Perry Hall Mansion

Perry Hall Mansion was begun in seventeen seventy-three by Corbin Lee and completed in seventeen seventy-six by planter Harry Dorsey Gough, who modeled its name on a family estate near Birmingham, England. Gough enslaved dozens of people on the surrounding one-thousand-acre plantation and kept chains and a jail on the property. In seventeen eighty-four, Gough gathered fellow Methodist leaders here to plan what became their first American conference, held soon after in Baltimore.

The enslaved community and their descendants built Dowden Chapel nearby, one of the stations on the Underground Railroad in Baltimore County. Baltimore County purchased the mansion in two thousand one for use as a museum, and in two thousand twenty-four the county council voted to sell it to private developers. The question of what becomes of the property remains open.