Schifferstadt: Frederick's Oldest House
Near Harpers Ferry, Maryland
Just outside Frederick stands a house that carries its German birthplace in its name. Joseph Brunner's family came from the Palatinate region near Mannheim, settled in Maryland in seventeen thirty-six, and farmed about three hundred acres, and in seventeen fifty-eight his son Elias built this stone farmhouse. He called it Schifferstadt, after the village they left behind.
The walls run about two feet thick. Hand-hewn oak beams are pinned with wooden pegs. The vaulted cellar holds a five-plate jamb stove still in its original location.
Elias modeled it closely on the farmhouses of the Rhineland, adapting German craft to an American frontier. The Department of the Interior named it a National Historic Landmark in twenty sixteen, calling it one of the finest surviving examples of German colonial architecture in the United States.
