weeknotes 7: Homewood Museum
This post is also linked from the Homewood Museum entry on my Baltimore page in the digital garden. I am trying to weave the blog and the garden together a little better
Homewood Museum at Johns Hopkins
The sun came out yesterday and the birds went ballistic in the morning. It's been so grey and frozen for weeks, and as a tropical transplant I was feeling pretty low for most of the week. I woke up yesterday and knew I needed to get out of the house before the snow falls again tonight, so I looked up the small Homewood Museum on the JHU campus. It turns out it's also free for Black History Month. Per Wikipedia:](tab:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homewood_Museum)
The Homewood Estate was offered as a wedding gift in 1800 by Charles Carroll of Carrollton, (1737โ1832), the longest surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, to his son Charles Carroll Jr. It occupied 140 acres (57 ha) acres in northern Baltimore and was first known as "Merryman's Lott."
Carroll Jr was a scary alcoholic and his dad took over the estate when he spiraled out and then passed away. It passed through the hands of prominent Baltimore families, then was a progressive country day school for boys before it was given to Johns Hopkins to build the main campus. When it was built it was extremely rural, and now Baltimore has kind of swallowed it up.
There's been a lot of research in determining the original paint colors from 1800, and they are all kind of shockingly bright for what we might think of from this time period.
Fabulous wallpaper - I would love to do historic reproduction wallpaper printing - there are some very cool screen print houses in the UK doing this work.
The dressing room is my favorite room and I love the sash on the sheet metal tub. Nothing from the original owners was left when the estate was sold in the 1800s, so curators had to acquire every single item in the house from 1800-1816 and there is great attention to detail. I love this floorcloth, which was recreated I think in the 1970's updates to the museum.
Here's the artist working on the floorcloth. I kind of want to make one for a hallway in my house, but I don't need any more projects.
This door also exists in the dressing room and deeply startled me. I read every plaque and brochure and QR code in that room and nothing addressed the scary door.
As JHU was built around it, the Carroll Mansion became the home for first the faculty club and then the administration building. It was the site of a lot of protest activity that is strikingly familiar - and ultimately successful.
This cute little brick building is actually an outhouse from (at least) when it was a boy's country day school in 1897. It's full of exactly what you would think middle school boys would draw on a bathroom. I find it amazing that Johns Hopkins has let a building on campus just have dicks drawn all over every surface for 130 years. Like, there are at least 30.
in other news
It's felt like a slow week. I haven't felt social really and struggled to keep up with daily habits. The new mp3 player has taken up some of my time, and I started reading Debt by David Graeber.
I bought some really great fabric for cheap at SCRAP Creative Reuse - exactly what it sounds like, a creative reuse store. One is a cotton I will use on my current quilt, one was a cool knit blend that I might use to make a top as my first garment. Ahh!
I am gearing up to go on a field trip the the Smithsonian African American History Museum with my middle school kids. I have never been, and there are some artifacts in the museum from the island I was raised on down south. The day after that trip, I fly out for a vacation with my in-laws that I have complex feelings about.
I am currently waiting to see how bad the snow will be tonight. If it's a lot, we're pretending to do internet school on the computer. The 8th graders figured out how to mute me last time which was about as annoying as it sounds.