A Walker’s Guide to Annapolis Sights & History

City Dock is the heart of the historic district and of the colonial seaport that has been the capital of Maryland since 1695. From here you can see across the Severn River to Greenbury Point, site of the first English settlement in Anne Arundel County; across the Chesapeake Bay to Kent Island, the first English settlement in Maryland; and across Spa Creek to the “Maritime Republic of Eastport,” an area annexed to Annapolis in 1951. The dock area and adjoining Market Space can be the starting point for several walking tours of Annapolis. This guide will offer routes through three different areas of town: the Spa Creek side of the city, the central core leading from Market Space up the State House and beyond, and the Severn River side of town. These can be done individually or combined into one or two tours.

During the colonial period, the Bay with its many navigable tributaries made the whole tidewater region accessible to ships from Great Britain. Because most planters used their own wharfs to export tobacco and to import European goods, there was no need for a large seaport like Boston, Philadelphia, or Charleston. Annapolis’ importance and growth depended on its role as seat of Maryland’s government.

Before the Revolution, there were fewer than 1,500 people in Annapolis, yet it was the center of wealth, culture, and crafts until the 1770s, when it was surpassed by Baltimore. Despite the city’s small size, visitors were impressed with its genteel society and the speed with which Annapolitans adopted the latest English fashions.

Today the dock is known as “ego alley,” the place where boat owners show off as they pass in review before Annapolitans and visitors. But this harbor is also a working port, as it has been since the seventeenth century. Crab boats use it in the summer and oystermen during the winter months. If you walk along the north side of city dock to Susan Campbell Park, you’ll find a National Park Service-sponsored Gateways Program exhibit that highlights the relationship of the city to the Bay since its initial settlement.

The area surrounding city dock has been a focus of activity for over three hundred years. During the colonial period, ships docking here included slavers bringing captive Africans for sale to local planters. Perhaps the best known slave brought to America was Kunta Kinte, whose story was told by his descendant, Alex Haley, in the book Roots. You can see a bronze plaque commemorating that event in the brick pavement near the water’s edge. Dedicated by Alex Haley in September 1981, the plaque memorializes Kunta Kinte and honors the struggle against adversity of all people who arrived in America in bondage. A nearby sculpture depicts Haley reading to a group of children and a series of ten bronze plaques on the adjacent wall contain messages based on themes of reconciliation and healing taken from Roots. Across Market Space, next to the Market House, the sidewalk contains an inlaid granite compass rose, whose bronze centerpiece contains a world map with Annapolis at its center. A nearby display provides more information about each element of the memorial.

If you stand anywhere along Market Space and scan around the waterfront, you’ll see a panorama of three hundred years of Annapolis architecture. The building located at the intersection of Main and Compromise Streets was once a warehouse, confiscated from its Loyalist owner, Daniel Dulany, during the Revolution for storage of food supplies for the Revolutionary troops. Nearly destroyed by a devastating waterfront fire in 1790, the building was rebuilt by 1810 and housed the store of George and John Barber. The other end of the block was the site of the bakery in which the fire started. Rebuilt immediately, 99 Main became the store of merchant Lewis Neth in the early nineteenth century and will soon lead a new life as a center for Annapolis history operated by Historic Annapolis Foundation. The adjacent bank building is a modern structure carefully designed to enhance the 18th-century Georgian building next door. Across Main Street, the early 20th-century store built by merchant Aaron Lee Goodman, whose name is still carved across the top of his building, dominates the corner of Main and Market Space. The restored 1858 Market House stands at the head of the dock and beyond it is Middleton Tavern, one of several buildings in town that once housed a colonial tavern.

In the eighteenth century, inns or taverns (“ordinaries” in the language of the day) were places where residents and visitors gathered to do business, discuss politics, and socialize. They housed social clubs, held auctions, posted tobacco and wheat prices, provided offices for itinerant physicians and dentists, served as post offices for hand-carried letters, and hosted balls and traveling entertainments. Horatio Samuel Middleton first leased this Market Space property in 1743. Later named “The Sign of the Duke of Cumberland,” the tavern was the meeting place of gentlemen’s clubs, such as the fashionable Jockey Club and the Tuesday Club, and saw Washington, Jefferson, and other prominent men as guests. Middleton also ran a ferry service to the eastern shore, operated a shipyard, and carried on a general merchandise business from the tavern.

The Central Core

If you walk away from the water, around the left end of the Market House, you can approach the State House by one of the town’s most picturesque streets. Cornhill and adjoining Fleet Streets (named after streets in the City of London) look much as they did in the late eighteenth century, except at that time the street surface was merely dirt, not pavement. Tradesmen and craftsmen leased the modest buildings, which housed several taverns and shops of local artisans. At 37-39 Cornhill, John Brewer operated a tavern and a dry goods business. Records show that Thomas Jefferson bought gloves, salt, and cotton stockings from Brewer in the winter of 1783-1784. After St. John’s College opened, Brewer’s widow Susannah rented rooms to students. In the 19th century, the house was divided into two units, both privately owned. Notice the plaques beside the doors. Historic Annapolis Foundation has placed these markers, which are color-coded to identify date of construction, on buildings of architectural importance throughout the city. The red color that you see here designates the 18th-century colonial period.

