The sounds of modern life have no place inside the house at 130 Prince George Street. In one of the oldest frame houses of Annapolis—circa 1700—time has eerily stopped. Inside, a precarious-looking winding staircase disappears to a second floor and wide plank wood floors creak and bend underfoot. The parlor lies crammed with furniture and collectibles dating from the colonial era through the Victorian.

But even though the modest house serves as a well-preserved monument to bygone days in historic Annapolis, it’s no museum docent who opens the door. Rather, it’s Ann Jensen, a descendant of John and Ann Sands, who first bought the house in 1771. The Sands House has been occupied by the same family—through wars, economic depressions, and the pro-gress of time—for more than 235 years.

“It’s my house, but it’s not my house,” says Jensen, sixty-seven, a plain-talking woman with close-cropped white hair and an encyclopedic knowledge of her family’s history. “It’s the Sands House. Sometimes it’s hard, but it’s just assumed that it will always be in the family.”

The house, which passed to her and her brother and sister in 2003 (Jensen has lived there since 1989), is not grand. It’s a place where everyday people—a tavern owner, a merchant, and several spinster women—lived and worked and struggled to get by.

The house is unlike anything on the street, where many of the buildings date to the late nineteenth century. The structure’s yellow wood siding stands out against the backdrop of Annapolis’s brick row houses, and the roof comes to a gently humped peak that drops off on one side in a gentle slope. A small porch shelters the front door; it leads into a small hallway from which the rooms radiate: two rooms downstairs and two bedrooms. (An addition on the back was built in the last century.) The rooms all have the same white plaster walls showing the uneven ashen color of age (and a few marks where the plaster was recently replaced). Although one downstairs room contains a few nods to modern convenience—a recliner and a television—the house is most remarkable for its collection of family items, gathered over the course of two centuries. “This is a family that never threw anything away,” says Jensen, “so there’s something from every period that’s been passed from one generation to the next.”

The main parlor is filled with colonial chairs, a piano that has Civil War-era sheet music on the stand (the family were all Southern sympathizers), and a piano lamp from 1890. There are books inscribed by Ann and John Sands and pewter plates from the mid-to-late 1700s. There are shadowboxes filled with old medicine bottles and sewing accoutrements. The bed in which Jensen’s mother was born in 1910 is still in one of the bedrooms. A Victrola stands in one corner, a reminder of when Jensen’s mother used to play records and dance the Charleston with her friends, until the house started to shake and her grandmother would bring the revelries to a close. 

Since she took on the house in the eighties, Jensen has opened its doors to school groups, graduate students, and researchers. Recently, she began paid tours for the public. Although she’s brought many items into the main house from other rooms for the tours (she lives in the 1904 addition, which has slightly more modern conveniences than the original home), many of the items were in their present locations when she was a child. 

“People are most familiar with the large brick mansions; this is a smaller, more modest house that shows how the majority of people lived in Annapolis in the eighteenth century,” says Glenn Campbell, historian at the Historic Annapolis Foundation. Campbell says that private ownership of a house such as the Sands’ is unique. “If you go to a house museum, you’re lucky if there are furnishings from the family that originally owned it on display in the house, whereas Ann has so many things from her family in the house that she lives with every day.”

“I’m not so interested in the things, but in the stories they tell about the people who owned them,” says Jensen, who is most fascinated by the collection of papers left by her relatives. Although the original letters and papers are in the Maryland State Archives, Jensen keeps copies in seventy-one ringed binders, kept in chronological order. “I’m interested in their daily lives, how they lived in this house, how they lived in this town.”

John and Ann Sands bought the house in the eighteenth century and operated it as a tavern and inn. Jensen has early records from those days, indicating the number of beds and bolsters the Sands kept for the business. One can only imagine the tight quarters guests enjoyed. This was likely the first property the Sands owned, and pride of ownership was something they no doubt passed to their children. It can still be felt in today’s generations.

