BNHA Mount Clare Museum House
Affiliations
Authentic Baltimore
Baltimore City Landmark
National Historic Landmark
National Register of Historic Places
Interpretive Framework
Gaining Freedom for All: African American Heritage and the Struggle for Equality
Seeking Prosperity on the Chesapeake: Baltimore History from Colonial Times through the 1800s
Shaping a Monumental City: The City’s Growth in the 20th Century
Resource Type
Museums
1500 Washington Blvd
Baltimore, Maryland 21230
The Mount Clare Museum House is a grand mansion built in the 1760s and was once the center of a bustling 800-acre farm and industrial complex. The mansion, built by Charles Carroll (the Barrister), is the oldest example of grand Georgian architecture in the city. Although well within the city limits today, the mansion still shares the stories of the Carroll family, its plantation, and the enslaved laborers who tended its fields and worked in its iron works.
The mansion served as the country home for Charles Carroll, a politically active lawyer (barrister), who helped write the Maryland State Constitution. The mansion was part of an active plantation known as the Georgia Plantation. The Carroll family owned slaves and was one of the few in Maryland with more than 100 enslaved persons. The primary crops were grain and labor-intensive tobacco. Enslaved workers not only tended to domestic work and toiled the fields but they also worked at Carroll’s Baltimore Iron Works, which was located on the plantation grounds.
The house left the Carroll family hands in 1840. During the Civil War, Union troops used the mansion as quarters. In 1890, the city purchased the house and 70 surrounding acres to create Carroll Park. The mansion was restored by the National Society of Colonial Dames in Maryland, which continues to oversee the operation of the mansion as a house museum. The mansion was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1970.
1500 Washington Boulevard (Inside Carroll Park)
mountclare.org 410-837-3262