When you reach State Circle, the small brick building to the right of the State House is known as the Old Treasury. This sturdily-built, cross-shaped structure was erected between 1735 and 1737 to serve as the office issuing Maryland’s first paper money. After the Revolution, the state treasurer’s office was located here, giving the building its name. The property is now a state historic site, managed by Historic Annapolis Foundation. A panel in the entranceway provides more detail about the building’s history.

If you walk past the Old Treasury and up the steps toward the State House, you’ll see one of the cannons brought to Maryland by the first settlers. These colonists numbered close to 150 and arrived in 1634 on two sailing ships, the Ark and the Dove. Their settlement, on a tributary of the Potomac River in southern Maryland, was named St. Mary’s City and served as the colony’s first capital. The colonists mounted their cannon to protect St. Mary’s from possible attack. Over time the river bank eroded and the cannons fell into the St. Mary’s River. Two hundred years later, several were discovered; this one was brought to Annapolis as a reminder of Maryland’s beginning in 1634.

In 1695 the small village then known as Ann Arundell Town (after the wife of Cecilius Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore) became the second capital of Maryland. Royal Governor Francis Nicholson drew up a new town plan, inspired by the Baroque plans used in European cities. He placed two circles on the highest points of land, situating the State House on the higher and the Anglican Church (St. Anne’s) on the lower, with streets named for points of the compass radiating out from the circles. This design, then the most sophisticated in English America, still frames views of the town’s principal buildings and vistas of the water more than three hundred years later. Nicholson left Annapolis in 1698 to become governor of Virginia, where he laid out the City of Williamsburg, also in a Baroque plan but without circles.

As you look around State Circle, you can see a number of 18th century buildings. To the far left of the State House is a white building with a widow’s walk and red roof, built in the 1720s. After 1783, it was occupied by John Shaw, Maryland’s best known cabinet maker, who came to Annapolis from Scotland. Many pieces of Shaw’s beautiful and valuable furniture are still in existence in museums and private collections; a few pieces are on display in the State House. Shaw, like many 18th-century businessmen, had many jobs. He was also State armorer, made coffins, sold imported goods, and oversaw final construction of the State House dome.

The first State House in Annapolis, built on this site in the 1690s, was destroyed by fire in 1704. The second, built upon the foundations of the first, continued in use until 1772, when it was razed to make room for this larger building in the Georgian style that predominated in England during the reigns of the three Kings George. The present State House is the oldest building in continuous legislative use in the fifty states and is topped by the largest free-standing wooden dome in America, made of cypress timbers and held together with wooden pegs. Just as the building itself is the third on the site, so too it took three tries to achieve the present dome. A hurricane destroyed the first small copper cupola soon after its completion in 1774. The second attempt leaked badly. Although work began on the present dome in 1785, it was not completed until 1794, sixteen years after the legislature first occupied the building.

To enter the State House, you must walk around the building to the entrance on the opposite side of the circle. A photo id will be necessary for admission. Once inside the State House, if you walk through the central hall to the last door on the left, you will be in the Old Senate Chamber. In addition to its historic importance, this room exemplifies the emphasis Georgian architecture placed on symmetry and balance. The door to the left of the fireplace has no handle because it is not a working door; its sole purpose is to balance the working door on the right. Two of the desks and one of the chairs are original pieces from John Shaw’s workshop. Above the fireplace hangs Charles Willson Peale’s painting of General George Washington after the battle of Yorktown in 1781. Behind Washington stands his aide, the Marquis de Lafayette; on the right is Washington’s young aide and secretary, Maryland-born Tench Tilghman, who carried news of the victory over the British to the Congress then meeting in Philadelphia.

The Old Senate Chamber has been the scene of many important events in both Maryland and American history. First used by the State Senate in 1779, it also housed the national Congress from November 1783 to August 1784, when Annapolis was the nation’s ninth capital.

Two events of critical importance to the new country took place in this room during the session of Congress held here. The figure of George Washington, in full military dress, commemorates the general’s appearance before the Congress on 23 December 1783. After eight years as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, Washington took part in a carefully-scripted ceremony of resignation, written by a congressional committee that included Thomas Jefferson. Washington entered the room, took off his hat, and bowed to the Congress before starting his speech. Members of Congress tipped their hats to acknowledge Washington, and then replaced them on their heads. The purpose?: To establish the authority of the civilian government over the military, one of the most important principles of American freedom. As soon as the resignation ceremony ended, Washington left to spend Christmas with his family at Mount Vernon.

Three weeks later, on 14 January 1784, Congress ratified the Treaty of Paris, formally ending the Revolutionary War and making Annapolis the first capital of the independent United States.

