The Shipley-Leydecker mansion was completely out of place. Looking at its architecture you don't think of Baltimore, you think of a plantation house sitting in or around New Orleans. The house was built somewhere between the mid-18th century and 1814, with 1802 being a generally accepted date. Like many homes of the Colonial/Federal period, it grew and changed over the years with prevailing tastes and needs. It’s been said that originally it was a plain square house built of brick, with Neo-Classical appointments in line with Federal Era design, but what was original to the house and what was added later is unknown, making a definite construction date hard to ascertain.
Balconies around three sides, ostentatious ironwork, columns and pediment…whether these were original construction is not known, but additions like a two story wooden add-on to the back of the house for servant’s quarters being a good example of something built onto the house later on. This architecture wonder stood out as highly unusual for Baltimore, and appears to be the only one of its type in the area.
It all started with a man named Carrol, Charles Carroll. Born in Maryland in 1723, as a young man he received a classic European education in Portugal and England, fitting for Colonial landed gentry of the 18th century. To top off these scholarly endeavors, Charles rounded out his education by studying Law at one of the Inns of Court in London. After completing these legal studies at the Middle Temple, he was admitted as a barrister, then set sail back to Maryland, never putting his legal training to much use. He did retain the title however, taking on the moniker of barrister to distinguish himself from the multitude of other Charles Carrolls in and around Maryland. Significantly, one of his distant relations, another Charles Carroll, who went by Charles Carroll of Carrollton, was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and ended up as the last living gentleman to have signed that document, passing away in 1832 at the age of 95.
Charles the Barrister was a wealthy man, as all the Carrolls seem to have become. He was also an important contributor to American Independence. In addition to owning land, mills, and iron works, he was active in the Maryland political scene, sitting on committees furthering the Colony’s participation in breaking from the Crown. His pride and joy was Georgia Plantation, and the exquisite colonial manse built and finished on the property in 1760…Mt. Clare. It sits southeast of Baltimore itself and stands today, preserved and full of the family’s original possessions. It represents an almost complete example of the material culture exhibited by Maryland’s colonial “upper crust”. Interestingly, Charles also encouraged and financially supported Charles Wilson Peale, who painted his portrait more than once…
In 1783 the Barrister died, ironically, in the same year that the American Revolution officially ended, beginning that new chapter called the United States. He and his wife were childless, two daughters dying young and leaving no heir apparent. To fix this, Charles had enticed his nephew, Nicholas Maccubin, with all the wealth he had to give. The catch…Nicholas had to take the last name of Carroll…
Nicholas became one of the wealthiest men in Maryland.
And this is where the story of the house begins…
Georgia Plantation, now owned by the heir, was large. It wasn’t the largest, but stretched from Baltimore Harbor west (it had its own pier into Baltimore Harbor), encompassing significant acreage in what is now part of the city itself. Lot number 75, on a high hill from which you could see the Mt. Clare house and off the Garrison Forest Mill Road, was given to Anne (Macubbib) Carroll, one of Nicholas’ daughters. On Lot 75 a house was built for Anne and her husband, William Mason. It was a stately affair, built of brick, painted white with ostentatious ironwork surrounding both wrap-around balconies on two of the three floors. Some sources say it was built before the turn of the 18th century, some say it was built in 1803. What is certain is that it is squarely within the Federal Period, and exhibits all the trappings of the new nation’s fascination and love with the Classical World…Greco and Roman.
It is known as the Shipley-Leydecker mansion. Both names being the last two named owners of the home. The Shipley family purchased the mansion and its environs in the 1850s, the Leydeckers around 1906. While the later owner’s names have stuck, in my opinion it should rightfully be called the Carroll-Mason home for the first owners.
From the late 1940s until the eventual tear-down and destruction in 1969, it was owned, refurbished, and served as a Veterans of Foreign Wars post and memorial. Unfortunately, as the years went by, this area of Baltimore, Shipley Hill, became dangerous and crime-ridden…not a place safe for the VFW. Today, a housing project sits where the house once stood, a low-income apartment complex in a very run-down part of Baltimore.
In the 1930s, with the country in the throughs of the Great Depression, a make-work government program known as the Works Projects Administration, or WPA, sent individuals across the country in a program to document interesting aspects of the Nation and its cities. These were used to create travel guides, and the Shipley house is in the book for Baltimore. Described as “one-of-a-kind”, and “out of place”, the authors recognized how unusual it was…in the place it was. It put the house on the map. Subsequently, it was featured in a reference book called Decorative Arts of Victoria’s Era, published in 1950. From here it was seen by a man that was looking for that perfect house…the perfect house to create a new attraction, alongside new land called New Orleans Square at the Happiest Place On Earth…Disneyland.
Finding the right haunted house was a more difficult job than you would imagine. Some with popular reputations were considered , like the Winchester House in San Jose Californbia. But the one in the book, which was in the Disney library, showed this one house, and caught the eye of Ken Anderson. He was the artist and designer that Walt Disney on the haunted house project for Disneyland in the late 1950s. It was Anderson saw the picture of the Shipley-Leydecker mansion in the book…liked it, sketched it, and secured this house as the ultimate exterior model of what became Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion. Ken Anderson never participated in the majority of the Haunted Mansion design and implementation, being pulled by Walt Disney to work on Sleeping Beauty, so he never really gets much, if any, credit for the attraction.
As a side note, the designers for Disney imagined a ramshackle, broken down, plantation house...Walt Disney firmly said no...there would be no decayed architecture in Disneyland. From day one the outside of Anaheim copy has been fresh, clean, and well maintained. Aside from a few architectural differences, mainly the cupola, which was changed very late in the design process from square to hexagonal, and the addition of a pediment with columns on the side of the structure, the house is a virtual carbon copy of Baltimore’s most unusual house, seen by millions…since 1963.
Sources:
The Shipley-Leydecker House
http://disneylandcompendium.blogspot.com/2008/03/shipley-lydecker-house.html
Charles William Leydecker
https://stuffctwfound.com/2017/03/07/charles-william-leydecker/Father of the Haunted Mansion
https://longforgottenhauntedmansion.blogspot.com/2010/10/father-of-haunted-mansion-part-one.html