Evergreen House

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With 48 rooms, a soaring portico, and a Tiffany designed glass canopy, Evergreen House stands out as one of Baltimore's best Gilded Age mansions. The house was originally built in 1857 by the Broadbent Family. John Work Garrett, president of the B&O Railroad and a burgeoning railroad tycoon, purchased the mansion 19 years later (in 1878) for his son T. Harrison Garrett. (Incidentally, five years before this, John Work Garrett purchased the Garrett Jacobs Mansion on Mount Vernon Place for his other son, Robert). The Mansion was expanded in the 1880s and again in the 1920s by two generations of Garrett family members.

Evergreen House has over 50,000 items from the Garretts, including drawings by Degas and Picasso and the world's largest collection of Tiffany glass pieces. The building's rare book library was designed by noted Baltimore architect Lawrence Hall Fowler, and contains 8,000 volumes that include original works by Shakespeare and Audubon, as well as the signatures of every signer of the Declaration of Independence. The mansion even has its own theater, which is elaborately decorated by the Russian designer Leon Baskt and is the only known theater to retain original sets by him. In 1942, the mansion and surrounding 26 acres of landscaped lawns and gardens were deeded to The Johns Hopkins University, under whose care they remain today.