History in the Making
While rehabbing a classic Stone Hill home, a local couple uncovers a piece of Baltimore’s abolitionist past
From The Urbanite
February 2007
By Karen Houppert
Mark Thistel wants a PhD.
After spending the last year deeply immersed in restoring his newly acquired 1804 house in the Stone Hill section of Hampden, Thistel and his wife, Robyne Lyles, have had a crash course in architectural history, a smattering of carpentry, a taste of archeological forensics, and a hands-on tutorial in negotiating the linguistically dense bailiwicks of engineers, plumbers, and electricians. “This should be a degree program,” he says with a smile, his eyes sweeping across buckets of plasters, stacks of tarps, and the mountains of tools that fill the library of his new home. Then he raises his voice slightly to be heard above the whine of a power drill droning upstairs (the soundtrack to his life these days): “Seriously, I am emerging from this renovation project as a completely different person with a new set of skills. I am now unafraid of taking things apart.”
Fortunately, Thistel admits, he had no idea what he was getting into when he and Lyles decided to purchase the dilapidated mill house for $335,000 in September 2005 and undertake a historically authentic restoration that began in January 2006. “Clearly, ignorance is an essential state of being,” he says, “otherwise no one would tackle this kind of renovation.”
But this was love.
“We had been walking by this house for fifteen years, admiring it,” says Lyles, explaining that the couple lived with their 5-year-old daughter a few blocks away on 33rd Street but found themselves regularly drawn to the charming Stone Hill houses that were built for mill workers in the 1800s. In particular, they were curious about one of the largest houses that was said to have belonged to the mill supervisor.
Eventually, Thistel and Lyles approached the owner—“an old-time Hampden-style resident,” as Thistel puts it—about buying the house. “He chased us off his property!” Thistel laughs. “And that was that.”
However, a few years later, the owner changed his mind and put the house on the market at $500,000, a price the couple considered too steep for the amount of renovations required. A year passed. The price dropped twice. Finally, Thistel and Lyles put in an offer that was accepted, and they became the proud caretakers of a little bit of Baltimore history.
Today, Thistel and Lyles show a visitor through their house as if they are sharing a good detective story. The exact construction date of the home was in question, but they slowly found clues. In the basement, an extraordinarily long beam bears the grooves of an axe, which places the house’s construction in 1804, a time pre-dating any local saw mills. According to Thistel, its length affirms this theory, exceeding the capability of period mills.
Placing their faith in the rigid symmetry of this Federalist-style architecture, the couple recently took a mallet to their library wall, hoping to expose a window they suspected was buried there—and found one, right where its partner existed in the opposite room.
A lavish six-foot-by-eight-foot fireplace in the dining room—and the exquisite attention to detail throughout the house—told them it was unlikely that the house belonged to a mere “mill supervisor,” as originally believed. “In those days,” Thistel says, “a man could be measured by the size of his fireplace, as it were.”
For Thistel and Lyles, restoring the mantelpiece was one of the big-ticket items (approximately $400 for stripping alone) and they are still working to restore it to its original glory. The entire wooden mantelpiece, carefully notched with a geometric frieze, was removed and taken to Baltimore Finishing Works to be dipped and stripped of two-hundred years of paint. Then it had to be carefully reinstalled, hewing to the couple’s self-imposed commitment to period materials. Though the heart pine mantel is rich and lovely in its exposed state, the couple will paint it in compliance with period style. “Stain didn’t exist and untreated wood would have been considered gauche,” says Lyles, explaining that even beyond their personal commitment to historic authenticity, the Maryland Historic Trust tax break they received requires such touches. Similarly, the fieldstone surrounding the mantel, which our modern sensibilities deem charming, will be plastered over in accordance with period tastes. (Likewise, the exterior fieldstone on the first level is being plastered over. In 1804, builders carefully scored the damp plaster with grooves to imitate the “finer” look of limestone.)
