Mount Clare

Mount Clare Mansion has acquired an 18th-century portrait of barrister Charles Carroll painted by John Hesselius, one of the most important Colonial portraitists.The portrait, which shows the barrister as he appeared at the time he was building Mount Clare, his summer home on an 800-acre plantation, was donated by National Society of Colonial Dames of America in the State of Maryland.John Hesselius was one of few artists working in the middle Colonies whose training and background was exclusively American.

Temperatures climbed into the 50s and gentle winds buffeted those who had gathered outside Mount Clare Mansion to celebrate its reopening and affiliation with the B&O Railroad Museum. While bystanders waited for the official ribbon-cutting ceremonies to begin last week, they reveled in the spectacular view of Baltimore from atop the gently sloping hill where Mount Clare, built in 1760, stands overlooking Southwest Baltimore's Carroll Park. The Monumental City Fife and Drum Corps, dressed in colorful period costumes and wearing tricorn hats, serenaded those waiting with a selection of peppy 18th- and 19th-century airs.

The National Society of Colonial Dames of America has hired Sian B. Jones, a conservation consultant from Art Conservation and Technical Services, to finalize conservation plans for the Mount Clare Museum House. The NSCDA received a grant from the Maryland Historical and Cultural Museum Consultant Program of the Small Museum Association Inc. to aid in hiring Ms. Jones, who will concentrate on guidelines for restoring the museum. The house, located in Carroll Park, needs restoration and maintenance of paintings, furniture and decorative arts that date back to the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Ina W. Hubard, a homemaker who had been an active member of the Daughters of the American Revolution throughout her life, died April 13 of heart failure at St. Joseph Medical Center. The Lutherville resident was 94. Ina Walker, the daughter of a career Navy officer and a homemaker, was born and raised in Annapolis. She attended the Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School and graduated from the old Gunston Hall School in 1934. Two years later, she married Randolph Bolling Hubard, a West Point graduate and career Army officer.

Beat the heat the way they did in the 18th century. This Saturday, the staff at Mount Clare Museum House will give tours showing how Colonial-era residents of the house kept cool during Baltimores summers. The hour-long tours will allow visitors to view the house and learn of the seasonal adjustments the owners had to make to it and to their way of dressing to keep cool. At the end of the tour, visitors can sample ice cream made from period recipes in the house's Colonial kitchen. Tours begin at 1 p.m., 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. Saturday at the Mount Clare Museum House in Carroll Park, 1500 Washington Blvd.

City police were investigating the death of a man found Wednesday afternoon in the back seat of a van parked in the Mount Clare Junction shopping center in Southwest Baltimore. Detectives said he did not appear to be the victim of foul play. The man's feet appeared to be propped up in a back window, and blood appeared to be dripping from above the left rear tire of the large red van, which had handicapped-parking plates and was in a handicap space in front of the Family Dollar store. Steven Bruns, 45, said he was walking through the parking lot when he noticed the blood and looked inside, where he saw an older man who appeared to be tied up. A police spokesman said the man appeared to be in his 50s or 60s but did not immediately have additional information.

Steve Ashe rose in his stirrups, dug in the spurs on the heels of his knee-high cavalry boots and yelled, "Charge!"The curved blade of his saber glinted as he extended his right arm, and Knight, his 15-year-old Tennessee walking horse, burst into a gallop as if against a line of Rebel infantry.The 49-year-old Hampstead clockmaker, uniformed in the blue of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry, was demonstrating Civil War cavalry tactics to a small but interested group of spectators gathered on the lawn of the Mount Clare Mansion, in southwest Baltimore's Carroll Park.

During his seven years as a Marine, Lewis Jackson learned a strict, physical discipline that he hoped would help in his planned career as a youth counselor.But soon after he began work as a counselor at Mount Clare House, a Southwest Baltimore facility that houses male teen-agers with drug and alcohol problems, he learned that his tender side worked just as effectively."He was like a father figure or big brother to them," said Jesse McClain, director of operations at Mount Clare House, where Mr. Jackson worked for about 18 months.

Perhaps we had better lower our voices. We've come to Mount Clare in Southwest Baltimore's Carroll Park to pay our respects to Charles Carroll the Barrister, framer of Maryland's Declaration of Rights, legislator and farmer, who died -- probably from malaria, a common malady in 18th- and 19th-century tidewater Maryland -- on March 23, 1783. Life came to a close for the prominent Marylander in his second-floor bedchamber in this house. He was 60. His black coffin, with the Carroll hatchment, his coat of arms, carefully arranged on its closed lid, rested on a bier in Mount Clare's elegant parlor.

