Mount Clare, Baltimore's Oldest House

Mount Clare is the oldest surviving colonial-era structure in Baltimore. Charles Carroll the Barrister built it in Georgian style as his summer residence, with most sources placing completion around seventeen sixty-seven. He named it after his grandmother, and he used it as an escape from the city heat.

Carroll was no minor figure. He served as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress and became one of Maryland's first state senators. The estate stayed in the Carroll family until eighteen forty. The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America has stewarded the property since nineteen seventeen, preserving one of the finest collections of colonial furniture and decorative arts in the country. Today it operates as the Mount Clare Museum House, a surviving fragment of eighteenth-century Maryland landed life, set inside what is now the grounds of Carroll Park.