Very few of us will ever be lucky enough to live in a mansion, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to dream. I love touring other people’s homes and getting inspiration for my own. And apparently I am not alone. Did you know the National Park Service offers tours of some of the country’s most historically and architecturally significant mansions?
Hampton Mansion in Townson, Maryland is one of the Park Service’s largest dwellings, though it doesn’t attract anywhere near the number of visitors that sites half its size do annually. Hampton mansion sits on 63 acres just outside the Baltimore Beltway, yet many area residents don’t know the first thing about it. Perhaps, it’s because the mansion was closed for the last three years as it underwent multi-million dollar renovations.
Regardless, the mansion is now known by the National Park Service as one of the finest examples of Georgian architecture in the country. It contains 25,000 square feet of living space and was the largest private home in the United States when it was completed in 1790.
Back then it was owned by the Ridgely family, who resided there for seven generations. The what family? Exactly. Some mansion caretakers believe the Ridgely’s bear some responsibility for the mansion’s present-day obscurity. The family simply isn’t as prominent as their famous neighbors in nearby Virginia. You don’t have to be a history buff to understand why George Washington’s Mount Vernon, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and James Madison’s Montpelier mansions garner more attention and attract far more visitors than the Ridgely’s mansion.
Which doesn’t mean that Hampton Mansion is not worth visiting. On the contrary, public relations officials with the National Park Service are trying to beef up business to the new and improved Maryland mansion. Historians have painstakingly decorated the mansion’s drawing rooms and four second-story bedrooms with ornate furnishings to reflect different periods in the Ridgely’s stewardship of Hampton, which lasted from 1790 to 1948, when the park service acquired the home. During the restoration, the entire building was emptied for the first time since the Ridgely’s moved in. The job required the extraction of more than 7,000 items, which were then catalogued and stored.
If you decide to visit the mansion caretakers say you should plan to take both the interior and exterior tours. Down the hill from the mansion’s dramatic front lawn sits a 1745 farmhouse where the Ridgely’s lived while Hampton was under construction. And next to the farmhouse are three buildings where slaves lived. All of the structures are now open to the public year round.
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