 1934 they leased MacAlpine to the Longfellow School for Boys; by then most of the outbuildings, including the carriage barn, icehouse, and water tower, had become obsolete and were removed.

Riverdale Park, Maryland · United States