Evolution of a House

The Magruder family settled and developed this farm and lived here from 1734 to 1878. By 1778, Isaac Magruder had built a one-story composite house of stone and log that formed the original main block of the larger structure standing today. In 1864, William Talbott bought the property from his father-in-law, Edwin Muncaster, and added a two-story rear ell to the farmhouse. Added in the mid-1860s, the ell contained a less formal living room on the first floor and two bedrooms upstairs. Thaddeus Bussard acquired the farm in 1888 and, ten years later, demolished the old Magruder block but kept the attached mid-19th-century kitchen. The foundation of the late-18th-century structure still survives beneath the larger two-story house. Vernacular in design, the house also had Victorian features including a bay window and elaborately turned front porch posts. When Harry Bussard renovated the house in the 1940s, he replaced the original porch posts with a less ornate square boxed design, added the same treatment to a new porch on the kitchen façade, updated the kitchen with new electrical appliances, and installed indoor plumbing, replacing reliance on an outdoor outhouse purchased from Sears-Roebuck. In the late 1970s, Parks began renovations by removing the dilapidated mudroom and the brick veneer on the kitchen exterior walls that Harry and his son had installed, with the goal of returning the entire house, inside and out, to its early 20th-century appearance. When the property was advertised for sale in 1878, it was described as a large and comfortable frame dwelling house in a community noted for thrift, intelligence, enterprise, and the qualities that make up good society.

Maryland · United States