The original 18th-century section of the State House contains additional exhibit rooms open to the public. The room directly across the hall from the Old Senate Chamber displays portraits of the Calvert family. The Silver Room, also on the left side of the central hall, contains the 48-piece silver service created in 1906 by Samuel Kirk & Sons, famous Baltimore silversmiths, for the wardroom of the new battle cruiser USS Maryland. Citizens and schoolchildren donated $5,000 to purchase the silver, which depicts nearly two hundred scenes from Maryland history. After the battleship Maryland, which served in World War II, was decommissioned in 1947, the silver returned here. In June 1992, the state sent four pieces of the silver service to the Navy to be displayed aboard the newly commissioned nuclear submarine, USS Maryland.

On each side of the doorway are two large paintings by Francis Blackwell Mayer, who lived in Annapolis in the late nineteenth century. The one on the right depicts the Mass of Thanksgiving celebrated by the first settlers on St. Clement’s Island in the Potomac River on 25 March 1634, an event remembered today in the annual Maryland Day celebration. The one on the left depicts Maryland’s own tea party, which took place at Annapolis just ten months after the Boston Tea Party. The brig Peggy Stewart arrived in October 1774, carrying about 2000 pounds of tea from England. When local Sons of Liberty learned that the ship’s owner had paid the hated tax on tea, they aroused the entire city. Fearing for the safety of his family, Stewart ran his ship aground and then set fire to it himself.

As you walk back toward the exit, when you cross the marble stripe in the floor you are moving from the 18th-century State House into the 20th-century addition. You will pass on your right a plaque honoring Matthew Henson, who was born in Charles County, Maryland in 1866. At the age of thirteen, Henson walked to Baltimore and got a job as a cabin boy on a sailing ship, whose captain taught him mathematics and navigation. Henson accompanied explorer Robert Peary on a trip to Nicaragua to find a route for a canal to the Pacific Ocean and on seven expeditions to the Arctic and polar regions. Henson was one of five men to accompany Peary on the final push to the North Pole in April 1909. Because Henson was in better physical condition, he broke a path for Peary and was thus the first to reach the Pole. Recognition of Henson’s accomplishments came late in life, but before his death in 1955, he received a Congressional Medal, was awarded honorary degrees from Howard University and Morgan College, and became a member of the Explorers Club. Henson Bay in northwestern Arctic Canada is named after him.

The rooms on either side of the new section house the legislature, which meets each year beginning in January for ninety days. The room on the left is occupied by the 141 members of the House of Delegates and the room on the right by the 47 State Senators. When the legislature is not in session and the doors of these rooms are open, you can see four life-size portraits on the side walls of the Senate chamber that portray Maryland’s four signers of the Declaration of Independence. On the left wall are William Paca, three-term governor and a federal judge, and Thomas Stone, who was initially reluctant to take the bold step of declaring independence. On the right are Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the only Roman Catholic among the signers, and Samuel Chase, later a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Note also the Tiffany skylight in each chamber.

As you exit the State House, to your left you can see the residence of Maryland’s governor and the spire of St. Anne’s Church beyond. These will be described more fully in the section that tours the Spa Creek side of town. The neo-Georgian buildings you see in front of you are various Maryland State offices built in the twentieth century. Directly in front of you is Lawyer’s Mall, which features sculptures celebrating the accomplishments of Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993). The central figure depicts Marshall as a young lawyer. Seated opposite him on one bench is the figure of Donald Gaines Murray. Marshall’s first major victory in the battle for school integration won Murray’s admission to the University of Maryland Law School. The other bench holds two schoolchildren to symbolize Marshall’s most significant legal victory: the decision in Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka et al. declaring segregated public education unconstitutional. Marshall, who was born in Baltimore, received a law degree from Howard University in 1933. He worked as counsel for the NAACP from 1934 until 1961, was a judge on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals from 1961 to 1965, and served as solicitor general of the United States from 1965 to 1967. The first African American appointed to the Supreme Court, Marshall served from 1967 to 1991.

If you walk along North Street, which leads off State Circle at an angle to your right, to its intersection with College Avenue and along College Avenue for one block, you will be at the edge of the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College, chartered by the state legislature in 1784. In front of you stands the main building, McDowell Hall. Governor Thomas Bladen began construction of this building in 1744, using money appropriated for a governor’s mansion. But the money ran out before the building was finished and no further funds were approved because Bladen and the Assembly were at odds over policy issues. The unfinished building became known locally as “Bladen’s Folly.” Forty years later the four walls were roofed, the building finished, and turned over to St. John’s College. Since 1937, St. John’s College has offered its “New Program,” a non-elective curriculum based upon the reading and discussion of over 100 great books considered the foundations of western civilization.

St. John’s is believed to have been the first private institution of higher learning in Maryland to integrate its student body in modern times, when it admitted Martin Dyer in 1948. Dyer went on to law school at the University of Maryland after graduating from St. John’s in 1952.

