Judge John C. Motter's Queen Anne home, built circa 1880 in Frederick, Maryland, rises 3½ stories in front of you. This 3½-story building announces itself with the kind of exuberant detail that marked late 19th-century domestic design: take in the beveled corners, the brick corbels that punctuate the eaves, the massing that gives the house a vertical, lively silhouette. When it rose here it was not in a dense town block but out in what was then a rural area beyond the north end of Frederick.
It became the home of Judge John C. Motter of the Maryland Sixth Judicial Circuit Court, who lived here from the 1880s to 1914, and his long residence helps explain the stately, domestic quality of the place. Today the house has been repurposed and is used as offices, so you are standing before a building that has quietly moved from private domestic life into active civic use. Listen to the way the brick and form still speak to a different era, from the neighborhood to the north that once felt like country beyond town.