BALTIMORE, Md. — In the aftermath of the three-alarm fire at the blighted, vacant mansion in West Baltimore, firefighters doused hot spots and looked for any sign that someone may have been caught inside.
“That could very well be a possibility, Jeff,” said Kevin Cartwright of the Baltimore City Fire Department, “We had no initial reports of anyone being inside of this building at the time they were dispatched, but that’s a concern, you know?”
What is certain is that the fire will serve as the victorian, Uplands Mansion’s final chapter in a history that dates back to 1850.
One of the city’s top socialites, Mary Frick Garrett Jacobs, made her home in what’s now the mansion of the same last name in Mount Vernon, but Uplands served as her summer home she shared with her first husband, a B&O Railroad president, and a subsequent husband.
“So that was their summer home,” said J. Austin Bitner, executive director of the Engineering Society of Baltimore, “You know, if you think of that, they’re summer home. Upland was where they summered, but that had been donated to the women of the Episcopal Church, the widows of the priests, but for various reasons had been mismanaged and after several sales, been abandoned.”
While the vacant mansion has been leveled and totally destroyed, many of its historical contents had already been preserved over the years.
That forethought, after decades of abandonment, spared items from the fire spanning the mansion’s 42 rooms that time had forgotten.
“Some of the property within there was saved and salvaged by the Garrett family,” said Bitner, “We recently have been able to bring some of it back the their other home, and the Engineering Society of Baltimore and the Garrett Jacobs Mansion Endowment Fund, both together, worked extremely hard to preserve this history and to keep this part of Baltimore’s history alive and a part of the community.”
