The Walker-Maclary House

The Walker-Maclary House

If you've read a few of these posts before (especially some of the more recent ones), you'll have noticed that there are two different aspects to researching and telling the story of any given property. First, there's the chain of ownership of the land itself, as documented in the various deeds and indentures. With the resources I have available to me now, that part is relatively easy and I've gotten pretty good at it, for the most part. I've even gotten better at mapping out the metes and bounds of some of the tracts (Do you know how long a perch is? I do, and I don't think I'll ever forget it now).

But it's the second part that's often the tricky and more frustrating one -- trying to determine exactly when a particular house was built, and therefore, by whom. I've taught myself a little over the years, but I am definitely not an architectural historian. Unless there's some sort of contemporaneous report of construction or a reliable date stone, we're often left to detective work and guess work. That usually entails judging the style of the house for a likely era, and seeing who owned it then to determine who might have built the house. In this case, though, we're fortunate enough to have a story passed down about part of a home, albeit a second-hand story. (Ironically, the house was only one story.)

The property I'm referring to is located at 4925 Old Capitol Trail, in the middle of Penndrew Manor, near Old St. James Church. I usually don't use street addresses, but in this case the house has already been referred to by the address in a previous post. However, after researching the history of the property, I've chosen to call it the Walker-Maclary House for reasons that should soon be apparent. And it's from information obtained relating to the previous post that we get the story about part of the house. This is also an example of how a property doesn't have to date back to the 1700's to have an interesting history.