The sighs coming from the bedroom can be heard all the way down the hall. Several of us gather outside the open bedroom door and strain to see inside. With a loud, breathy “Ahhhhhhh!,” a sixty-something woman in a pink sweatshirt caresses a hand-woven coverlet on the rope bed. Then, she sighs again when she spies the hand-hewn beams in the ceiling. Nudging her way through the ten or so people in the hallway, she cries to all of us and to no one in particular, “Oh, I just love this house!” She presses her palms together as if in prayer. “I didn’t think I’d like it at all when I saw it in the paper, but this is one of the finest houses I’ve been in,” she squeals.

Apparently, some people take the houses they visit on the Maryland House & Garden Pilgrimage a little more seriously than others. 

But Lucy and Don Arthur, hosts of this house on the Anne Arundel County leg of the 2007 pilgrimage, take it all in stride, from the woman who crouches down to inspect the reverse side of Lucy’s handmade painted floor cloths to the lady who insists on being shown just where the TV is hidden (in a small cupboard in the living room).

“We’re proud of the house and enjoy it very much,” says Don of the 1862 Greek Revival home. And with the warmth of a couple hosting a few friends for lunch—and not a throng of strangers that will top six hundred by the end of the day—he and Lucy politely and happily field questions about decorative choices, their antique pewter collection, and Lucy’s watercolor paintings hanging throughout the house.

Opening up their home to a few hundred visitors is nothing new for the Arthurs. After all, they’d already shown off the house’s historic chops to millions of Americans in March 2003 on Restore America, a show on HGTV, the house and garden cable channel.

Known as the Thomas O. Welch House, what was originally a tenant house was first owned by Henry C. Welch, who deeded the land to his son Thomas in 1863. Lucy’s great-great grandfather bought the land and house in 1873. The tenant house passed through various Shepherd family members until Lucy, who spent childhood summer vacations down the lane at her grandmother’s house, bought it—and its 108 scenic acres—in 1995. 

The tour brochure notes that when the Arthurs acquired the house, “it was in very poor condition.” Try no indoor plumbing (ever), a crumbling kitchen, circa-1940s electrical service, four deteriorating fireplaces that heated the house, and the matter of four tons of trash left in the house by the last tenants. It took four years for the Arthurs to complete the renovation.

But by 1999, it had been transformed, and in 2006, Suzanne Smith, a friend and former co-chair of the Anne Arundel County tour, invited the Arthurs to be part of the following year’s tour. “Lucy just looked at me at first and said, ‘Oh, my,’” Smith says with a laugh. “I told her that they’d have a lot of fun, and they have. Their house is perfect for the tour. It’s a gorgeous home and a great spot, and there’s
a lot of parking.”

When Lucy greets me at the front door a little before 9 a.m., the house is impeccably clean. No one’s running a vacuum, frantically cleaning windows, or quickly tidying up. The only hint I have that the Arthurs might be expecting hoards of company is the load of recently used white towels in Lucy’s arms. (Fresh towels have been carefully rolled and placed in baskets in the bathrooms.)

“I’m pretty together today,” she laughs. “I have some quick dusting to do, and I need to put out the flowers, but other than checking the corners for cobwebs, we’re ready.” She admits that the house is the cleanest that it’s ever been. (For the record, no professional cleaning crew has swept in the day before. The Arthurs do all their own cleaning inside and out, handle all lawn care duties, and maintain the formal cutting garden near the kitchen.) With most of the surfaces in the house being wood, Don quips that “dusting is not a casual thing for us.” Vacuuming, polishing some brass (“We have patina, not shine,” Lucy explains), and dead-heading irises in the garden beside the house are the extent of any last-minute chores. Lucy’s cousin Mariann Shepherd, who is on hand to help during the day, assures me that the state of cleanliness is not just for tour day.

“It looks like this all the time,” she says. “Nothing is out of place, but
it’s a very comfortable home.”

I walk with Lucy to the laundry room, where she deposits the towels and offers me coffee and muffins. This nook is “command central” for the fifteen or so family and friends who have volunteered as room guides, ticket takers, and parking attendants. The guides are equipped with a cheat-sheet that Don and Lucy put together to help them point out significant facts about the house, its furnishings
and restoration. It’s a charming list, complete with amusing typos. The kitchen section lists a “wooden bowel [sic] and dough bowel [sic].” “My mother-in-law caught that one,” Don deadpans.

