A BRIEF HISTORY OF RIVERSDALE

Riversdale was begun in 1801 as the manor house of a 729-acre plantation, by a wealthy Flemish emigre, financier and art collector, Henri Joseph Stier of Antwerp. He, his wife, two married children and a teen-aged daughter fled the Low Countries in 1793, anticipating by only six months the invasion by the armies of the revolutionary French Republic. The Stiers lived in Philadelphia for a year and then moved to Annapolis, where the younger daughter, Rosalie Eugenie, married George Calvert in 1799. Calvert, a planter and state legislator, was a descendant of Maryland's proprietors; his father, Benedict Calvert of Mounty Airy Plantation, was a natural son of the fifth Lord Baltimore, who acknowledged him and gave him land. His daughter Eleanor, George's sister, had married George Washington's stepson, John Parke "Jacky" Custis. George and Rosalie spent part of their honeymoon trip at Mount Vemon, then settled on George's 2000 acre Prince George's County tobacco plantation, Mount Albion.

Discovering that the William Paca house in Annapolis, which he had been renting, was to be sold, Stier bought land at auction in 1800 near the then-thriving port and spa town of Bladensburg and began his new house. Despite popular belief that Riversdale was designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Stier and his son Charles probably created it. During construction, Mr. and Mrs. Stier rented Bostwick, a 1746 house in Bladensburg. In 1802 the Stiers moved into the east wing of Riversdale.

Meanwhile, conditions in Europe had changed. First Consul of France Napoleon Bonaparte declared an amnesty for the emigres. Mr. and Mrs. Stier and their older children returned to Antwerp, and the Calverts moved into and completed Riversdale by 1807. The correspondence between Rosalie and her family survives, and is the basis for Mistress of Riversdale: The Plantation Letters of Rosalie Stier Calvert, edited by Dr. Margaret Law Callcott (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). These letters also provide the basis for the restoration and interpretation of the house. Rosalie never returned to Europe as she had hoped and planned to do. She died at Riversdale in 1821 at age 42 having borne nine children, five of whom lived to maturity. George Calvert did not remarry and died in 1838. The younger son, Charles Benedict Calvert, continued to live at Riversdale. A "scientific" farmer, he founded the Maryland Agricultural Society, provided the site for the Maryland Agricultural College (now the University of Maryland, College Park) and, as a U.S. congressman, sponsored the legislation establishing the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He died in 1864. Riversdale began to decline without a slave labor force. Charles's widow, Charlotte, eventually went to live in Baltimore. In 1887,475 acres of the estate, including the house, were sold to developers laying out a model "railroad" or commuter suburb of Washington, D.C., Riverdale Park. (The B&O Railroad had cut across the Calvert lands in 1835.)

After using the run-down Riversdale as a surveyors' headquarters, the developers sold it to a woman who divided it up into a boardinghouse. She defaulted on the mortgage, and the mansion was vacant until 1910, when William Pickford, a Washington real estate magnate, bought it. He installed electricity, plumbing, and central heating, and also added late Victorian style touches to the house. Mrs. Pickford, though, did not want to live "out in the country" and Pickford leased the house to U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson of California. (He had earlier been governor of California and the vice-presidential candidate for Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose political party.) The house was later sold to Senator and Mrs. Thaddeus Caraway of Arkansas. Caraway died in office; his widow, Hattie, completed his term and then ran for the seat, becoming the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate. She could not afford to continue living in the house, however, and it was sold to Abraham Lafferty, a former congressman from Oregon, who occupied the house from the 1930s to the late 1940s. He sold the property in 1949 to the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission. The bi-county parks and recreation and planning agency used Riversdale as offices for many years until it built new quarters. Riversdale was occasionally shown to the public by the Riversdale Historical Society, who also preserved the Calvert family cemetery.

A full restoration of the house began in 1988. Following the discovery of Rosalie Calvert's letters in the Stier family's archives in Belgium, the decision was made to restore the house to its appearance during the period of Rosalie and George Calvert's occupancy, 1801-1838. Riversdale was opened to the public in 1993, and may be seen year-round on Fridays and Sundays from noon to 4:00 p.m.