If you walk down Prince George Street and turn right on Randall Street, you will be back at city dock. Or you can pick up the Severn River tour either along Prince George Street or one block north on King George Street.

The Spa Creek Side of Annapolis

Most visitors to Annapolis gravitate to the north side of town, between Main Street and the Severn River, to see the State House, the magnificent Georgian mansions that receive public visitors, quaint streets like Cornhill, Fleet, and Pinkney, and the Naval Academy. But many unfortunately leave without exploring the varied attractions of “southern” Annapolis between Main Street and Spa Creek, an area with gems to match those of the more familiar parts of town.

You can reach this part of town by turning right as you face city dock, crossing Main Street at its intersection with Green Street, and walking up Green. You’ll pass the simple but charming 18th-century house at 183 Green Street, once owned by blacksmith Simon Retallick. Turn left at the corner and walk down Duke of Gloucester Street to St. Mary’s Church. The spire of this Gothic Revival building, which was dedicated in 1860, adds a whimsical note to the Annapolis skyline. If you walk down the driveway past the church, you will find the Charles Carroll House, home of Charles Carroll of Carrollton.

One of five Charles Carrolls who lived in Annapolis, the signer was distinguished from the others by the name of a plantation, Carrollton, that he owned in Frederick County. Born in Annapolis in 1737, Carroll was educated at Jesuit colleges in France and studied law in both France and England. His Roman Catholic religion prevented him from holding public office until the Revolution, but he took an active interest in politics and supported the Revolutionary cause in the years before 1776. One of the wealthiest men in the colonies, he had the distinction of being the only Catholic signer of the Declaration and the longest-lived, dying in Baltimore in 1832 and bridging the years from the colonial period to the age of railroads. Carroll’s Annapolis home, in which he was born, was originally a two-story Georgian house with end chimneys but has been expanded substantially over the years.

Walking back up Duke of Gloucester, on the right you’ll find Ridout House and Ridout Row. The handsome Georgian mansion was built about 1765 by John Ridout, who came to Maryland as secretary to Governor Horatio Sharpe. Shortly before the Revolution, Ridout erected the group of three row houses, planned as rental properties, adjacent to his home. Although three individual units, the original design (which had a central door in the middle unit) intended that they appear to be one large house.

One block south of Ridout’s home is the residence built about the same time by Dr. Upton Scott, who came to Maryland as Horatio Sharpe’s personal physician. It can be reached by turning left on Market Street and left again on Shipwright Street. Scott’s home is unique in having surviving dependencies. The small building to the left of the house was Scott’s stable; the building to the right, now a private home, was originally a detached kitchen. Both the Ridout and Scott houses are privately owned and not open to the public.

As you reenter Duke of Gloucester Street, notice the three-story Victorian Italianate building at 148 Duke of Gloucester, which was probably built in the 1850s. In 1863, William Butler, a successful and prosperous carpenter with a nearby workshop, bought this house. Ten years later, Butler had the distinction of being the first African American elected to public office in the State of Maryland. Butler served until 1875; his son, William, Jr., later held the same office. During his lifetime, William Butler, Sr. owned not only this brick house but also two dozen additional houses throughout town.

To the left of Butler’s home stands City Hall, located on the site of the earlier Assembly Rooms, which were built in the 1760s and were a center for social gatherings. The building burned during the Civil War, after being taken over for use by Union troops. The present Italianate structure incorporates the three surviving walls of the original Assembly Rooms. On the City Hall facade, you will see the plaque identifying the Historic District of Annapolis as a National Historic Landmark.

Across the street from the far left end of City Hall, at 163 Duke of Gloucester, stands a home purchased in 1847 by John Maynard, a free African American. The house has an unusual history in several respects. It was originally a one-story building, constructed in the late eighteenth century, with a door but no windows. After being enlarged to two stories and having windows added, the house was moved to this location sometime between 1838 and 1847. The Maynard House is also a rare example of an Annapolis home associated exclusively with the African-American community for almost all of its history. John Maynard became one of about twenty free African American land owners in Annapolis when he bought this property. Maynard, who was about thirty-five years old, had already purchased the freedom of his wife, her daughter, and her mother. Maria Maynard was a washerwoman and John Maynard a waiter, probably at the City Hotel, located just a block away and the best hotel in town at the time. Now owned by the City of Annapolis, the house is being restored under the supervision of Historic Annapolis Foundation. It is expected that the house will be operated as a museum when restoration is completed.

At the corner of Conduit Street, stop first and look right along Conduit to Main Street. The group of colorfully painted frame houses is known locally as “Rainbow Row.” Beyond them stands the surviving building of Mann’s Tavern, scene of a grand ball in 1783 to honor George Washington when he came to Annapolis to resign his commission. Next door is the Pinkney-Callahan house, moved first in 1900-1901 from its original site at the corner of College Avenue and Bladen Streets to a nearby location on St. John’s Street, and then again in 1972 to its present position on Conduit.

