The land on which this historic house was built was once owned by The Havre Iron Company. Joseph and John P. Whittaker built two iron furnaces at the foot of Bourbon Street in the mid-1840s and owned the Bourbon Street land up to Washington Street. They furnished metal used to make guns during the Mexican-American and Civil Wars but ceased operations in 1866. This was one of five lots sold by the Havre Iron Company in 1884 to Oliver T. Rogers (who was City Attorney at the time) and Joseph W. Chamberlaine (who became City Attorney in 1911). Rogers and Chamberlaine and their wives sold this lot in 1892 to Charles Edwin Palmer (1858-1923) and his wife Beadie Sinclair Palmer (1867-1937).

It is known that Charles Palmer and a friend built this house in 1892 for his growing family of 13 children in all. Some of them were Theresa Palmer Williams, Annette Palmer Trimble, Charles D. Palmer, Ralph D. Palmer, Pearl Palmer, Hilda Palmer, Augustus Palmer, Mason Palmer, and Ella Palmer. They first built four rooms and then they built the kitchen and another bedroom upstairs, as well as an attic. Looking at the house today at least two further additions can be seen at the rear, probably added later. We know that several of their neighbors also had large families at that time and nicknamed the street as Kids Street, which was still just a dirt road.

Charles Palmer preceded his wife in death but when Beadie died in 1937 two of their sons (Charles D. and Ralph) disputed ownership of the house and a Court Trustee sold it to a daughter, Theresa P. Williams (and her husband, Fred). They owned the house (in which Theresa said she was born) into the early 1980s. In 1980, Theresa and Annette were interviewed in the home as Harford County Living Treasures (nominess have to be at least 70 years old and to have lived in Harford County for at least 40 years). And together they provided insight into life in the early 1900s.

Their father, Captain Palmer, owned a scow-sloop, “The Elsie,” in which he shipped cargo to ports on the Bay and made three or four trips to Baltimore each week. Sailing scows were flat-bottomed boats with a rectangular form (or barge like). They were swift and could run across shallow waters, such as the Susquehanna Flats, due to a very light draft. Some of the Captain’s cargo was logs that he took to the paper mill in Wilmington; rickrack stone (not cut to a particular shape) from the upriver quarry to Baltimore; and grain to Baltimore that was suctioned out of the hold by a chute. The Captain often took some of his children on these trips and they recalled that the first thing they liked to do on reaching Baltimore was to go to the Lexington Market to get apple cake, cheesecake, and peach cake from a Dutch lady in the Market. They also spoke of how they got the drawbridge to open when they had to go upriver in days before radios. When they were about at the Lighthouse, they used to blow three times on a conch shell and the workers would have the bridge open by the time they got there so they just sailed through with their tall mast.

The Elsie is the same boat that had previously been owned by the Moore family at 710 Market Street because in researching the Moore family’s “Elsie,” it is known that it was the last sailing scow known to have plied the Chesapeake Bay and was eventually abandoned on the banks of the Susquehanna River in the early 1940s. The Palmer sisters relayed the same story about the end of their “Elsie” in their interview, and added that after Captain Palmer died, their brother took over the scow and continued to haul goods and fish as his father had done. Before the Elsie was abandoned, however, the Pennsylvania Railroad paid their brother to remove the mast so the drawbridge didn’t have to be opened by several employees any more.

In 1983, the children of Fred and Theresa Palmer Williams sold this home, built by Theresa’s father 101 years earlier, to Catherine Judith Billings who owned it for about five years. Other owners were Patricia Cobb and Larry and Cyndia Thebeau. Since 1998, however, this home has been owned by artists Tina F. Schueler-Parks and Thomas E. Parks, who used to own the White Rabbett Gallery in town on North Washington Street. Notice the peacock in the stained glass transom above the front door and directly above that can be seen the original house number that has been painted over.

County Records
Built 1930. 1280 sq ft, 2 stories, 1 bath, no basement, detached garage, 3500 sq ft lot.