Maxwell Hall a jewel of Charles County
Friends group opens doors to the public; 250th celebration Oct. 13
On their way to burn Washington, D.C., in 1814, British troops made their way up the Patuxent River hopping onto land at Benedict during the War of 1812. At Swanson Creek, now flowing in the shadow of the large cooling towers of Chalk Point Generating Station, just north of Benedict, the travel and battle weary troops may have stopped off for a rest at an estate house built by merchant and tobacco farmer George Maxwell in 1768. As the story goes, the troops set up camp waterside and the officers took over the first floor of the main house up the hill, now known as Maxwell Hall, forcing the family then living there — not the Maxwells — to the second floor in a sultry August.
Peter J. “Pete” Swann, 67, one of the last people to have lived in the one-anda-half-story gambrel-roofed home, said the story is only legend but artifacts found on the property lend an air of possibility.
“They found several buttons, which appeared to be from the War of 1812,” Swann said while sitting in one of the house’s front parlors in September during a Sunday open house. “Daddy had them made up into little display cases, and we left them with the house.”
“There never was any definitive research done, it was never definitively proven that the British actually were here — a legend, that’s what the historic marker out by Teague’s Point Road says,” Swann added.
Maxwell Hall has been open to the public for Sunday open houses this year for the first time with the help of the newly formed Friends of Maxwell Hall, and is set to celebrate its 250th birthday later this month. Purportedly built in 1768, the house has been in county ownership since 2007 and is now part of the larger Maxwell Hall Park.
Swann’s parents, Edwin O. and Marion Swann, purchased the rundown, vandalized house and its 22 or so acres in 1980, the latest of several old or historic homes the couple had purchased to fix up and live in over the years. Maxwell Hall had been abandoned for 10 years or more at that point: Vandals had removed the mantle pieces from the fireplaces, the brick and rock flues were crumbling and vines were growing up through the roof.
“I thought my parents were crazy,” Swann said.
Family and hired work crews set to work clearing overgrown brush and digging into the rotted foundation beams to get the house basically livable by the summer of 1981, at which point Pete moved in with his parents to help complete the restoration. Pete would later marry his wife, Mary, and they would build a house just down the lane from Maxwell Hall on a piece of property that had once been a part of the estate. He and Mary still live there and take walks up the lane to visit the 18th century home.
“It was very warm here. I remember all the good times we had with family — holiday dinners, the Christmas tree,” Mary Swann said. “So much love was put into the house, restoring it. … It really was a labor of love.”
The labor for the Swanns continued for at least two more years after moving in as they restored the interior and upgraded the electrics and heating and cooling systems.
“It was gutted right down to the bare-bones on the inside,” Pete said. “Everything had to be scraped and sanded. Who knows what I breathed at that time.”
Marion Swann died in 2004 and her husband followed in 2011. Before Edwin died, the house, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974, was put up for sale before he, as a WWII Navy veteran, spent his last five years at Charlotte Hall Veterans Home. It sat on the market until 2007 when the county decided to purchase it to complete what is now Maxwell Hall Park — nearly 700 acres of forest and former tobacco fields crisscrossed with nearly 15 miles of equestrian and hiking trails.
Pete said his parents never considered the historic property “theirs,” rather that such places belonged to the public and future generations and they were the restorers and caretakers.
“I … am very happy that the house is in public hands, that it’s public property and the public can enjoy it,” Pete said, echoing his parents’ sentiments. “And hopefully [people] can learn from it as well.”
Along with the legend of the British troops, the house has other mysteries and secrets yet discovered, such as its provenance. While courthouse records were traced back to George Maxwell’s purchase of the property in 1768, the housing site may have been developed as early as 1680.
“Daddy had traced the histor y of the property back through the courthouse
records,” Pete said. “He was friends with Patrick Mudd, the clerk of the court forever in Charles County, and they worked together tracing it back to the date [in 1768] that the anniversary will be celebrated in October. But the traditional date, which is why the Colonial Dames has the plaque on the front of the house, the traditional date is 1680. It is what everyone had always heard and said and told us is when the house was first built, 1680.” Marion Swann was a member of the Colonial Dames and initiated the plaque dedication.
Friends of Maxwell Hall
The Friends of Maxwell Hall and Hughesville Garden Club, along with the county, are working on making the house more accessible to the public, starting with a series of Sunday open houses that started in September and continue this month. The 250th anniversary of the 1768 date will be celebrated Oct. 13 with a “Colonial Faire” from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
The garden club had been decorating the house for the annual “Holiday Trail” since a county-wide War of 1812 celebration in 2014, but aside from a handful of other meetings, it was the only time the public got a peek inside until this year.
“All of us in Hughesville Garden Club fell in love with Maxwell Hall, and we knew that the house deserved more than what we were doing for it,” said current garden club president George Gazarek. “We formed the friends group [this year] with the goal of preserving, restoring and developing — making it more accessible to the public.”
Currently the friends group is at 12 members but Gazarek said he hopes the open houses and the Colonial Faire will spur interest in the house and get more willing hands involved to increase the number of events throughout the year.
“... I think when people come in and see the place and fall in love with it that they’ll want to be a part of the future stuff here,” he said.
“We plan on having a lot of additional events throughout the year,” he added. “We will have open houses from early spring until late fall every year. We hope to have speakers from time to time, and we might serve a light lunch with them or something.”
Gazarek said, and Pete Swann later backed him up on this, that some people feel the house is haunted. A couple of “spirit investigations” have been held there led by people who investigate paranormal activity with scientific instruments.
“There were about a dozen people in each group, and I never felt anything, and there was a policeman in the group who never felt anything, but the other 10 people all claimed they felt spirits in the house,” Gazarek said.
“We’ll probably be doing more of them in the future,” he added. “There’s a small crowd that likes those kind of things.”
Gazarek said the fledgling friends hasn’t gotten into preservation or restoration yet, but will eventually get there as the bank account and volunteer list both grow.
“The more money we get, the more people we get, the more events we can do, and the more we can focus on researching the house,” he said. “From time to time, when we’re here for the Holiday Trail, we blow a breaker, so the electricity probably needs to be beefed up and modernized to some extent. That’s the kind of thing the friends group can fund.”
Gazarek, along with his wife Rose, both of whom are master gardeners and members of both the garden club and Friends of Maxwell Hall, hopes that others will the see the house and its property the way he and his wife do: as a historic treasure that needs to be experienced by more people.
“Basically the whole purpose is to just to showcase this historic property to make more people love it, to make more people come here. Really, this is a jewel in Charles County,” he said.
“It seemed natural to start this organization and make this historic home become more alive,” Rose Gazarek added. “This is really a treasure. A lot of people don’t know that it’s here.”