Who Built Harmony Hall? Archeology and an Unsolved Mystery on Maryland's Broad Creek

In the 1600s, Broad Creek sat between two worlds: the Piscataway people, for whom the land was probably important hunting and fishing ground, and European colonists, who began settling it in 1634. The Broad Creek community — also called the town of Aire or Ayres — thrived as an Atlantic port, then collapsed with the American Revolutionary War. One estate survived it all, along with the stately red-brick Georgian manor that gave it its later name: Harmony Hall.

A tangle of owners

• 1662 — Humphrey Haggett patents a 500-acre tract called Battersea.
• 1668 — it passes to Richard Fowke, who married Haggett's widow. Fowke splits it and sells the part that will become Harmony Hall to Philip Mason.
• Further owners follow, including Thomas Lewis, William Tyler and the Magruder-Lyles family.

Here the written record turns murky — and archeology, shedding light, raises more questions than it answers.

Digging at Harmony Hall

From fall 1985 to summer 1987, on and off, archeologists and more than 75 volunteers with the National Park Service Regional Archeology Program dug 49 five-by-five-foot units. The work began as a Section 106 compliance check. It, and a detailed follow-up survey in 2014, found far more than expected — from late-1700s trash pits to scattered remains of 19th- and 20th-century outbuildings — some confirming the house's timeline, some contradicting it.

The first house

The land seems to have gone unimproved until Thomas Lewis, who held it from 1692 to 1696 or 1697, did at least some farming. An inventory of his estate describes a comfortable household, and the animal bones found on site match the animals it lists. Lewis is credited with the first residence at Battersea.

A few feet east of the manor, excavators found a post hole and a borrow pit belonging to an earthfast house — one built without a foundation, resting on the ground or set on posts in it. The pit's six layers date tightly to the late 1600s–early 1700s, and it held domestic debris of that time, including seven sherds of Delftware and Buckley redware and four tobacco pipe stems, along with charred timbers, charcoal and ash. It was probably dug for clay to build and repair the house's chimney. For a modest building on a western frontier farm, the goods found here show how tied Broad Creek was to maritime trade.

Seventeenth-century scissors found at Harmony Hall. NPS

The manor house: who, and when?

After Tyler's death, Battersea belonged to absent owners; a few colonial artifacts in the field beyond the front yard may mark a brief mid-1700s tenant or enslaved occupation, but no one else seems to have lived there until Magruder.

The dirt doesn't settle it:

• Excavators looked for the builder's trench at the foundation — first at the northeast corner, then the southwest — without success; a 20th-century French drain around the house probably destroyed it.
• Two refuse pits held ceramics with a mean date of 1729, yet there are no mid-1700s ceramics — which could point to construction after 1769, or simply to years when tenants leased the property, which would fit a house built before Tyler's death.

The mystery remains unsolved.

A name, and a rewriting

The Magruder-Lyles family kept the property, sometimes living there and sometimes renting it out. William Edelen bought it in 1850 and sold it in 1867; the story goes that in between, two newlywed couples loved the house so much they named it "Harmony Hall." In 1892, German immigrant Robert Stein bought the Broad Creek properties to found a new community with his relatives.

By the 1920s the tobacco industry had collapsed. Broad Creek — once a commercial town of farms and markets, buoyed by maritime trade and the labor of enslaved African Americans in homes and fields — became rural again.

Harmony Hall as it appeared from Broad Creek, 1930s. NPS

Then came Charles Wallace Collins, a pro-segregation Washington insider, who saw the place as a relic untouched by modern pressures. In the 1930s and 1940s, he and his wife "restored" Harmony Hall to look like an antebellum Old South plantation — damaging and destroying traces of its past, with little record of what was lost — and spread his ideas of exclusion and resettlement there.

The people still missing

Only two buildings from before Collins survive: Harmony Hall and Want Water, also called the Lyles House, just north of Battersea. Around them, a substantial community of enslaved people worked the fields, houses, workshops and stores — yet where they lived is unknown, and their families and social networks don't yet appear in the archeological record. Collins's legacy has overshadowed their history, accidentally or deliberately.

The first excavations, re-exposing the house at the center of it all, laid the groundwork for telling the story of the whole town, its residents and its unrecognized laborers. Ethnographic research with descendant communities and further archeology could bring the enslaved community back into view.

Further reading

• Archeology at Harmony Hall: Exploring the Late Seventeenth-Century Frontier of Maryland, The Louis Berger Group, Inc., for the National Park Service, 1993
• Archeological Overview and Assessment of Harmony Hall, Maryland, National Park Service, 2015
• Cultural Landscapes Inventory: Harmony Hall, National Park Service, 2018
• Charles V. Reed, "History of Harmony Hall," University of Maryland, College Park, commissioned by the National Park Service

Sources

Based on "The Confounding Mystery of the Red-Brick Manor at Harmony Hall," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The article credits Thomas Lewis, who held the land from 1692, with a first residence "first occupied around 1690," so that date is left out. Rewritten in hubnx's own words.