It may surprise you to learn that there has been very little information in our files about the history of the Brumbaugh House, our own headquarters! Well, we started looking into it, and it is really neat! Ken Short, who works for Howard County in the historic district area, took a detailed tour yesterday and is going to write a document for the Maryland Inventory of Historic Properties.
I am waiting to get a couple of court documents from 1877 and 1889 to get more of the deed history, but here is what we know right now, as far as chain of ownership: on the 1860 Martenet Map, the property was owned by Joseph Pettit. There were two houses (one is basically where the magnolia tree is now, the other is the Brumbaugh House in some early form). We suspect they were rental houses. The earlier deeds are obfuscated by the court documents, but we did find a deed where some Talbotts conveyed some property to Ann Maria Pettit, the wife of Joseph Pettit. This is after the 1860 map already said it was Pettit property so this is confusing.
Well, it appears that Ann Maria Pettit is Joseph Pettit’s second wife. His first wife was named Ann, as if that is not confusing enough, but she is buried in Melville Cemetery with a death year of 1847. Ann’s previous husband was Allen Talbott who also died in 1847. The Talbotts in the 1865 deed are the children of Allen and Ann Maria Talbott. So now it might make sense. There was a time when a woman’s property automatically belonged to her husband when she married so when Joseph married Ann Marie, the property became his. The two deeds immediately preceding the aforementioned 1865 deed (also written in 1865) have to do with Joseph Pettit conveying the land to the Talbotts. I think it is all sorted and part is deeded to Ann Maria so she is the lawful owner of her own property, and her children (who are adults at this time) also are deeded some of the Talbott land. This Talbott land was at the south east corner of the intersection of Hanover Road an Old Washington Road.
Joseph died in the 1870s, and all his property passed to his two living children, Thomas and Annie (Annie married Robert Milling by this time, and he may have died in the Civil War – he was a lieutenant.) But Ann Marie Petitt was still alive, so presumably she still owned her own property.
In the 1878 map, the houses were shown as Thomas Pettit’s property, to include the houses formerly labeled “Mrs. Mills” which were supposed to be Annie Millings’ properties. In 1877, Thomas had taken his sister to court, we think to officially divvy up the properties. In 1889, Ann Marie Pettit, stepmother of Thomas and Annie, took Thomas and Annie to court. The ruling in the court was that the homes were not well-cared for and needed to be sold at auction. John Wyatt bought the Brumbaugh property for $900 at public auction. In 1893, John Wyatt defaulted on his mortgage and trustees sold the property to Charles A. R. Earp, an undertaker.
Some of you may remember Carlyle Earp, the son of Charles, who was an important member of Melville Chapel, and who died tragically when he was struck by a car in 1979. He had written to Sun Magazine claiming his father razed Elkridge Furnace to salvage the bricks. You may also remember Lester Earp, who was a funeral director, and was the nephew of Charles. That’s all we know about Charles. We don’t know for sure if he lived in the Brumbaugh House, nor if he used it as a funeral parlor. Lester may have been trained, or inspired by Charles to get into the business. We can definitely imagine the Brumbaugh House as a funeral parlor!
We believe a lot of major improvements were made to the house in the Earp era. Under the Pettit ownership, we believe it may have been a one-room-over-one-room house, and then extended to two rooms, or it could have been two rooms over two rooms in the first place. There was a chimney between the two rooms. The cellar, under only one room, looks extremely old, with log joists, and a beam with railroad spikes in it across them!
We will wait for Ken Short’s report, but we do have the above photo from the 1930s, early in the Brumbaugh’s ownership, with the doctor’s office tacked onto a bay window, as if the bay window was there before he owned it. We think the Earps added that bay window, and the front (street-side) gable, which is more grand than the rest of the house.
Dr. Brumbaugh bought the house from Charles Earp’s widow Mary around 1920. He made many other changes which resulted in asymmetrical rooflines, and a head-clunking staircase. But despite that, it is still a charming house.
See the outside of the house as it is today at 5825 Main Street, Elkridge. We apologize that we can’t give tours at this time because of some renovations we need to do. Hopefully they will be in progress, and next year, we can open up the house for visitors.
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Tina Barton, EHS Webmaster
I really enjoyed reading this article about the first owners of the Brumbaugh House. If the walls could talk there would be some interesting stories for sure.
Bruce was my mother’s uncle and Miriam ( known as Aunt Mimi) was the person for whom I was named.