If Homewood's Walls Could Talk

What makes history? For the 225-year-old Homewood House, the answer lies within the details of the building, says Michelle Fitzgerald, curator of collections for the JHU Museums at the Sheridan Libraries and University Museums.

“When you visit a historic house, you’re usually experiencing just one period in its life, but that’s not its reality,” she says. “It has these layers of time over one another to create what it is today.”

If Homewood’s Walls Could Talk: A History of an American House is a new exhibition at the Homewood Museum which aims to peel back some of those layers of that building’s past. The exhibition will run at this historic house museum on the Homewood Campus until January 2027.

Until now, the museum has only interpreted the house’s first fifteen years, when the Carroll family built the structure and used it as a summer home starting in 1801. Charles Carroll of Carrollton was known as one of Maryland’s wealthiest men, as well as the only Catholic and longest-living signer of the Declaration of Independence. He gifted the land and money for the construction of the house to his son, also named Charles Carroll, as a wedding present upon his son’s marriage to Harriet Chew of Philadelphia. Within those fifteen years lie stories of the Carroll family, their enslaved workers, and the Federal-style architecture of the house.

Those stories remain on display at the museum today but are now complemented by others—like when the house became one of the first country day schools in America and was bought and later gifted to Johns Hopkins University by the Wyman family and William Keyser. The house served intermittently as the university president’s office, student dorms, a Colonial Revival museum, and more, until finally being restored as the historic house museum it is today.

“When we look back through American and Hopkins history, there are all these stories of power, resistance to power, and education,” Fitzgerald says. “We need to explore those historical silences and realize that every single life that has gone through Homewood has had an impact.”

After three years of research and preparation, each room at Homewood Museum now reflects a different era using archival photography, textiles, student diaries, historic documents, furniture, oral histories, and more to amplify the voices of those who lived, worked, or learned at Homewood. Philanthropic support—from individual gifts, the Johns Hopkins University Sesquicentennial Celebration team, and internships funded by alumni—played a major role in making the exhibition and the opportunities it provided possible.

Several student curators were involved, and in some cases, students from the Theatre Arts and Studies Department recorded interpretive readings of firsthand accounts written by historical figures.

Some of the student curators got involved through a Krieger undergraduate course taught by Lori Finkelstein, director of the JHU Museums, where they analyzed the early 20^th century Colonial Revival period. This class’s semester-long work resulted in one of the sections of the exhibition.

“An exhibition like this really takes resources and support, not just for the curation, but to provide research opportunities for students,” Finkelstein says. “They spent quite a lot of time studying historical sources, even ones we’ve never examined, so that we can continue to piece all of the building’s different, complex stories together.”

While the exhibition itself is now part of Homewood Museum’s legacy, Fitzgerald hopes visitors leave knowing they’ve played a role, too.

“I hope people go through Homewood and then go to their own house, whether it’s a 1900 home in Fells Point or a 1990s townhouse, and see the impact they’re making,” she says. “And think about how they’re also impacting their community, their state, their country.”