Homewood House, the mansion in front of you, is one of the finest examples of Federal-style domestic architecture in the United States, a house that holds both the extraordinary taste and the troubling wealth of early Maryland's planter class. Homewood House was built between 1801 and 1806 by Charles Carroll Jr., son of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence. The elder Carroll was the wealthiest man in America and one of the wealthiest in the English-speaking world; his fortune was built on thousands of acres of Maryland farmland worked by enslaved people.
He gave his son and new daughter-in-law a wedding gift of ten thousand dollars and the Homewood estate on which to build their home. Charles Jr. hired an unknown architect — possibly Robert Cary Long, who also worked for the University of Maryland — and the result is a masterwork: a five-bay center-hall mansion with delicate Federal ornament, perfect proportions, and interior woodwork of extraordinary refinement. Charles Jr. proved to be a dissolute alcoholic who squandered his father's gifts; the elder Carroll eventually stopped supporting the household.
The estate became a country retreat and was eventually sold. In 1902, the Homewood farm became the site of the new Johns Hopkins University campus, which grew up around the house. The museum inside has been restored to its 1801 appearance with period furnishings and displays about the Carroll family's complex legacy.