Note the house on the southwest corner of Conduit and Duke of Gloucester. It was originally a typical Georgian mansion with a central door flanked on each side by two windows. In 1899, the city bought the left side of the house and removed it to widen Conduit Street. Now turn left on Conduit to 123 Conduit. This 1887 American Queen Anne, one of the most exuberant houses in Annapolis, was once the home of Lt. Charles A. Zimmermann, Naval Academy bandmaster and composer of “Anchors Aweigh.”

Continue to the next corner, turn right up Cathedral Street, and right again at Charles Street. The gambrel-roofed house at 124 Charles Street was the home of Jonas Green, official printer for the government and publisher of the Maryland Gazette beginning in 1745, and is still lived in today by Green descendants. The gambrel roof, with its double pitch, is typical of Annapolis’s earliest houses. The Adams-Kilty House across the street at 131 is another of the city’s Georgian gems, although among the least well-known.

Continue along Charles to the corner and turn left up Duke of Gloucester. On your right at Church Circle will be the Maryland Inn, built in the 1770s and one of the leading hotels in Annapolis since that time. Walking left around the circle, you’ll pass the Anne Arundel County Courthouse, the original portion of which dates to 1824; the modern addition was added in 2001.

A short distance down Franklin Street stands the Victorian-Gothic 1876 Mt. Moriah Church, originally the home of an A.M.E. congregation organized under Rev. John Lane in 1862. The African American Commission and Historic Annapolis Foundation joined with the City of Annapolis in the 1970s to prevent demolition of this building. In 1977, Anne Arundel County, which had bought Mt. Moriah, leased it to the State of Maryland, which began restoration of the church. The Banneker-Douglass Museum, which offers changing exhibits on African-American history, opened to the public in 1984. An addition, now under construction, will soon substantially expand exhibit space and allow installation of the museum’s first permanent exhibits.

Reynolds Tavern, at the corner of Franklin Street, was built c.1747 by William Reynolds, a hatter and tavern keeper. Note the unusual string course that arches over the first floor windows. As you continue around the circle, a left turn on West Street for two blocks will take you to Asbury Methodist Episcopal Church, originally part of the First Methodist Church (Calvary) but which formed a separate congregation in 1838. Now housed in this handsome Victorian Gothic church, built in 1888, the church has been an important religious and cultural force in the West Street African-American community since its founding.

Stanton School, the first elementary school for African American children in the county, was built in Annapolis in 1865 and takes its name from Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War during the Civil War. Black high school students also attended Stanton from 1917 until 1933, when Bates High School opened. The present building, located two blocks northwest of Asbury on Washington Street, was built in 1898 and closed in June 1964 when Anne Arundel public schools were integrated. It reopened ten years later as the Stanton Community Center. In 1994, the Stanton School building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, in recognition of its importance to the educational and cultural history of African Americans in Annapolis and Anne Arundel County.

Cross Church Circle at West Street and continue around St. Anne’s Church. Maryland became a royal colony in 1689, and in 1692, under Protestant King William III and Queen Mary, the Church of England became the colony’s established religion. The first St. Anne’s church was begun in the 1690s and demolished in 1775 to make room for a larger church. When the second church burned in 1858, it was rebuilt the following year in the Romanesque-Revival style you see here. The picturesque steeple houses the town clock, while the interior includes Tiffany windows. Until the Revolution, St. Anne’s was the only church in Annapolis other than the private Roman Catholic chapel in the home of Charles Carroll of Carrollton. The fountain in the roadway to your left was erected in 1901 to honor Rev. William Southgate, for thirty years rector of St. Anne’s.

Farther to your left, within the grounds of the Government House, is the latest Annapolis fountain, containing representations of Maryland flora and fauna. The view of the building from the steps of the State House shows its Neo-Georgian facade, dating from 1936, but from Church Circle you can see the Victorian features of the original 1870 construction that complement the fountain’s design.

If you continue around Church Circle to Main Street, you can return to city dock by that street. As you walk down the street, on your left, the brick half of the building at 230-36 Main was built about 1830 by Henry Price, a free black and third-generation Annapolitan. A lay minister, Price was one of the founders of Asbury Methodist Church. Price’s grandson, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, lived in this house for a few years while attending Stanton School on Washington Street. An 1883 graduate of Chicago Medical School, Williams was surgeon-in-chief at Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington, DC, from 1893 to 1898. There in 1897 he performed the world’s first successful operation on the human heart when he sutured the pericardium of a stabbing victim.

Just a short distance down and across Main Street, at 213 Main, is the old city hall, which housed the town fire engine as well as city offices in the early nineteenth century. A left-turn at Chancery Lane will take you through the block to State Circle, where you can pick up the Central Core tour, or you can continue down Main Street to the waterfront.

