The History of Stone Mansion

There's a building in the Coldspring Newtown neighborhood, down Green Spring Avenue from Sinai Hospital, which is so monumentally out of place it's possible to drive by without even seeing it. There, in the midst of the modernist condos and vinyl-sided townhouses, stands a stout Civil War-era mansion hewn of thick brown and gray stone. Its current owners, Baltimore historical developers Azola & Associates, simply call it the Stone Mansion.

To make sense of this place, rewind about 150 years to a time when these hills were topped by the country estates of Baltimore's industrial titans. Just up the road, Jesse Tyson was using his portion of the family manufacturing fortune to build his mansion at Cylburn. His younger brother, James Wood Tyson, was doing his best to keep up with him.

James built the Stone Mansion in 1866, and while it was more subdued than his big brother's French Second Empire edifice, it wasn't too shabby either. Two-and-a-half-stories high and
capped with arched dormers and a cupola, James' house was built of rough-hewn fieldstone in
the Renaissance Revival style. He called it "Ruscombe," which according to family lore means "brown hill." (The Azolas call the house the Stone Mansion to distinguish it from a later building many know today as the Ruscombe Mansion, which houses a holistic community health center
and lies 100 or so yards to the South.)

The Tyson family fortunes fell, and so did the mansion's. Over the following century and a half, the mansion would serve variously as a retirement home, a school for Jewish girls, and the Baltimore Waldorf school. Linoleum floors and drop ceilings hid much of the historic features. When the Waldorfians moved out in 1997, the city slapped some plywood over the shattered windows and doors but otherwise left the place to rot. By 2004, when the Azolas discovered the place, it was owned by the city and inhabited by a band of ruffians and a black vulture. The former was said to rob nearby houses and retreat to the derelict mansion, where the latter added to the haunted-house pall that kept anyone else from venturing near.

Contact Tea by Julia Faye in Baltimore, Maryland, at (866) 959-4314
for more details about the history of our tea house.