Your walk leads to Baltimore's oldest surviving urban residence, a Federal-period house in Fells Point since 1765, a decade ahead of the American Revolution. Robert Long was a merchant and mariner who built this one-and-a-half story structure as a combination home and place of business, typical of the way Fells Point's early commercial class blended work and domestic life. The house is built in a simple vernacular style — brick construction, modest proportions, small windows that conserved heat in the cold Chesapeake winters — that was common throughout the colonial port towns of the Mid-Atlantic coast.
The neighborhood around it in 1765 was a shipyard and maritime commercial district; the smells would have been tar, rope, salt water, and wood smoke. Long's house survived the transformation of Fells Point from a maritime industrial district to a residential neighborhood, from a working-class immigrant enclave to a gentrified historic district, from the 1760s through to the present day — an extraordinary span for a modest wooden-framed structure in a city that has seen multiple major fires. The Preservation Society of Maryland, which owns and operates the house, has restored it to something close to its eighteenth-century appearance.
Walking through, you are experiencing the scale and sensory world of colonial urban domestic life.