One Baltimore mansion gifted to Gilded Age newlyweds retains its beauty 150 years later. The other is gone.

After Mary Frick married the son of B&O Railroad President John Garrett, the railroad tycoon gifted the newlyweds a property in Mount Vernon, while the socialite’s family gave them a country estate in what is now West Baltimore.

The debutante and her husband, Robert Garrett, built the properties up into lavish palaces, hosting both Baltimore’s elite and working class at the Garrett-Jacobs Mansion on West Mount Vernon Place during the Gilded Age’s social season.

When she would return from her summer travels, Mary Frick Garrett — the city’s social queen who later became Mary Frick Garrett Jacobs after being widowed and remarrying — would reside at the quieter, but just as grand, Uplands estate east of Catonsville.

Over a century and a half since the Garretts’ wedding in 1872, their regal 40-room mansion near the city’s Washington Monument maintains its elegance, hosting social functions to this day. Uplands, the 1852 country home described by The Sun in 1906 as “one of the most beautiful in Maryland,” has been leveled. Both can trace their present conditions to fire — one that happened last October, and another 120 years ago in February.

West Baltimore mansions, neglected for decades, burn down

The three-story, 42-room Uplands mansion, where Garrett Jacobs and the estate’s staff once raised livestock and grew award-winning plants in the conservatory and greenhouses, burst into flames last fall after years of neglect.

Investigators have not determined what caused the Oct. 30 fire or similar blazes that destroyed two other derelict mansions over the past few years in West Baltimore. Fire investigator James Smith wrote in the three reports that his examinations of the once-stately structures — Uplands, as well as the former Gundry/Glass Sanitarium and the Sellers Mansion — were limited, as the structures were all but destroyed by the fires.

The long-vacant Sellers Mansion in Harlem Park had been purchased out of receivership by developer Ernst Valery. He said after the fire that his plans to convert the building to senior apartments were stymied by the Maryland Historical Trust requiring preservation work he didn’t think was “financially feasible” to get a rehabilitation tax credit for the project.

Both the hospital — built by Dr. Alfred T. Gundry during the late 19th century — and Uplands were owned by the city as part of an effort to renew the Uplands neighborhood south of the Edmondson Village Shopping Center. City officials purchased the combined 40 acres of land in the mid-2000s in a $16.6 million land deal with New Psalmist Baptist Church.

The city’s housing department said that despite the public ownership of the historic structures, which stayed vacant while the Uplands redevelopment effort suffered from years of delays, the project’s private development team ultimately held the “contractual interest” in the land.

A historic preservation group had received a promise from the city that the former sanitarium, built in 1880, wouldn’t be demolished as part of the renewal. Before it was destroyed by fire in 2021, it was eyed to be restored as part of the Uplands project’s second phase.

The Uplands mansion didn’t get such promises, and before last year’s fire, the brick and wood-framed Victorian residence had become a hotbed for trespassers, overgrown with vegetation that caused worry that the three-alarm blaze could spread to the surrounding neighborhood, according to Smith’s report.

“It’s almost a miracle that nobody was hurt,” said Patrick Stewart, an executive for Pennrose, the company leading redevelopment efforts in Uplands, where construction is taking place just a few hundred feet from the former mansion.

The Uplands mansion on land once owned by Daniel Dulany, a lawyer who was loyal to the British and served as mayor of Annapolis for a year. Dulany’s properties were seized after the American Revolution, and the 1,000-acre property that would become Uplands was granted to John Swan, a Scottish immigrant who served as a general during the war. The land ended up in the hands of his granddaughter, Mary Frick’s mother. She gave her daughter and Robert Garrett the property when they married.

Despite being at the top of Baltimore’s Gilded Age elite, Garrett Jacobs was revered as a supporter of “ordinary people” and a generous philanthropist. She founded multiple children’s hospitals in the area, and her efforts are “still paying” for pediatric care in the city, said Bernadette Low, a board member for the Garrett-Jacobs Mansion Endowment Fund who has researched the socialite extensively.

“I just have a lot of admiration for her,” Low said. “She did a lot for the city.”

The couple hosted picnics for family and friends at Uplands, where they grew crops and raised livestock — Garrett Jacobs became especially interested in chickens, raising a vast number of fowl, Low said. The famed Baltimore architect E. Francis Baldwin designed several parts of the mansion, such as its grand billiards room.

Upon their deaths, Garrett Jacobs and her second husband — Dr. Henry Barton Jacobs, her family doctor who had cared for her first husband before his death — left the estate to the Episcopal Diocese to use as a home for “lonely church women,” the widows of clergymen. The land came with a $1.3 million endowment with stipulations for improvements. It opened as the Uplands Home for Church Women in 1952 and operated for three decades.

In Mount Vernon, a symbol of era’s lavishness is preserved

Garrett Jacobs would frequently hold extravagant parties at her Mount Vernon mansion, the original structure of which was constructed in 1853. Around the holidays, she hosted feasts for the city’s “messenger boys” — the young people who ferried telegrams — also inviting Uplands staff to the events, which sometimes included a full vaudeville show.

The Garrett-Jacobs Mansion, an extravagant residence built out of three former rowhouses, was the couple’s primary home, and where she carried out most of her entertaining.

The Mount Vernon mansion was heralded as both the largest town house in Baltimore, as well as “one of the most artistic and magnificent residences” in the country, complete with 16 fireplaces, an art gallery, a library, a ballroom and a theater with an electric organ. It took more than a ton of coal to heat the residence for a day, The Sun once noted.

After Garrett Jacobs and her second husband died, the building passed between several hands. The Boumi Shriners — an offshoot of the Masons — held on to it for several years, but eventually sold it to the city for $155,000. City officials planned to demolish it as part of a $9 million project to expand the next-door Walters Art Museum, but the gallery expansion was shot down.

As the once-regal building was “gradually declining” into the 1960s, according to city officials at the time, a potential solution appeared. The Engineers Club, an organization born out of the Great Baltimore Fire, had been pushed out of its old location and wanted to lease out the decaying mansion.

The club, now the Engineering Society of Baltimore, bought the residence with a focus on preserving it in all its glory. The group of professional engineers acknowledged it would be difficult to restore and maintain the building, estimating a cost of $1 million in 1962 dollars to restore just the principal rooms, while calculating the home had cost around $6 million to build and furnish.

The engineering society, which played a pivotal role in restoring the city’s core destroyed by the fire Feb. 7-8, 1904, maintained the mansion and has restored it little by little over the past several decades.

The Engineering Society uses the venue as its headquarters, lending it out as a filming location and event space for weddings, as well as hosting small performing arts groups as artists-in-residence. The society’s fund for the Mount Vernon residence received some of the original ornate furniture from the Uplands mansion in early 2023, before that building was destroyed.

What’s next for Baltimore’s destroyed mansions?

The small community surrounding the former Uplands mansion south of Edmondson Avenue is slowly growing. The first homes of the mixed-income redevelopment effort opened in 2013. After a decade of delays, the second phase broke ground in April 2023, bolstered by $12 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds passed on by the city.

Pennrose expects the first of the new residences — around 150 affordable and workforce apartments located just feet from the former Uplands mansion — to be complete this spring, with more to be finished closer to fall. Stewart, who is Pennrose’s regional vice president for the area, said he hopes the redevelopment can “repair the fabric” of the community.

Neither the city’s housing department nor Pennrose has solid plans for the former Uplands mansion site yet.

Stewart said he hopes the site of the Gundry/Glass Sanitarium can be used for a community amenity such as a clubhouse, though it’s up to the city and the neighborhood’s interests.