Between the fireplaces and the twenty-five windows and five closets, this seemingly modest two-bedroom house was actually pretty fancy for its day. “At that time, you were taxed based on the number of windows and closets,” Lyles says, explaining that the attached fieldstone house, now separately owned by a neighbor, was probably a kitchen, laundry, and servants quarters. “We expect it is built by and for the owner,” says Thistel. “Because there are really expensive touches that I can’t see any company investing in for middle management.”
This is an exciting prospect for the couple. After all, the owner of the nearby grist mill was Elisha Tyson, renowned by local historians as a forward-thinking Quaker philanthropist and a very early, very radical abolitionist. Aside from cofounding the first abolitionist society in the South here, Tyson was a persistent thorn in the side of his fellow Baltimoreans and even among his Quaker friends, pushing them—many of whom had businesses which benefited from slavery—to take decisive action against this evil. Frequently, he took matters into his own hands.
Local historian Lance Humphries, PhD, helped the couple date the house and tie it to Tyson via Equitable Fire Insurance Policy records, which show that Tyson paid his first premium on the building in 1811. “For many years people assumed this house was built in the 1840s like all the other Stone Hill houses,” says Humphries.
But, in fact, hard evidence—like those insurance papers—confirms what Humphries suspected from the very first time he saw the house: The house predates its neighbors. “There are architectural clues, like the twelve small panes of glass over twelve small panes—because larger panes of glass were still expensive and uncommon. It wasn’t until several decades later that larger panes of glass became more widely available and builders switched to six panes over six panes. This and distinctive door moldings readily suggest a date much earlier than 1840.”
But what clinches things is the insurance papers’ description of Tyson’s “two-story stone dwelling at Laurel Mills on the east side of Jones Falls” as being 45 feet long and 21 feet wide—an exact description of Thistel and Lyles’ home. They speculate that Tyson, whose permanent home is known to be in Jonestown, probably summered here with his family or used the house to stay in for spates of time while he oversaw his mill.
Other hints about the house’s various inhabitants and their allegiances are just as … intoxicating. In cupboards and closets and buried behind plaster, Thistel and Lyles have found a host of bottles. “Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup,” reads one. “Dr. Pierce’s Golden Medical Discovery,” reads another.
“Brandy, by any other name,” notes Thistel.
When Thistel and Lyles, owners of a chauffeur and limo company called Freedom Services, acquired the property and went on to spend roughly $500,000 renovating the $335,000 house, some of their friends thought they were crazy. “People have told us we could have one of those brand-new McMansions in Owings Mills for that price!” Thistel says. “But that’s the last thing we wanted.”
“Part of the charm of this place is that basically no one has touched it for years,” he says, “And that’s a good thing.” The couple lost one wooden mantel piece in the library to a faux brick monstrosity that was added in the 1950s and had to replace two window sashes with replicas, but that’s it. “We’re just very grateful to the previous owners for not doing so many of the hideous things that people did during the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s to ruin their historical homes,” says Thistel.
With that in mind, the couple chose an architect for their addition very carefully. Local architect Walter Schamu built an addition that fit the existing footprint of the wing the couple tore down in the back of the house. “It’s tempting as an architect to build a come-look-at-me piece of work,” Thistel says. “But Walter created an elegant, understated addition that works well with the home.”
“Sometimes it helps new structures to be integrated with the old to see an expression of the building in the interior,” says Schamu, explaining why he went with exposed timber framing in the addition. Here, white oak beams, locked into place via mortise-and-tenon construction, grace the cathedral ceiling. The entire eight-hundred-foot wing is nestled inconspicuously between the back of the house and a steeply graded hill in the yard. The addition accommodates those things necessarily modernized: a kitchen, a bathroom, a laundry room, and a TV/family room.
Forty-year-old Thistel points out with pride that the ground-floor library can easily be converted to a bedroom one day when he and his 38-year-old wife grow old and the stairs become too much for them. After putting in an estimated three thousand hours scraping paint, peeling wallpaper, and chipping plaster, he is planning ahead: “There is too much of us in this house now to ever want to leave it.”
