I’m on the first leg of what has become my annual spring southern tour, stopping in at Annapolis for a few days. I love Annapolis, so I visit here every other year or so, but generally during my spring break in March when the historic houses I want to see are not open yet. But this spring I’m on sabbatical, so I shifted my visit later to see the William Paca and Hammond Harwood Houses–and more colorful gardens. This week is Historic Garden Week in Virginia, so I’ll have lots of color in my next post, but today is all about Georgian architecture. Annapolis really had a golden age of architecture in the second half of the eighteenth century, and the Paca and Hammond Harwood Houses are exemplars of this exuberance, as is the Brice House in the same neighborhood, which is currently undergoing a multi-million dollar restoration. William Paca was a Maryland signer of the Declaration of Independence, and later Governor, and his house first fronted an extensive walled garden that later became the site of the Colonial Revival Carvel Hall Hotel. In 1965 Historic Annapolis (a very venerable preservation organization but not as old as Historic Salem) partnered with the State of Maryland to restore the Paca house and recreate its garden, which involved the demolition of the hotel. I imagine this was quite the project, but wow, what a result. I’ve been dying to go into the Paca house for years, and it did not disappoint, except for the dining room, which you won’t see below because it was essentially a pass-through room.

The recreated gardens below, from the house, and out back: the two-storey summer house was recreated based on visual evidence from a portrait. Its perspective shows the Paca house, but the knot garden’s view shows the nearby Brice house.

The dining room at the Hammond Harwood House compensates for that of the Paca house, and then some! It’s right around the corner, and somehow even more stately, certainly more Palladian. But a similar “Annapolis Plan”–the main house in the center, connected to two wings by “hyphens,” a large interior hall with the stairway on the side. The house was built in 1774 for the young and wealthy plantation owner Matthias Hammond who wanted a house in the capital and commissioned architect William Buckland to design it. Hammond never inhabited this grand house, but it survived without many alterations into the twentieth century, when St. John’s College owned and utilized it briefly for the one of the first scholarly programs on American decorative arts. From 1938, the House has been owned and operated by an independent nonprofit association.

Both houses are beautiful and instructive, but I want to spotlight the food history presented at each. Generally this is my least favorite part of a historic house tour: I think large displays of plastic food look silly. But that was not the case at either the Paca or Hammond Harwood Houses. Instead, there were unique and creative displays, and substantive interpretations of the types of food that were prepared and consumed. And of course, these interpretations included discussions of the central roles that enslaved persons played in the households, as well as their diet. I learned a good bit of eighteenth-century “kitchen technology” as well. My guides in both houses referenced the research of food historian Joyce White, so I snapped up one of her books in the Hammond Harwood gift shop and consulted her website as soon as I got back to my hotel: wonderful resources and I particularly love her hedgehogs!