The Severn River Side of Annapolis

If you face away from city dock, turn to the right end of Market Space, and approach the narrow street at the end of the block, you’ll be facing a small, white-washed building now known as the “Waterfront Warehouse.” Warehouses like this one were used to inspect tobacco from local plantations, as required by law after 1747. Inspection raised the price of Maryland tobacco by eliminating inferior tobacco and non-tobacco leaves like milk-weed or goldenrod that planters slipped into the large barrels called hogsheads to increase their weight. In the side yard stands a replica of a tobacco prise, or press, used to pack the greatest possible quantity of tobacco into each barrel. During the colonial period, all Maryland tobacco was shipped first to England, and then on to markets on the continent. In Europe, tobacco was used for snuff and pipes; cigarettes did not become popular until the late nineteenth century. Inside the building contains a model of the waterfront area as it looked in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Just up the street from the warehouse stands an early Georgian frame building with a brick gable wall on the east side. Shiplap House takes its name from the tongue-and-groove shiplap siding on the rear facade of the building. The house was constructed c.1715, perhaps by Edward Smith, a sawyer and innkeeper, who was the first documented resident. In the 1780s, the house contained a tavern called “The Harp & Crown.” Over the last three hundred years, other occupants included a shipbuilder, a merchant, and artist Francis Blackwell Mayer, whose paintings hang in the Maryland Room of the State House. In 1957 Historic Annapolis Foundation purchased the property, restored it to its present appearance, and now uses the upper floors as its headquarters.

Farther up Pinkney Street, number 43 is another of Historic Annapolis Foundation’s museum properties, owned by the State of Maryland and managed by HAF. This gambrel-roofed frame house with the two dormer windows is representative of a typical artisan’s home of the eighteenth century. The building is interpreted as a barracks because during the Revolution, houses like this were used to shelter recruits waiting to be shipped out to join the Continental Army. An unusual feature of the house is its basement kitchen.

Continue up Pinkney Street to the intersection with East Street. To your left, at 91 East Street, you’ll see a tall building that was originally constructed about 1790 in the Federal style. The fourth floor was added during a later remodeling that has given the building its present Victorian Italianate appearance. The Methodist Order of Galilean Fisherman, a fraternal order established in Baltimore for the “moral and educational betterment of colored persons,” acquired this building in 1868. At a time when the State did not provide public education for Annapolis blacks, the Order established a school for African American children that operated until about 1900.

Turn to the right and walk down East Street to the intersection with Prince George Street, where there are four buildings of interest. To the right, at 160 Prince George Street, you can see another of the small gambrel-roof houses typical of early vernacular construction. This colonial home was built between 1735 and 1747 by Patrick Creagh, a painter, shipbuilder, and contractor. In the early nineteenth century, Lucy and John Smith, a free black couple, lived here. Lucy Smith operated a very successful catering business with a clientele that included Maryland’s governors and her husband John had a profitable carting business.

Creagh’s house has always been a private residence, but the other three buildings here are examples of adaptive reuse, or the recycling of old buildings. The “Gothic church” on the corner of Prince George and East Streets was built in the 1870s as a mission chapel of St. Anne’s Church and later served as a Jewish synagogue. When the synagogue moved out of the historic district, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation made the building its headquarters. When the CBF moved to a new home in Bay Ridge, this building was converted into condominiums. A short distance down East Street you can see the tower of the former Waterwitch Fire House, for a time part of the CBF headquarters and also now converted to residential use.

On the opposite corner of this intersection the James Brice House, noted for its intricate and beautiful interior woodwork, towers over its neighbors. The expansive central block and its chimneys, flanking hyphens, and wings create a massive silhouette guaranteed to impress any visitor. James Brice was a wealthy planter and lawyer, who was also mayor of Annapolis. But he was only twenty-one, at the beginning of his career, when he began to build this house, having inherited the land and building materials upon the death of his father in 1765. It is now owned by the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftsmen.

As you walk up Prince George Street, away from the water and towards St. John’s College, you will pass the houses of James Brice’s father, Judge John Brice, and his brother John. The Judge John Brice House faces the William Paca House at 195 Prince George. Two features of this early, gambrel-roof house are distinctive: its placement well back from the sidewalk position of the other houses on the street and the stairway that passes directly by the downstairs window on the right side of the house. John Brice III’s house, at 211 Prince George Street, is a late Georgian house with a nineteenth-century tower addition.

