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BALTIMORE'S REVOLUTIONARY EXPERIENCE

Mount Clare: Baltimore’s Revolutionary Experience

Mount Clare Museum House is pleased to announce "Mount Clare: Baltimore’s Revolutionary Experience." Over the course of the next 18 months Mount Clare Museum House will introduce new educational programs, living-history interpretation, and exhibits that emphasize the unique roles of Charles Carroll, Barrister, and his wife Margaret Tilghman Carroll, and the servants and slaves that made Mount Clare function during the revolution. The programs and initiatives are designed to complement the existing interpretation of the house and make the museum the only site in Baltimore to focus on the city’s role during the revolution and Maryland’s transition from colony to state in the early years of America.

Charles Carroll, Barrister was one of Maryland’s leading patriots and helped define and form Maryland’s new government. He is credited with framing Maryland’s first state constitution and declaration of rights, which was adopted on July 3, 1776. The Barrister also represented Anne Arundel County in the Lower House; was elected to all nine Maryland Constitutional Conventions; selected to four Councils of Safety and represented Maryland as a Delegate to the Continental Congresses from 1776-1777. Carroll was also appointed a Judge of the General Court in 1777, but declined to serve. He served as one of Maryland’s first senators, representing the Western Shore from 1777 until his death in 1783.

Mount Clare was built in the 1750’s as the summer residence of Charles Carroll, Barrister a prominent figure during the revolutionary period. His summer home was located on an 800 acre tract of land called Georgia Plantation. A plantation in every sense of the word, Mount Clare formed the center of a bustling, self-sufficient community of indentured servants, slaves, tradesmen, and artisans. Separate from planting, supporting the plantation’s farming activities were other businesses and trades such as ship building, milling, dairying, coopering, gardening, brick making, horse breeding, carpentry, shoemaking, cooking and domestic work. All these activities required a labor force of both skilled and unskilled workers. The primary source of labor for the plantation was enslaved individuals, supplemented by indentured servants and hired workers. During the Revolution, the Barrister and his wife frequented Mount Clare and used it as a refuge from Annapolis allowing the Carroll’s to move further up the Chesapeake Bay to avoid potential British activity in the region.

"Baltimore’s Revolutionary Experience" intertwines the complexities of everyday life on a plantation in the late colonial, and early federal period from the time construction of the house began in 1756 until Margaret’s death in 1817. New educational programs include onsite and outreach programs closely related to today"s major educational initiatives of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. Students will be able to meet a colonial gentleman scientist who will recreate experiments made famous by Benjamin Franklin. They will be able to meet a colonial surveyor who will talk about surveying and the importance of geometry and math in laying out land. They will meet a brickmaker who will discuss the process of making bricks and learn how many of the buildings in early Baltimore were made from the clay dug from the grounds surrounding the mansion, and they will be able to meet a continental soldier or British soldier, to discuss life as a soldier and the impact of the war on the surrounding region.

New exhibits include "While the Rockets Glared:" the Battle of Baltimore during the War of 1812; and Slavery at Mount Clare.

Upcoming exhibits will focus on the march past Mount Clare by Continental and French forces during the Yorktown campaign; explore the split loyalties of the Tilghman family that included Tench Tilghman, George Washington’s Aide de Camp; and feature the Baltimore Iron Works and the role of industry in early Maryland.

Visit Mountclare.org for updates and for the latest calendar of events. Be sure to be a part of Baltimore’s Revolutionary Experience!

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