The Carroll Park Foundation has received grants totaling $150,000 to begin work on Carroll's Hundred, a "living history park" anchored by Mount Clare Mansion in Southwest Baltimore.A $125,000 federal grant will be used to begin archaeological excavations and for improvements on the property, which eventually will include a reconstructed 18th-century village that will depict life in Colonial Maryland.The money is part of $600,000 in "enhancement" funds awarded to Baltimore this year under the federal Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991.

T he closing of a supermarket in a Baltimore suburb is hardly big news; most of the people affected by it usually just drive to the next available store. In the city, the condition is more delicate; Baltimore is eager to attract new stores, not see them close. So, in that regard, I found it surprising that the only person to call me about the looming closure of the Safeway in Mount Clare, on the city's southwest side, was the guy who runs the check-cashing place next door. Robert Rombro, of the Cash Bar, worries he'll lose customers if the Safeway closes, but he also had this to say: "There are no other major supermarkets in the area, and the local residents will have to find transportation to the county; most don't drive.

Months ago, a homeless man entered Dwayne Hess' West Baltimore coffeehouse. He took in the scene for a few minutes, had a warm beverage, then headed for the door. Before he left, the man turned toward Hess, whom he had never met before, and said something that continues to stick with the former Mennonite farmer. The man, disheveled and obviously down on his luck, spoke of being shunned at other places, some as unremarkable as gas stations, but welcomed without reservation at the coffeehouse.

City police were investigating the death of a man found Wednesday afternoon in the back seat of a van parked in the Mount Clare Junction shopping center in Southwest Baltimore. Detectives said he did not appear to be the victim of foul play. The man's feet appeared to be propped up in a back window, and blood appeared to be dripping from above the left rear tire of the large red van, which had handicapped-parking plates and was in a handicap space in front of the Family Dollar store. Steven Bruns, 45, said he was walking through the parking lot when he noticed the blood and looked inside, where he saw an older man who appeared to be tied up. A police spokesman said the man appeared to be in his 50s or 60s but did not immediately have additional information.

A man and his dog died in a Southwest Baltimore house fire Monday night, city fire officials said yesterday. About 11 p.m. on Christmas Eve, firefighters responded to reports of smoke at an alley house in the 300 block of S. Norris St. in the Mount Clare neighborhood. While working to extinguish the heavy fire in the rear of the Formstone-clad rowhouse, firefighters were impeded by floor-to-ceiling piles of debris - mostly towers of empty paint cans and piles of aluminum cans - that littered the two-story dwelling, said Chief Kevin Cartwright, Fire Department spokesman.

Perhaps we had better lower our voices. We've come to Mount Clare in Southwest Baltimore's Carroll Park to pay our respects to Charles Carroll the Barrister, framer of Maryland's Declaration of Rights, legislator and farmer, who died -- probably from malaria, a common malady in 18th- and 19th-century tidewater Maryland -- on March 23, 1783. Life came to a close for the prominent Marylander in his second-floor bedchamber in this house. He was 60. His black coffin, with the Carroll hatchment, his coat of arms, carefully arranged on its closed lid, rested on a bier in Mount Clare's elegant parlor.

A 6-by-6-foot yellowing photograph, mounted on sturdy cardboard, sold three times yesterday at Baltimore's first Heritage and Museum Yard Sale, only to come back from the parking lot each time because it didn't fit in any vehicle. The circa 1940 image of railworkers leaving the Mount Clare shop finally went to a Fells Point antiques dealer, when sale organizers offered to deliver it, rather than return it to storage.

The grounds around Mount Clare Mansion in Southwest Baltimore are slated to be transformed into a Williamsburg-style tourist attraction featuring owner Charles Carroll's 1770s Patapsco River wheat plantation and ironworks.The 1993 General Assembly allocated $300,000 to help return a 56-acre tract at Washington Boulevard and Monroe Street to its 1770 appearance, complete with an orangery, greenhouse, slaves' quarters, iron foundry and other outbuildings.The project, called Carroll's 100, is expected to cost $12 million and take up to 10 years to complete.

Lisa Plumley drove her shovel into the hard ground and struck a centuries-old brick, sending a metallic echo over the sloping terraces below Mount Clare Mansion in Carroll Park.The 24-year-old archaeologist looked at not-so-distant Baltimore high-rises and then at the perfectly marked section of ground under her feet."I'm really interested in 18th-century life," said Plumley, who was digging to find the foundations of a period greenhouse. "The people who ran [the greenhouse] weren't the people living in the house.

Charles Carroll, Barrister, and his wife, Margaret Tilghman, stare down from their portraits at the black-draped "coffin" in the parlor of Mount Clare like benign spirits contemplating their future. "He died in March of 1783," says Michael Connolly, assistant director of Mount Clare Museum House, the well-preserved home of the Carrolls. "So we used his death as sort of the basis of our interpretation of what was happening in the house at that time." Charles Carroll, Barrister was the cousin of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, who signed the Declaration of Independence.