To get a better view of William Paca’s house, go up the steps to the front terrace. Paca built his home on Prince George Street in 1763, on two lots purchased four days after his marriage to Mary Chew, described as “an amiable and most agreeable young lady of this City, with a very considerable fortune.” When he married, the twenty-two year old Paca was an aspiring lawyer. Born in Baltimore (now Harford) County in 1740, he was the second son of John Paca, a prosperous planter. At the age of twelve, William was sent with his older brother to be educated in Philadelphia, graduating in 1759 with a bachelor of arts degree. Paca returned to Maryland, settling in Annapolis to study law with Stephen Bordley, a prominent attorney. Paca’s law practice flourished in the 1760s, during a time of increasing political agitation. Paca first helped organize the local Sons of Liberty to protest the 1765 Stamp Act and continued to play a leading role as events moved to revolution, including serving as a delegate to the Continental Congress, where he both voted for and signed the Declaration of Independence. When the new state government formed in 1776, Paca served first in the Senate followed by three one-year terms as governor from November 1782 to November 1785. Mary Paca died in 1774, the year Paca first represented Maryland in the Continental Congress. After the death of his second wife, Ann Harrison, in 1780, Paca sold his Annapolis home and later built a new residence on Wye Island in Queen Anne County. He served as a Federal District Court judge from 1789 until his death in 1799.

Paca’s home was the probably the first of Annapolis’s Georgian mansions to be built as a unit in the elaborate five-part form, with central block, hyphens, and flanking wings. No architect is credited with the plan for the house. Paca and the master builder overseeing construction probably borrowed ideas from English design books and added familiar local features. The house combines elements of English Georgian style with distinctive Maryland additions such as the massive end chimneys, while retaining older forms, including the enclosed rear porch. The two-acre walled and terraced pleasure garden, with an informal wilderness area at the far end, completed the elegant design.

After Paca sold his house in 1780, it changed hands many times during the 19th century. In the early 1900s, it became the entrance to Carvel Hall Hotel, a popular gathering place for the Maryland legislature and visitors to the nearby Naval Academy. For fifty years, one man – Marcellus Hall – personified Carvel Hall for most visitors. Hall, an African American, began work as a bell hop on 12 October 1913 and remained at Carvel Hall as bell captain until the hotel closed in 1965. Hall became so well known as a source of information about Annapolis that he eventually wrote a guide book to the town and also served on the Historic District Commission.

As the years passed both hotel and house deteriorated until they were slated for demolition in 1965. An office-apartment structure was planned as a possible replacement on the site. Determined to save one of the town’s great landmarks from oblivion, Historic Annapolis Foundation raised funds to buy the house and upper terrace, and persuaded the State of Maryland to buy the remainder of the property. Now a National Historic Landmark, the restored garden opened to the public in 1973 and the house in 1976, two hundred years after its builder’s service to the nation in Philadelphia.

Continue up Prince George Street. As you approach the intersection with Maryland Avenue, notice the attractive shops that share the street with charming and varied colonial and Victorian dwellings. The tall three-story building on the far right corner of the intersection was once the Masonic Opera House, built by the Masonic Lodge in 1872. The Lodge rented the first floor for shops and the second floor contained a theater, a popular site for traveling exhibitions and plays.

At the intersection of Prince George and College Avenue, turn right to King George Street. The handsome early Georgian house on the near corner was built in 1739 and later rented by Governor Samuel Ogle, whose widow later bought the property. George Washington dined here as a guest of the Ogles in 1773. Ogle Hall now houses the United States Naval Academy Alumni Association. In the center bay on the first floor, what seems to be a large window flanked by two Doric columns is actually a clever deception known as a “jib” door. The lower section opens out like a Dutch door and the sash is raised into the upper frame to provide headroom for the doorway.

At the intersection of King George Street and Maryland Avenue, turn left and walk one block to Hanover Street and the Gate 3 entrance to the United States Naval Academy, established in 1845. The Naval Academy is home to more than 4,000 young men and women (called midshipmen) during their four years of academic and military training. James Conyers of South Carolina became the first African American to attend the Naval Academy when he entered in 1872. The two subsequent classes each included a single African American midshipman, but harassment from their classmates forced all three to withdraw before graduation. Wesley Brown, a Maryland native, in 1949 became the first black officer to graduate from the Naval Academy. Lawrence Chambers, the second African American graduate, who was a member of the class of 1952, became the first black Academy graduate to achieve the rank of admiral when he was promoted to Rear Admiral in 1976. Women first gained admission to the ranks of midshipmen in 1976 and comprise about 13 to 14 percent of each class. The visitor’s center is located just beyond Gate 1, at the end of King George Street, but Gate 3 provides the quickest access to the Academy museum, located in Preble Hall (a photo id is required for entrance). Tours of the Yard and Academy buildings can be arranged at the visitors’ center

Turn right on Hanover Street to 207 Hanover (the Peggy Stewart House), once the home of Thomas Stone, the third of Maryland’s signers of the Declaration of Independence. Built originally by planter Thomas Rutland between 1761 and 1764, the house later became the property of two other men, in addition to Stone, who were closely associated with the Revolution. Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, who bought the house in 1772, had a long public career that included service on the commission that established the Mason-Dixon boundary line with Pennsylvania and as a delegate to the Philadelphia convention that drafted the Constitution. Merchant Anthony Stewart purchased the house in the early 1770s. When an illicit cargo of tea was discovered on his ship, the Peggy Stewart (named after his daughter), in October 1774, Stewart set fire to the vessel and its cargo to avoid harm to himself and his family. Stewart, a Loyalist, left Maryland in 1775 and was eventually joined by his family. The property returned to Jenifer’s ownership in 1779 and remained in his hands until purchased by Stone in 1783 for use as his Annapolis residence.

