Historic West Baltimore mansion destroyed by fire
The historic Uplands Mansion in West Baltimore caught fire Monday night, reducing the 42-room Victorian to a smoking pile of debris.
The mansion, built in 1853 for the parents of a Baltimore socialite who made it her vacation home, had become the subject of complaints from the Uplands neighborhood in recent years as the city-owned land remained vacant and overgrown.
Firefighters responded to the mansion on Old Frederick Road around 5:30 p.m. and found the structure engulfed in flames intensified by high winds, the Baltimore City Fire Department said.
No firefighters were injured in the threealarm blaze, which was a “total loss” as far as the mansion, fire department spokesperson Kevin Cartwright said Tuesday morning. The cause of the fire is still under investigation.
The mansion, which once sat on 181 acres of land in what is now the Uplands neighborhood, was a vacation home for Mary Frick Garrett Jacobs, one of Baltimore’s premier socialites of the 19th and early 20th centuries and owner of the 40-room Garrett-Jacobs House in Mount Vernon. She inherited the mansion from her parents, and built it out, after marrying Robert Garrett, president of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, in 1872. She later married Dr. Henry Barton Jacobs, the physician who had attended to Garrett before he died.
Jacobs left the Uplands Mansion and the 19.3 acres it sits on to the Episcopal Diocese, which operated a retirement home there from 1952 until 1984. The Episcopal Diocese then sold the property to the New Psalmist Baptist Church.
The property is now owned by Baltimore City, which bought about 50 acres of land, including the mansion property, in an over $14 million land deal with the church. The city, which planned to use the land for residential development, also gave the church a new space in Seton Business Park as part of the deal.
The development in Uplands took off after a multitude of legal conflicts, including one of the developers being named as a player in federal charges against former Mayor Sheila Dixon. A decade later, though more development is planned, much of the land remains vacant — including the mansion.
In the adjacent Ten Hills neighborhood, the Gundry/Glass Hospital, a historic stone mansion on a 65-acre plot built as a home and later transformed into a psychiatric hospital for children, caught fire and was torn down in 2021. The property including the stone mansion was also purchased by the city, and was set to be restored as part of the second phase of the Uplands project, which began this April after years of delays.
The mansions were “both quite the buildings,” said Eric Holcomb, director of the city’s Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation. The Uplands Mansion was not designated as a landmark to be preserved by the city agency.
David Smallwood, president of the Uplands Community Association, said the vacant Uplands Mansion has attracted trespassers — kids and adults — over the past several years.
“People thought they had free reign over there,” Smallwood said. He’s called the city in regards to gaps in the fencing that allow trespassers in, as well as overgrowth that has spread from the abandoned mansion down into the neighborhood.
The city’s housing department last inspected the property in April, and responded to a work order in June, agency spokesperson Tammy Hawley said. The last 311 service request called in about the property was last year, for a fallen tree.
The fire was “bound to happen,” Smallwood said, noting an out-of-control blaze “could have been catastrophic” due to the overgrowth and general decay of the mansion.
The Uplands estate is the second vacant 19th-century mansion to fall in a blaze this year. In February, a fire destroyed Sellers Mansion in Harlem Park. A developer owned that mansion and intended to convert it into senior apartments. After the fire, he said the Maryland Historical Trust wanted him to “preserve so much of the interior that it wasn’t financially feasible” to go through with it.