While the hosts may be relaxed and easy-going, the plan of how to move 600 or so visitors through the house isn’t. At 10 a.m. exactly, guests begin to arrive by car (there are no tour buses for the pilgrimage). Volunteers direct guests to park along the third-of-a-mile winding lane and to enter via the side porch, where the Arthurs’ daughter, Beth, handles tickets. Then it’s through to the kitchen to begin the self-guided tour. Volunteer guides are stationed in several rooms upstairs and downstairs to answer questions from Don’s sheet and to help keep the flow of traffic moving.

Some people walk through slowly, taking it all in. Others, like one woman on a cell phone motors through, glancing at the rooms while chatting away. Many pepper the Arthurs and their volunteers with questions, which they answer repeatedly and patiently: Yes, the kitchen wing is new. No, that small table in the kitchen isn’t an antique but a warming drawer designed by Lucy. She’s the artist of most of the paintings and designed and made all the floor cloths. Yes, the windows are original, but during the painstaking restoration of the house from 1995 to 1999, each window had its glass replaced with new thermal panes.

There is no formal presentation during the tour, though Lucy pretty much holds court in the kitchen, occasionally being called in to the adjacent dining room to answer a question about the pewter. The kitchen is where their design vision and skill came into full bloom. Prior to the renovation, Don, a retired computer industry executive, had never done any carpentry work, but the kitchen table is his design and craftsmanship. Lucy designed the cabinets, and it was her idea to raise the fridge off the floor and hide it behind more cabinetry. Most visitors have the same reaction that I did when I first entered the kitchen, murmuring a low “wow” as they scan the room and take off their sunglasses. It’s the kind of kitchen I figure most of us touring the Arthur home wish we had: beautifully appointed, well-designed, inviting, comfortable, and clean. Actually, I’d settle for just clean.

By the time the day ends and Don gets ready to head to the nearby St. James’ Parish Church Annual Spring Dinner to fetch a carry-out supper of crab cakes, country ham, slaw, and potatoes for his hungry volunteers, there’s not a room that hasn’t been tromped through. Nobody peeked in closets, perhaps only because there aren’t too many in the house. When the house was built, the original residents would have used armoires for storage, so the Arthurs do, too.

Lucy marvels at the reaction to their home and handiwork. She was nervous at first about pebbles from the driveway finding their way into the house en masse—she went as far as placing a small sign on the ticket table reading “please check your shoe treads for pebbles”—but she notes that “the house was as clean when we finished as when we started.” They both deem the experience as a lot of fun and one that they’d consider doing again—but not anytime soon. After dinner they plan to keep things pretty simple: get a good night’s sleep and take it easy the next day. And leave the dust mop in the closet.

Sarah Achenbach writes from Baltimore.

Making a Pilgrimage

From a humble start in 1930 as a committee of the Federated Garden Clubs of Maryland, the nonprofit Maryland House & Garden Pilgrimage has grown into a statewide program to raise funds for the preservation and restoration of Maryland’s architecturally and historically significant properties. Maryland counties sponsor pilgrimage tours in alternating years, with participating counties receiving their
own Saturday tour date in April or May. Each county has a volunteer pilgrimage committee, which selects tour homes, old or new, that they feel will be interesting for visitors. Each county’s committee also chooses a historic preservation project to receive funds raised through ticket sales. (For 2008, $30 per day covers admission to all houses in a given county.) Statewide in 2007, the pilgrimage raised nearly $85,000 and close to 5,000 people toured the homes. In Anne Arundel County, the Arthurs’ house tour helped raise more than $22,000 for Edgewater’s Historic London Town & Gardens. For ticket information, call 410-821-6933 or visit http://www.mhgp.org.

Schedule for the 2008 Maryland House & Garden Pilgrimage:

April 26: Talbot County
May 3: Kent County
May 4: Baltimore City
May 10: Calvert County
May 17: Washington County
May 18: Baltimore County