Farmhouse

While your attempt at making your home resemble a page from Better Homes and Gardens may have failed, the chance to see perfectly holiday-decorated houses has not passed. On Sunday, seven houses, both historic and modern, in Liberty Township in Adams County, Pa., are opening their doors for the Holiday Home Tour. Decorated homes include the Pecher Farm, a renovated 1800 stone farmhouse; Windborne Farm House and Barns, a working sheep farm; as well as a reproduction New England saltbox, a converted post and beam barn, a Revolutionary-period log house and a passive-solar home built in the 1980s.

If there is one thing Bridget and Josh Speiser realize about their lives today, it is how lucky they are. "New city, new jobs, newly married and ... new house," Bridget Speiser says, summarizing the past four months of her life. On Bellona Avenue, between York Road and Saint Dunstans Garth in Govans, the Speiser home is not easily spotted from the street. Behind a high, creosote picket fence, nestled among spruce and pine trees, a circular brick pathway converges at the porch of their 1880, clapboard-framed Victorian.

Rich Taylor, Kathy and Rich Taylor own three houses, but there is only one they call home: their 1888 Victorian farmhouse on Church Road in Ellicott City. The soft yellow, cedar shingle structure rests on 5 1/2 acres of manicured lawns. The land was once part of a huge estate of local merchants that was named Lynwood 120 years ago. Several subdivisions were subsequently plotted in what would come to be known here as the Great Lynwood Divide. "My dream was to have a lot of land," says Rich Taylor, leading the way to the front porch, past a fragrant boxwood and Blue Star juniper.

CAMBRIDGE - Carol Clark says she has a permanent guest in the parlor of her Dorchester County farmhouse. "There's a ghost in here, and the ghost plays the organ every once in a while," she says of the spirit, which is rumored to be a deceased aunt in the family that owned the house for nearly a century. "But the ghost only knows one chord." At least, she jokes, it's a friendly chord. In spite of its musical shortcomings, the ghost has been the least problematic of the amenities Clark inherited with the home, which was built in 1899.

After 18 years, Sue and Richard Hillis are realists about their 150-year-old Victorian home in the Lutherville historic district. "These houses are a labor of love-slash-money pit," Richard, a civil engineer, says with a grin. Sue Hillis, now 53, had no idea what she was getting herself into when the couple bought the house. She was eight months pregnant with their first child, and she had been brought up in a small Canton rowhouse. "Rich always wanted to have a 'painted lady,' " she says, referring to the colorful exterior of a period Victorian home; but she was wary of an old six-bedroom house that needed lots of fixing up. She needn't have worried.

Eleanor K. Kahle, an avid hiker and world traveler who with her husband restored an old farmhouse overlooking the Elk River, died of respiratory failure Monday at Ivy Manor Assisted Living in Ellicott City. She was 90. Born and raised Eleanor Kennedy in Philadelphia, she graduated from West Philadelphia High School, where she was an accomplished athlete. After earning her bachelor's degree in education from the University of Pennsylvania in 1937, she taught home economics for 12 years in Philadelphia public schools.

An old farmhouse in Huntingtown that preservationists hoped to keep from bulldozers was knocked down this month after attempts to save it failed. No one was able to salvage the house, which was blocking a housing development going up in this part of Calvert County, despite some interest, said Kirsti Uunila, historic preservation specialist for the county's Department of Planning and Zoning. The house was free to whoever was willing to move it from the site. An Anne Arundel County businessman, E. Steuart Chaney, had hoped to save at least one of the outbuildings, but a communications breakdown kept him from getting to the property in time, he said.

To hear Baltimore County Councilman Vincent Gardina tell it, the county council's recent decision to keep the Solomon Bowen farmhouse off a list that would have saved it from the wrecking ball is no big deal. After all, the circa-1740 landmark on Greater Baltimore Medical Center's Towson campus, within Gardina's 5th legislative district, is just an old house with little "historic value, "as he told the Towson Times. More troubling than these remarks is that all of Gardina's council colleagues agree with him, even though the Bowen home is one of the few pre-Revolutionary homes still standing in Baltimore County.

HUNTINGTOWN - Yet another tony subdivision is going up in once-rural Calvert County, the fastest-growing spot in Maryland. In the way this time is a century-old wood-frame farmhouse, a reminder of the once-common landscape that is just as rapidly disappearing. The house - from the peeling paint on its ceilings down to its splintered floorboards - is free to whomever will take it off the property where it has stood for what is believed to be 100 years. The developer will even pay $2,500 toward having the three-bedroom, one-bathroom house moved.

THE CIRCA 1740 farmhouse built by Solomon Bowen that stands on the bluff overlooking the intersection of Charles Street and Towsontown Boulevard was placed on the Baltimore County Preliminary Landmarks list Dec. 17. The vote was unanimous. The recommendation went to the county executive to be included in a bill (with several other properties) for submission to the County Council. But, in some mysterious process, the Bowen House was excluded from the bill. Even more suspicious, the bill is miscoded on the County Council Web site so that when one searches for it and keys in the correct number a different bill appears.