St. Michaels Museum Opens Saturdays Through Dec. 5; Its Sewell House Began as Part of a Harbor Steam Mill

ST. MICHAELS, MARYLAND — The St. Michaels Museum at St. Mary's Square is open Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., starting today, Nov. 7, through Dec. 5, the museum says. Admission is free, and donations are appreciated. For Christmas in St. Michaels weekend, the museum lists special hours of 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 12, and 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 13.

The museum, at 201 E. Chestnut St., one block east of Talbot Street, is three 19th-century buildings moved onto the square from elsewhere in town. The first of them, the Sewell House, carries the oldest story.

Its north half was once part of a large steam mill that Samuel Harrison, a wealthy St. Michaels merchant and farmer, built on the harbor sometime before 1819, according to the museum's history of its campus. Harrison had a large sailing merchant ship trading with Barbados and hoped the mill would grow his business. Hard times after the War of 1812, and the arrival of steamboats running on regular schedules between St. Michaels, Annapolis and Baltimore, sank the venture. The mill failed, and Harrison died in 1837.

In 1847 the shipbuilder Edward Willy bought the property and took the mill apart, later using pieces in his boatyard. One section, a room down and a room above, was left standing. In 1865 a St. Michaels waterman, Jeremiah Sewell, bought a lot on Mill Street, moved the little frame building there and added a two-story wing for a family with seven children, with a separate kitchen out back. The house stayed in the Sewell family until 1928.

By 1963 its owner wanted to tear it down. The St. Michaels Sesquicentennial Commission, marking 150 years since the 1813 Battle of St. Michaels, saved it with money raised by that celebration. The town commissioners let the commission put the house on St. Mary's Square, on land left vacant when the old brick public school was demolished, and it was moved there in May 1964. The museum was established June 10, 1964, by a committee led by Capt. William G. Ludlow, a retired Navy officer who lived in the Cannonball House and taught math at St. Michaels High School. Volunteers renovated the house, which was in extremely poor condition, to show the life of a typical working family in 1865.

The second building, the Teetotum, is a one-story commercial duplex built around 1860 on Willow Street, on property owned by the merchant Edward Harrison. One side served for years as a magistrate's office for justices of the peace and the other as a harness and saddlery shop, the museum says; the building has also been the town jail and a barbershop. St. Michaels Bank gave it to the museum, and it was moved to the square in November 1968. It now holds a large diorama of the Aug. 10, 1813, Battle of St. Michaels.

The third, the Chaney House, built in 1851 by three free Black brothers, joined the campus in 2003. The museum changed its name from St. Mary's Square Museum to the St. Michaels Museum in 2006, and volunteers still run it.

The money that saved the Sewell House came from a celebration of a battle fought 150 years before. The museum's phone number is 410-745-9561.