Baltimore County will apparently remain the owner of an historic mansion it would rather give away.
Months after the County Council approved a plan to sell the structure to Kingsville landscaper Robert Lehnhoff for $5,000 and provide funds to help with its restoration, Lehnhoff has advised the county that the purchase is no longer feasible.
“The challenges with this property and its use within the residential community surrounding it appear to be too significant,” Lehnhoff wrote to county officials. He said he would follow up with a formal termination of contract shortly.
Reached Tuesday evening, Lehnhoff said he attended several community meetings and also met with the Maryland Historical Trust, which has easements on the building. The difficulty, he said, is the land on which the mansion sits is just under 4 acres, leaving little room for lighting, parking and adequate buffers for noise. Anything he would put there to recoup his investment would be intrusive to neighbors, he said.
“It wasn’t worth it for me to upset neighbors in a community in which I have a lot of friends and that I do a lot of business” in, said Lehnhoff, who owns a landscaping company.
County spokeswoman Erica Palmisano said no money had changed hands yet in the sale, as Lehnhoff and his team were still performing their due diligence. The county had planned to provide Lehnhoff with a $250,000 grant for improvements to the white stucco-covered structure, which sits just off a subdivision in the bustling Perry Hall residential community. The lane was still unpaved as of May, its entrance marked with “No Trespassing” signs along what were once verdant peach orchards.
“We’re all kind of disappointed,” said Pat Keller, president of the Perry Hall Improvement Association and a former Baltimore County planning director. “The Perry Hall Mansion has so much history — a mixed history, but a history nonetheless.”
Perry Hall Mansion dates back to the 1770s; Baltimore businessman Harry Dorsey Gough bought a 1,000-acre estate called The Adventure from Corbin Lee, an ancestor of Robert E. Lee.
Gough renamed it Perry Hall after his family home in England. He served in the Maryland House of Delegates and on the board of one of the state’s first orphanages. Gough also enslaved dozens of people and kept a jail on the property as well as chains in the basement, according to Sean Kief, whose grandmother was born in the mansion and who wrote a history of the place for Arcadia Publishing.
Gough tapped into the extensive wine cellar for lavish parties until he became a Methodist. He gathered fellow leaders at the mansion in 1784 to plan their first conference, which was held at Lovely Lane Meeting House in Baltimore. There, a few dozen preachers organized into what is today the Methodist Church, which now boasts hundreds of churches in the state. Historians often refer to Perry Hall as the “cradle of Methodism” because of the mansion’s role in growing the religion.
The original foundation survived a fire in the 1830s; the current mansion was built on top of it. The mansion has only about 4 acres now, as the remaining acres are what is now the Perry Hall community.
This is not the first time neighbors’ objections have stymied plans for the mansion. Baltimore County bought the mansion in 2001 for $335,000. Officials floated turning it into a wedding and event venue, then a nonprofit history center, but neighbors objected because of concerns about possible traffic and noise. The county then received $400,000 in state funds to repair and stabilize the aging structure, which had deteriorated under private ownership.
County officials determined they would need at least $1 million more to open the mansion to the public, and even if they could, would never be able to make the mansion compliant with both the Americans with Disabilities Act and restrictions on the Maryland Historical Trust easement. They decided that selling it would be their best option after stabilizing the structure.
Lehnhoff grew up near the mansion and was taken with its history. In an interview in May, he acknowledged the purchase was “probably a dumb move” and said the county’s grant would not even cover 10% of the needed costs for restoration.
Councilman David Marks, a longtime resident who authored a history of Perry Hall and helped the mansion achieve landmark status so that it could not be torn down, said he was also disappointed.
“Nothing would give me more satisfaction than to find a property owner who could lovingly restore the mansion,” Marks said. “I am disappointed by this development and will continue working to find the right owner.”
