Matthias Hammond

Matthias Hammond was born around 1748 in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, into one of the colony's established planter families, with the education and social standing that made entry into the legal profession a natural course. He trained as a lawyer and established himself in Annapolis, the colonial capital and one of the wealthiest and most sophisticated cities in British North America, where the legal and planter elites overlapped extensively. His prosperity and social position enabled him to undertake the construction of an ambitious townhouse that would become one of the greatest architectural achievements of colonial America.

Hammond commissioned William Buckland, the most accomplished architect-craftsman working in the Chesapeake region, to design his Annapolis townhouse in the early 1770s. Buckland created a five-part Palladian composition of extraordinary refinement, with a central block connected by curved hyphens to flanking wings, its interior featuring some of the most sophisticated decorative woodwork carved in colonial America. The house was completed in 1774, just as the political crisis with Britain was intensifying, and Hammond himself was active in Annapolis's pre-Revolutionary resistance movement, participating in the network of committees and associations that organized Maryland's opposition to British taxation and trade policy. He was among the Patriot gentry who were willing to put their social standing and economic interests behind the cause of colonial rights.

Hammond retired from public life after independence was achieved, a withdrawal that has puzzled historians given his apparent early enthusiasm for the Patriot cause. He never married, and he died in 1786 without having occupied his great house for long. The building passed through several owners and was eventually acquired by the state of Maryland, which transferred it to the Colonial Dames of America, who preserved and restored it. The Hammond-Harwood House stands today as a monument to the extraordinary architectural culture of colonial Annapolis and to the craftsman who designed it, William Buckland, whose genius Hammond's commission had enabled and preserved.