by While in Baltimore we visited the H. L. Mencken House. As so often happens in our relationship, I’ve never heard of H.L. Mencken and Doug is all “Oh, I know Mencken, I’d love to tour his house.”
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) “was an American journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English”, according to Wikipedia.
Known as the “Sage of Baltimore”, his style might be best described as “combative”. He had a wide-ranging and productive career, including becoming City Editor of the Baltimore Morning Herald at just 23 years old, covering the Scopes “Monkey Trial”, and eventually authoring 30 books and more than 1,000 articles.
Mencken lived at the same Victorian row home in Baltimore for nearly his entire life; his parents moved there when he was a toddler, and he left for just five years while married.
Though he called marriage “the end of hope” (before he was actually married), he was grief-stricken at the premature death of his wife, and returned to his childhood home to live out his remaining 21 years.
The house remained in the Mencken family until it was donated to the University of Baltimore in 1967, so much of the furnishings and contents are original.
There is just one three-hour window a week when tours are scheduled, yet somehow we were the only ones on the tour.
We saw all of the downstairs, Mencken’s office where he did much of his writing (I was very surprised when Doug was invited to sit at Mencken’s desk, pictured above!), and the garden, which coincidentally included a lot of tiles from the Moravian Tile Works in Pennsylvania that we had toured a few weeks earlier. Mencken was a big fan and collector of the tiles from this historic pottery.
