|
 |
 |
|
History & Architecture
Maryland's Colonial Past
at the
Hammond-Harwood House, Annapolis, Maryland
The Hammond-Harwood House was built for the 25-year-old tobacco planter Matthias Hammond of Anne Arundel County, Maryland. The young Hammond had inherited not only a great deal of money but also a keen business sense. Indeed, Hammond managed to accrue more and more real estate while still successfully managing his various tobacco plantations. In April of 1773, Matthias Hammond was selected as a member of the vestry of St. Anne’s Parish and in May of the same year he was elected to represent the City of Annapolis as a delegate to the Maryland General Assembly.
Matthias Hammond began building the house in the spring of 1774. At that time, Annapolis was the prosperous hub of political power in the Province of Maryland. Wealth from tobacco provided a steady market for the imported luxury goods stocked by local merchants. The years 1763 to 1774 have been referred to as the Golden Age of Annapolis because political power acted as a magnet for the wealthy planters who came to town bringing a profound desire for sophisticated society, stylish architecture and a ravenous appetite for imported luxury goods.
The house was built on a large square site composed of 4 square lots, which Hammond bought in September of 1772 (lots 92 and 105) and March of 1774 (lots 91 and 106). The site was approximately 4 acres. The house was built on the highest point and the remaining land sloped gently toward the water. Presently, this plot of land can be described as bounded on three sides by Maryland Avenue, King George Street and Prince George Street with the Wm. Paca House garden as the final side of the square.
40-year-old English
architect William Buckland was chosen to design the house. He had been
trained
as a joiner in London and had worked in Virginia as an architect/joiner/designer
since 1755. To his credit were the interiors at George Mason’s, Gunston Hall
(1755-1759) in Prince William County, Va., John Tayloe’s, Mt. Airy (1761-1763)
in Richmond County, Va. and Edward Lloyd IV’s, Chase-Lloyd house (1771-1773)
in Annapolis. By 1772, Buckland was referring to himself in legal documents as an
"architect". Unfortunately, Buckland would die in December of 1774 at
the age of forty.
Construction probably continued at a normal pace until the beginning of the American Revolution in 1776. Wartime problems almost certainly slowed the finishing work making a definite completion date difficult to ascertain. Whether Matthias Hammond ever lived in his grand house is a mystery. He did, however, rent a portion of the residence to local lawyer Jeremiah Townley Chase in 1779. This rental would begin the Chase family's long connection to the house. There were other great Annapolitans to live in the stately structure. The Pinkney family resided in the house in 1811 when David B. Warden noted that the Hammond House is "a large Elegant house, with a garden, belonging to Mr. Pinkney, [and] is offered for four thousand three hundred Dollars." The Pinkney family moved from the house shortly thereafter only to open the door for another generation of Chases to call the place home. The death of Jeremiah Townley Chase’s great-granddaughter Hester Ann Harwood would eventually end the Chase-Loockerman-Harwood occupation of the site--145 years later .
It was after Hester Ann's death that the house and its contents went up for auction. In 1926, the nearby St. John's College purchased the house for $47,000. In the time that the college owned the site, the Harwood House was a kind of decorative arts classroom. At one point, the house even became a college fraternity house. Ultimately, it was the Great Depression that forced the college to abandon the 1774 house. In 1938, a group known as the Federated Garden Clubs of Maryland began renting the house from the College and later actually purchased the house and its surrounding property. In 1940, the Hammond-Harwood House Association was formed--the entity that still manages the site today.
Find out more about the owner's of the house . . .
Architecture:
William Buckland's Maryland
Masterpiece
The architecture of the
English colonies in North America from 1607 to the Revolution is primarily an
architecture built by regional artisans and influenced by the locally built
environment. It is an architecture not designed as a whole from academic sources
and not planned and executed by a professional architect. This type of
architecture is variously described as being folk or vernacular.
Architecture that is the
result of an academic tradition and is designed as a coordinated whole, by a
professional architect is described as "high-style" or academic.
Amos Rapoport, the co-author of the architectural treatise "Our Unpretentious Past" has stated that only 5% of the worlds built environment is not vernacular. When considering the architectural landscape in pre-Revolutionary North America, most scholars would probably agree that considerably less than 5% was academic. What makes the Hammond-Harwood House significant in the history of American architecture is that it is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, academic architecture. This is the reason for the house’s great importance.
The Hammond-Harwood House is best described stylistically as an Anglo-Palladian villa. Anglo denoting that it comes form the culture of 18th century Britain, Palladian in that it derives from the architecture of the 16th century Venetian architect Andrea Palladio, and a villa because it fits the English (The Penguin Dictionary of Architecture, by Fleming, Honour and Pevsner, 1966) definition of "a detached house, for opulent persons, usually on the outskirts of town".
Hammond-Harwood represents the ultimate contribution of William Buckland, who planned and supervised it. It also represents his best in its breadth of concept and fastidiousness of detail…. The building has a fine sense of scale, proportion, and even detail, while the almost pulsating profile of its three sections, connected by hyphens, carries great sophistication…. The nearly square central block is quietly understated except for its impeccable front door, the framing of the window above it, and the bull’s eye window in the pediment (the latter inspired by a plate in James Gibbs’s A Book of Architecture, 1728). The entry ranks as one of the finest in U. S. Georgian [Anglo-Palladian] architecture. Note that it garners extra attention because the windows alongside are modest (with the upper central exception) and shutterless.
On entering one finds a front hall lit only by a fanlight. However, a few steps farther on beyond the smallish front rooms and the separate stair passage at right, one enters – or encounters – the superb dining room, Buckland’s masterpiece. The wood carving here reached an apogee, from the framing of the doors, windows, and interior shutters up to the intricate cornice encircling the ceiling.
…it lays claim to being one of the most beautiful town houses in America.
--G. E. Kidder Smith, Source Book of American Architecture, 1996.
Click Here to Take a Virtual Tour !
Click Here to See What's Going on with Our Wall Conservation !
