The governor’s mansion has seen raucous entertainment

The wedding of Gov. Larry Hogan’s stepdaughter this weekend might be one of the largest parties thrown at the historic governor’s mansion in decades, but Maryland’s governors have hosted high-profile and extravagant affairs for centuries.

One of Maryland’s earliest governors, William Paca, threw so many raucous parties between 1782 and 1785 that the events earned their own nickname — governor’s routs — and inspired poetry, such as this stanza by Charles County lawyer and party guest Gephenial Turner:

The liquor at length getting into their heads, / They though[t] it high time to go home to their beds, / Some in coaches were carried, others ... thro the street / For scarce one of them all could stand on his feet.

Paca’s parties were held at the original mansion, which later became part of the Naval Academy grounds, said Mimi Calver, a staffer with the Maryland Archives.

Since 2009, Calver has been helping to compile a history of major events at Government House. Calver sums the historical research on Paca’s parties this way: “They were pretty crazy.”

In her informal ranking of events at the governor’s mansion, Calver puts near the top a visit from Samuel Clemens, the writer known as Mark Twain.

First lady Emma Nicodemus Warfield wrote Clemens and asked him to visit the mansion as a fundraiser to solicit money for a Presbyterian church, Calver said. The May 1907 event outgrew the mansion and was moved to the neighboring State House.

During a dinner held in Clemens’ honor the following night, Clemens told a story of nearly getting arrested for smoking while touring the Naval Academy grounds.

Other notable visitors over the centuries included Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Queen Elizabeth took a five-hour tour of Annapolis in 1954. Baltimore Sun researcher Paul McCardell contributed to this article. — Erin Cox