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Guilford Baltimore's Premier Residential Community
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From clippings now in the possession of the Roland Park Company, Guilford appears to have first gained prominence as the property of General McDonald, who distinguished himself in our wars with England. It is supposed that to commemorate the battle of Guilford Court House, N. C., in which he was wounded, Guilford derived its name. His son, William, upon inheriting the estate, about 1850, built the old Guilford Mansion, which was razed in 1914 and is now the site of the residence at 4001 Greenway. William McDonald himself was a man of no mean fame, having in his Guilford stables the fastest race horse in the United States, Flora Temple. During the Civil War he was imprisoned at Fort McHenry for allowing southern sympathizers to signal messages to the Confederate troops in Anne Arundel County from the tower of the Guilford Mansion. The property next passed into the possession of John De Speyer, who married McDonald's widow and it was from De Speyer that it was purchased in 1872 by Arunah S. Abell, founder of The Sun. It remained in the Abell family for 35 years, until 1907, when it was sold to the Guilford Park Company. The principal stockholders of this company were Robert Garrett, William H. Grafflin, William A. Marburg, Thomas J. Hayward and H. Carroll Brown. Profit making was not the sole aim of these purchasers: they also had the purpose of preventing a beautiful tract of land, lying in the line of the city's rapid growth to the north, from being sold in small parcels for merely speculative building operations of the usual type, and they determined that the property should be developed as a whole along the lines of the best modern methods of city planning. With this purpose in view, there was effected in 1911 a consolidation with the Roland Park Company; Guilford thus came under a management that had demonstrated in Roland Park the wisdom of safe-guarding a neighborhood by properly restricting the uses to which the land may be put and of adding to it the improvements that contribute so greatly to the comfort of living in it, and the attractiveness of its aspect as a whole. More... |