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Maryland Historical Society
Library of Maryland History
201 W. Monument Street
Baltimore, MD 21201
Phone: 410-685-3750
Fax: 410-385-2105
E-mail: library@mdhs.org

Baltimore Architecture:
Then and Now

Williams-Small House, 10 West Centre Street
image info

Architects: 
ca. 1845  Unknown 
ca. 1855  Unknown
1974  Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson and Abbott; Meyer, Ayers and Saint

In 1845 Thomas P. Williams, a North Carolina-born commission merchant, built a most un-Baltimorean three-story house on a lot at the northeast corner of Centre and Cathedral Streets, with a front and side garden and a row of columns reaching to the top of the second story. He lived there only four years. He was succeeded in both his business and his home by John Williams (1804-1876), who kept the latter until 1873, when he sold it to attorney John Small, Jr. At Small's death in 1878, it passed to his daughters, Anna Small and Rebecca Small Rayburn, who lived there, taking in boarders, until 1891.

In 1895 the firm of E.B. Hunting and Company reportedly paid Mrs. Rayburn, the surviving owner, $25,000 for the house and the lot on which it stood, and then pulled down the house in order to erect three French Renaissance-style townhouses facing Cathedral Street. These stood as #601-605 Cathedral Street until the mid-1960s, when the Walters Art Gallery purchased them and tore them down to make way for its west wing, which opened in 1974.

Image information
left: Courtesy of John Orrick.
right: Photo by John Orrick, 2000.

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Baltimore Architecture - Homepage
 

Site Contents
1  Masonic Building
2  Enoch Pratt House
3  Graham-Hughes House
4  American Brewery
5  Belvedere Hotel
6  Camden Station
7  Alex Brown Building
8  Williams-Small House
9  Timanus Mill
10  The Pembroke Apartments
11  Merchant's Exchange
12  Old B and O Building
13  Denny & Mitchell Building
14  Guardian Trust Building
15  Old Post Office Building
16  St. Joseph's R.C. Church & Washington Firehouse
17  The Maryland Casualty Building
18  Church of the Redeemer Building
19  The Popplein Family Mansion/Marlborough Apartments
20  Samuel Hoffman, later the Dr. William Osler Mansion
21  Cohen Brothers, later the Dr. Robinson Building
22  Saint Peter's Catholic Church 1770
23  The Baltimore Humane Impartial Society Building
24  Baltimore and Susquehanna Railroad Calvert Station
25  The Richmond Market Building Site
26  Dr. Charles Howard's Site and Mount Vernon Place M.E. Church
27  The Stephen Broadbent Mansion "The Glen Mary"