The Sands had five children, and to help make ends meet, Ann and her daughters did sewing for wealthy townspeople. “I know [Ann] was a pretty feisty woman because in 1770 she was hauled into court for beating another woman, and John had to pay a ten-pound fine—that was a pretty hefty sum at that time,” says Jensen. The records don’t indicate why the women quarreled, but they were both innkeepers’ wives. Jensen says with a chuckle, “It was a small town.”

The house passed next to Joseph Sands, Ann and John’s youngest son. Their oldest son, William, had been killed in New York during the Revolutionary War, part of the famous Maryland 400, which held off the British so that George Washington could retreat from what would have been certain defeat, allowing him to come back and fight another day. Jensen still has two of the last letters William sent home to his parents before he was killed.

Joseph Sands was a wealthy merchant, the treasurer and secretary of Annapolis, and a member of the city council. He had ten children, and when he died, the house went tohis eldest son. Unfortunately, he only outlived his father by about eight years, and the house went to two maiden aunts. Thus ended a brief time of prosperity and began a tradition of women in the Sands house. “It wasn’t easy [to keep the house in the family], because they weren’t wealthy,” Jensen recalls. “We have a letter my great-grandmother wrote. She was an heir of those two old aunts. There were about sixteen heirs and the property was divided up, and there was talk of selling the house. My great-grandmother wrote a letter to her brother saying, ‘Can you imagine this house has never been owned by any but a Sands, and I’d hate to see it fall into another’s hands.’ I think that’s how a lot of them felt, and so someone managed to hang onto it.”

The brothers of the two maiden aunts sent money to help the sisters, and they were able to stay in the house until their deaths in 1901 and 1902, when the house passed to Jensen’s great-grandmother. Even then, the house was expensive to maintain. In 1904, it needed to be raised eighteen inches. “They kept raising the street and adding sidewalks, and it was just coming up the side of the house,” says Jensen. At that time, her great-grandmother added a porch and a bay window in the main parlor. She also built an addition in the back and began taking in boarders—mostly Naval academy cadets, many of whom sent dolls back to the house to their former hostess. The collection now resides on a sofa in the parlor. One tenant, an Episcopalian minister named Reverend James L. Smiley, lived in the house until 1956. (When the house passed to Jensen’s grandmother and great aunt in 1917, they kept on the boarders.) He often married young couples in the parlor, and Jensen’s grandmother or great aunt would act as witnesses.

Although Jensen’s two maiden aunts liked to say George Washington once walked through the house to avoid a crowd, she doesn’t think the story is true. This isn’t a home for famous visitors—it’s a home for a family, and Jensen hopes to keep it that way. The house went to her mother and uncle before passing to her and her sister and brother. In 2000, they began the Sands House Foundation to help maintain the house and utilize it as an educational tool.

A house as old as this requires constant care. “It’s incredibly expensive to do it, but we’re trying to do it the way it should be done and to maintain the integrity of the materials and the house itself,” she says.

Jensen, a writer who has written a book for adolescent readers, The World Turned Upside Down: Children of 1776, about John and Ann Sands’ children and the impact of the American Revolution on the family, has two daughters who will one day inherit the house. One was even married in the main parlor (she now lives on the West Coast). Her daughter Erica Jensen-Holmes lives in Delaware but looks forward to the day she can return to Annapolis—and the house—with a mix of joy and trepidation. “I’m very sentimental, and I love all the things that belonged to my family,” she says. “If you go into some of the older homes in Annapolis, they’re done to a T. This was a lower- to middle-class family, a regular family, and that’s really neat.”

However, just thinking about the cost of maintaining old roofs and siding—not to mention heating a drafty old house—are intimidating realities, Jensen-Holmes admits, but she wouldn’t consider selling it.

“It’s my grandmother and my mother, and I can feel them there,” she says. “Also, there have always been women there—and that really draws me to it, too.”

It can be hard living in what is, essentially, a museum. Perhaps it’s that sense of history and family that keeps the tradition of the house alive. Jensen says she feels the spirit of the family, too, although she says she’s never come across a ghost. “I guess they’re there in all the things they left behind,” she says. “I feel a presence here, even if it’s not a ghostly one.”

Christianna McCausland writes from Baltimore County.