VAF Chesapeake Chapter Fall 2025 Tour - Blandair and Carrollton Hall, Howard County, Maryland
The next field visit of the Vernacular Architecture Forum Chesapeake Chapter will be to Howard County, Maryland. We will visit two locations: Blandair in Columbia, and Carrollton Hall (Folly Quarter) and the Shrine of St. Anthony in Ellicott City.
Registration will be limited to 50 persons and requires current VAF membership. Sign up deadline - Fri. 9/12. We look forward to seeing you there!
10 AM – 12 PM Blandair, 6651 Rt. 175, Columbia, MD 9 (access via Smiths Private Road)
Blandair is a five-bay, two-story brick house constructed around 1858 for Thomas H. Gaither and Sophia Mayo. It has a center-passage plan with large double parlors, a dining room and a small drawing room on the first floor; all the rooms feature arched marble mantels adorning interior chimneys. The house has a large service wing off the dining-room gable end. The house reuses timbers from an earlier 18th-century house in the roof.
The house today sits in a county park in Howard County, Maryland, surrounded by Columbia, a town developed by the Rouse Corporation. Blandair was not subsumed into the development through the determination of Elizabeth Smith, the reclusive last private owner of the farm.
A group of outbuildings survive along with the dwelling house, some of which may predate the construction of the dwelling. A double-pen, plank quarter and a meathouse sit close to the house, while a granary, springhouse-dairy, tenant houses and a hog house/ hay barn complex sit at a distance down a farm lane.
The Blandair farm is an excellent example of the changing face of the Maryland landscape between the late-eighteenth and late-twentieth centuries.
12 – 1:30 PM Lunch on your own or bring a lunch and chair/blanket to Blandair
1:30 PM – 3:30 PM Carrollton Hall (also known as Folly Quarter) and the Shrine of St. Anthony, 12280 Folly Quarter Rd., Ellicott City, MD
The neoclassical Carrollton Hall is among William F. Small’s finest houses, indicative of the work of his mentor, Benjamin Henry Latrobe. It was commissioned by Charles Carroll of Carrollton for his granddaughter Emily MacTavish and built on his Doughoregan Manor estate of locally quarried ashlar granite. Like Latrobe, Small favored Greek- and Roman-inspired architecture, demonstrated here by elegant restraint and classical proportions, flush tripartite windows set within arched recesses, and monumentally scaled tetrastyle Greek porticos. The staid exterior belies the sophistication, grand scale, and complexity of the interior. Its central passage with groin-vaulted ceiling is as broad as the adjoining rooms; parlors for entertaining are on one side, and a private library and parlor that flank an open-well stair are on the other. The second floor contains a twenty-four-foot-square gallery with an eight-light oculus domed ceiling. Small emulated Latrobe’s Rational House plan, placing the dining room in relationship to the service stair and basement kitchen. It is now owned by the Franciscan Friars (SAH – Archipedia).
We will also have access to the adjacent Shrine of St. Anthony, originally built as a novitiate or place for novice members of the order to live, worship, and train together. Inspired by the Sacro Convento of Assisi, Friar Benedict Przemielewski designed this Italian Renaissance building on a rise overlooking Carrollton Hall. Constructed of Beaver Dam marble quarried in Cockeysville, Maryland, the building dates to 1930-31 and features a U-shaped plan with a central courtyard framed by arcaded walkways.
