H.L. Mencken House (18BC195)

The H.L. Mencken House is situated at 1524 Hollins Street in Baltimore, Maryland and is located within the Union Square-Hollins Market Historic District. The structure on the property is a three-story brick rowhouse with telescoping segments north of the original building. The house was constructed in 1883 and inhabited by prolific author, essayist, and journalist H.L. Mencken for most of his life.

Due to Mencken's profuse writing, the layout of the back yard area has been meticulously recorded in his autobiography Happy Days. Original structural elements of the Mencken occupation still extant in the rear yard area include a water fountain dating to circa 1883, a pergola with brick columns and ceramic tile inlays that Mencken himself constructed, a frame gazebo with a brick foundation, also inlaid with ceramic tiles, and the original brick-paved walkway (removed and replaced during renovation). Several other outbuildings were documented by Mencken, including a "summer-house" constructed by Mencken's grandfather between 1883 and 1895, and demolished sometime before 1940.

In the summer of 2019, EAC/Archaeology Inc. was contracted to monitor the installation of concrete fence footers, concrete foundations and utility lines in connection with property renovations. The archaeological monitoring identified a total of six subsurface features. Most features were excavated in their entirety and all artifacts generated from feature contexts were retained. Features 1 and 3 were later determined to be parts of the same feature. Three utility features were excavated, including the area beneath the circa 1883 water fountain and two cleanouts associated with the water utilities in the back yard area. The stone and mortar foundation of the house was identified as a distinct structural feature.

The extent of archaeological monitoring was limited to utility trenching in the rear yard area. One modern utility feature, a concrete duct bank, was encountered, located 40 centimeters south of the northeast corner of the main structure. No artifacts were attributed specifically to the concrete duct bank and its associated stratigraphy. A second modern utility feature, a terra cotta pipe was also observed oriented roughly east to west, running to the northeast corner of the former brick kitchen.

One feature (excavated as Feature 1/3) was interpreted as a late 19th- to early 20th-century builder’s trench associated with the two-story brick structure to the east of the present project area and identified as a residence and cigar factory. Artifacts collected from this feature included salt-glazed stoneware, whiteware fragments, complete oyster shells and other faunal material, window and bottle glass, coal, machine-cut and other nails, architectural stones and mortar, and a single Rockingham base fragment.

Feature 2 was associated with the original stone and mortar foundation of the dwelling.

Features 4 and 5 were both associated with the drainage cleanouts situated in the rear yard area. Feature 4 was associated with the southern drainage cleanout and located 1.25 meters north and 13 centimeters east from the northeast corner of the former brick kitchen. The cleanout and associated drainage pipe cut into strata which had clearly been disturbed by the utility’s installation. Artifacts associated with Feature 4 included stoneware body sherds, brick and earthenware tile fragments, a vitrified clay sewer pipe fragment, and whole and fragmented oyster shells. Feature 5 was associated with the northern cleanout and located 70 centimeters north and 40 centimeters west of the northwest corner of the brick foundation for the frame gazebo. Artifacts associated with Feature 5 included a vitrified clay sewer pipe sample, in addition to two stoneware sherds and a single window glass fragment, which were discarded in the field.

Feature 6 was associated with the excavated area situated below the extant water hydrant, constructed at the same time as the dwelling in 1883. The water hydrant is situated 1.4 meters west and 45 centimeters north of the southwest corner of the brick foundation for the gazebo. Feature 6 was manually excavated to locate the preexisting water tie-in required for the installation of modern water utilities. The concrete water hydrant is affixed with a dual copper alloy faucet and is situated upon a brick and mortar platform 12 centimeters in thickness. Several cast-iron pipes and brick bats were observed in situ below the brick foundation at varying depths. Artifacts recorded in Feature 6 included a vitrified clay sewer pipe, a cast-iron pipe coal, architectural stone, porcelain, window glass, and stoneware, whiteware, and refined earthenware sherds.

Even after aggressive sampling of bulk structural artifacts, over 400 historic artifacts were recovered from the hand-excavated and mechanical trenches in the back yard area during the 2019 archaeological monitoring campaign.

((Modified from state site form by Patricia Samford)