Join Sherri Marsh Johns to discover how historians and preservationists “read” historic buildings to uncover stories that written records alone cannot tell. This presentation will explore the minute details of pre-Revolutionary brick architecture of Anne Arundel County, highlighting buildings such as the Rising Sun Inn, Tulip Hill, Larkin’s Hill, Larkin’s Hundred, and Sudley.
By examining architectural features including brickwork, floor plans, chimneys, construction methods, decorative details, and alterations over time, architectural historians can identify changing patterns of wealth, craftsmanship, technology, and daily life in colonial Maryland. These buildings serve as physical documents, preserving evidence of how people lived, worked, traveled, and expressed social status in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake.
Drawing upon documentation from the Maryland Historical Trust Medusa database, the lecture will demonstrate how architectural history methods reveal new information about Maryland’s colonial past and help reinterpret familiar historic sites. Attendees will gain insight into how seemingly small details can provide clues about construction dates, cultural influences, building evolution, and the broader social history of Anne Arundel County before the American Revolution.
This program offers a deeper appreciation for why preserving and studying historic architecture remains essential to understanding Maryland’s early history.
Speaker Biography:
Sherri Marsh Johns is an architectural historian and preservation specialist whose work focuses on early Chesapeake architecture, material culture, and historic landscapes. She is the founder of Retrospect Architectural Research and serves as a principal historian for the restoration and interpretation of Cloverfields Preservation Foundation, one of Maryland’s most significant early eighteenth-century estates. Her research combines archival investigation, architectural analysis, and emerging preservation technologies to reinterpret historic buildings and landscapes and uncover new insights into colonial life. Marsh Johns has contributed extensively to scholarship and public interpretation surrounding Cloverfields and other historic Chesapeake sites, with a particular emphasis on how architectural evidence can illuminate the experiences of both elite households and enslaved communities.