Thomas Stone was born in Charles County in 1743, studied law in Annapolis, and was admitted to the bar in 1764. A less ardent Revolutionary than his fellow signers, Stone favored reconciliation with England – a position supported by the delegates’ instructions from the Maryland legislature – almost up to the vote for independence. Stone was also elected in 1787 to attend the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia but decided instead to visit England after the death of his wife. Though only in his mid-forties, Stone himself died suddenly a few months later while awaiting passage from Alexandria, Virginia.

This Georgian mansion, a National Historic Landmark, has been substantially modified over the years. In 1894, the present hip roof and balustrade replaced the older gable roof and the chimneys were rebuilt.

Return to Maryland Avenue, walk back to the intersection with King George Street, and cross to the far side. To your right is the Chase-Lloyd House. Samuel Chase was born in 1741, the son of Rev. Thomas Chase, an English-born clergyman who emigrated to Maryland in 1739 to become rector of Somerset Parish in Somerset County. Chase came to Annapolis to study law with a local attorney and joined the Annapolis bar in 1761. Chase represented Annapolis in the Lower House during the 1760s; shared leadership of the local Revolutionary movement with William Paca ; and represented Maryland at the Continental Congress, being the fourth of Maryland’s four signers. From 1791 to 1794, Samuel Chase was Chief Justice of the Maryland Superior Court and ended his career by serving as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1796 to 1811. Chase died in 1811 in Washington, D.C. and is buried in St. Paul’s Cemetery, Baltimore.

Samuel Chase began building his Annapolis home in 1769 but never lived in the house. Financial pressures forced him to sell the unfinished building in 1771 to Edward Lloyd, a wealthy Eastern Shore planter who represented Talbot County in the Lower House. Lloyd engaged architect William Buckland, who had worked for his Tayloe in-laws in Virginia, to complete the work on his Annapolis home. Buckland, after seven years of training in England as a woodworker, had indentured himself at age 21 to George Mason of Virginia for four years of service, in return for his passage to America, board, and lodging. In Virginia, he decorated Mason’s celebrated Gunston Hall and worked on several other large Virginia homes. By the time Buckland came to Annapolis in 1771 he was an excellent architect and woodworker. Today, his work is considered among the finest of the colonial period.

One of the first three-story Georgian townhouses in the colonies, the house is an outstanding example of its type. Notable exterior features include the Palladian doorway, a three-section composition rarely used in pre-Revolutionary Georgian houses; the projecting central pediment; and the large Palladian window on the rear facade. The latter illuminates the landing of a magnificent cantilevered stairway that is framed by a pair of free-standing Ionic columns.

Lloyd used the house as a “town” house during the short but brilliant “season” when the legislature met and gentry from plantations all over tidewater Maryland gathered for parties, horse races, theater, and other social events. Francis Scott Key, author of our national anthem, married Lloyd’s daughter, Mary Tayloe Lloyd, in this house in 1804. The Lloyd family owned the house until 1847, when a Chase relative purchased it. In 1886 the National Historic Landmark house was left to a trust which maintains the property as a home for elderly women.

Across the street stands the Hammond-Harwood House, also acclaimed as one of the most beautiful houses of the late colonial era. William Buckland designed this townhouse in 1773 for 25-year-old planter and legislator Mathias Hammond, who probably never lived in his beautiful home. After losing his seat in the legislature in 1776, Hammond retired to his country estate, where he died ten years later at the early age of 38.

Buckland created this symmetrical, five-part dwelling, with a central block joined to the end pavilions by low connecting units called hyphens. The doorway, second-story window, and bull’s eye window in the roof peak all emphasize the central vertical axis of the building’s front. The front doorway is one of the most admired in Georgian architecture. A carved egg-and-dart molding surrounds the door and fanlight, while carved roses adorn the sides. Thomas Jefferson was so impressed with Buckland’s plan for the house that he made a detailed pencil sketch of it when he was in Annapolis with the Congress in 1783.

After the death of the last private owner in 1924, St. John’s College bought the house to save it from possible dismantling and removal from Annapolis. Later, the Hammond-Harwood House Association was formed; through their efforts, the house is now open to the public as a beautifully furnished museum of decorative and fine arts.

Now continue up Maryland Avenue toward the State House dome. As you walk along the picket fence next to the Chase-Lloyd House, look through the fence and note the “berm,” or bank of earth to the left of the house. This feature, which shields the garden behind the house from the gaze of passersby, provided privacy for the householder and his family when out-of-doors.

You can return to the city dock area by turning left on Prince George Street and right on Randall Street, or by continuing to State Circle and then turning down Cornhill Street.

By Jean B. Russo