An old photo came across the desk. It showed a set of streetcar tracks, some rowhouses and a curious, unidentified mansion.
The scene was clearly the corner of 33rd Street and Keswick Road, but the pieces of this picture puzzle just did not make sense:
Was there ever a colonial-style house, with a cupola on the roof and a porch supported by 10 columns, at this busy intersection?
This is a real stumper. The photo, taken by the late Sun photographer Edward Nolan in 1947, is of the approach to the old Huntingdon Avenue streetcar trestle, a Baltimore transportation landmark that lasted from the mid-1890s through 1949, when the cars stopped running from downtown, through Charles Village, Remington, Hampden, Cross Keys and Mount Washington.
Today there is little trace of streetcar tracks or the colonial house at the corner of 33rd and Keswick. The spot is a corner of Wyman Park. There's a World War II tablet memorial here and a grassy field. No house. No foundation. Just a typical neighborhood street corner a block south of the Northern District police station. A couple of streetcar wire poles survive. Occasionally, on a hot day, the steel rails pop through the asphalt.
The white house is a riddle. Is it really a house or some sort of temporary structure? There is one clue to the puzzle. There's a plaque across the porch. Its writing is not legible at first, but when enlarged several times, the sign board seems to bear the inscription "Mount Vernon Neighborhood."
This is a valuable hint. Today we don't call the corner of 33rd and Keswick Mount Vernon. The spot is Hampden, although the Remington neighborhood is certainly not far away.
Baltimore's Mount Vernon neighborhood is downtown. The community draws its name from Mount Vernon Place, the east-west squares that fan out from the base of the Washington Monument. The actual Mount Vernon, of course, was George Washington's home overlooking the Potomac River in Virginia.
So what is a mini Mount Vernon doing at 33rd and Keswick? A guess might be that this George Washington house look-alike was built by the Mount Vernon Cotton Mills, the largest employer in the neighborhood.
The Victorian brick mill, nestled deep in the Jones Falls Valley, still stands on Falls Road. There is also a Mount Vernon Methodist Church a block away from the vanished mansion.
