Brewhouse (18CV13)

The Brewhouse is a standing eighteenth-century structure that is best known as the birthplace of Maryland's first governor Thomas Johnson and also the birthplace of Mrs. John Quincy Adams. The property also contained a wharf, in service as early as the early eighteenth century, where goods and passengers could embark and disembark. The Mackall family owned the property beginning in the 1840s. Outbuildings on the property include tobacco barns, a cornhouse, a shed and a 1940s post office, as well as an eighteenth-century cemetery.

The archaeological site 18CV13 encompasses the area containing the house and all of its attendant outbuildings, as well as east to the end of the farm fields overlooking St. Leonard Creek and southwest to Mackall Road. Non-systematic surface survey done in the early 2000s revealed a Woodland shell midden, as well as historic artifacts associated with the nineteenth- and twentieth-century occupations of the standing structures. The shell midden site had been initially discovered in the 1940s by Richard Stearns.

An archaeological assemblage given the designation of Lot 2 was donated to the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory/State of Maryland in 2015 by the current property owners. This group of objects was discovered in the crawlspace under the house during renovation that took place in the 1990s. The owners carefully collected and boxed all of the artifacts at that time and stored them for several decades before donating them. The collection, comprising three Hollinger boxes of material, appears to be the discard of a number of ceramic and glass vessels dating to the very late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. This collection may relate to a property owner change, quite possibly related to the death of owner John Broome Mackall in 1913. These artifacts have been cataloged and the collection contains a large number of reconstructable vessels and a high percentage of Continental European hard paste porcelain, both decorated and undecorated.

(Edited from archeological site survey form, Maryland Historical Trust)