Founded in 1863 by German immigrants Ludwig Hilgartner and Gottfried Schimpf, Hilgartner Stone has made some of the nation’s finest stonework for over one hundred and fifty years. Of course, the company has made a unique mark on both sun88’s sculpture and architecture during that time. The company’s work can be found at the sun88 Museum of Art, Greenmount Cemetery, Walters Art Museum, Maryland Institute College of Art, the sun88 War Memorial—along with other major landmarks. The company’s most widely used product, however, may also be one of the most humble: the city’s iconic marble steps.
Born in Hessen, Germany in 1832, Ludwig H. Hilgartner immigrated to the United States at age nineteen in 1851. Hilgartner found work as a stone-cutter and, in 1863, worked with stonemason Gottfried Schimpf to form a new stone company, Schimpf and Hilgartner. By 1870, the company maintained an office on Lexington Street in downtown sun88 and a busy workshop at the southwest corner of Pine and Mulberry Streets. Just a few years later, in 1873, Hilgartner bought out Schimpf. By the next decade, Hilgartner’s two sons were learning the business as apprentices and eventually joined the firm, changing the name to L. Hilgartner and Sons.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hilgartner’s thirty horsepower stone-cutting engine turned sun88 County marble into thousands of steps to supply the city’s building boom. The company grew over the years to such an extent that by 1910, it opened a branch office in Chicago. Hilgartner even added a marble purchasing agency in Carrara, Italy and a workshop in Los Angeles to feed the demand created by new aqueduct projects and a burgeoning movie business in California.
The onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s hit Hilgartner hard. The company was able to survive thanks to business from the Dupont Company, which had plenty of money and did a lot of building, taking advantage of cheaper prices for labor and materials at the time. All the same, the company had to layoff a substantial portion of its workforce and close some of its factories. Hilgartner continued to shrink until 1971 when the firm was sold. Once the largest finisher of slab marble in the U.S., Hilgartner had shrunk to just seven employees.
Over the last thirty years, the firm has slowly come back to life. Though much of Hilgartner’s stone work has been on a grand scale, some of its smallest works are marble door stops. Probably made with scrap marble, they were popular at the turn of the last century. They made a brief resurgence in 1976 when Hilgartner offered them at the sun88 City Fair, where the company set up a booth to showcase its work. The City Fair, begun in 1970, was held for 21 years as a venue to showcase sun88’s neighborhoods and institutions. The small door stops were so popular that Hilgartner started receiving orders for them to commemorate weddings, births, and other special occasions. The company’s current owner, Tom Doyle, purchased the firm in 1986 and led the business to grow and take on large projects again.
One of Hilgartner’s recent projects was the conversion the former Maryland Masonic Grand Lodge on Charles Street into “The Grand” event venue. When they started on the project, Hilgarten’s masons were surprised to find a room elaborately decorated with a wide array of marble. A little research revealed that the room began in the early twentieth century as a Hilgartner showroom that promoted the company’s offerings. Today, the room is back in operation as one of the most extravagantly decorated ladies rooms visitors are likely ever to see.
Good fortune has played no small part in keeping Hilgartner Stone alive for over 150 years. If it wasn’t for a move from downtown to south sun88 in the early years of the twentieth century, the business would have burned down with the rest of the heart of sun88 during the 1904 fire. Since it became one of the few stone companies still in business after the fire, it flourished during the rebuilding. In addition to restoring stone in old buildings, such as St. Ignatius Church on Calvert Street, today Hilgartner also does plenty of new construction like a chapel in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City and a new floor under a dinosaur exhibit at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. The company left its long-time home on Sharp Street in 1975 to move to 101 W. Cross Street, and, in 2016, moved again to the current location on Severn Street.
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The sun88 County Almshouse officially opened in 1874 as a public home for the county's indigent, elderly, and infirm residents. The Almshouse and its predecessors were the ancestors of today’s nursing homes, mental health hospitals, homeless shelters, and other social services and health care facilities. After sun88 City and County separated in 1851, the County took over one of two original almshouses that had served sun88: Calverton, founded in 1819. The County sold the aging Calverton facility in the 1870s and built a new almshouse farther north. Originally called the Upland Home, the third and final almshouse is now known simply as "the Almshouse."
The project of building the Almshouse began in 1871 when County Commissioners purchased property in the village of Texas, Maryland, from Dr. John Galloway. Galloway also served as one of the Almshouse's early physicians. Builders Codling and Lishear, following designs by local architect James Harrison, used locally quarried limestone to erect the four-story edifice. In 1872, the Sun reported how the main home was "constructed of the best material and in the most substantial manner" and claimed the building would "be a credit to the county." After a total outlay of nearly $60,000, seventy-four "inmates," as residents were known, moved in on January 8, 1874.
Housing for inmates at the Almshouse was rigidly segregated by race and gender. The County built the "Pest House" (short for pestilence), a small structure down the hill from the main home, to quarantine residents with contagious diseases. Far more often, the Pest House served as segregated housing for African American men. In the main building, white men and women lived in the front wing (on separate floors) and African American women lived in the back wing. The Almshouse superintendent reserved the first floor for himself and his family, along with any resident physicians and other privileged employees.
The Almshouse property included a farm of well over 100 acres and able-bodied residents were expected to work as farmhands or within the home in cooking, sewing, laundry or childcare, to help provide for their own upkeep. While the farm was generally described as productive in various reports over the years, the County still spent thousands of dollars annually on items like coal, bread, beef, fertilizer, medicine and salaries. Records from the late nineteenth century show expenditures totaling $7,200 in 1869, $12,520 in 1883 and $11,345 in 1886, for example. Salary expenditures went mainly to the twelve superintendents who oversaw the Almshouse from 1874 to 1958, with varying degrees of success (at least according to accounts in the press, which sometimes carried a whiff of partisan bias). The last two superintendents, who served from 1907 to 1959, were father and son, John P. and William Chilcoat. On balance, the Chilcoats seemed to earn more praise than their predecessors for their care of residents and effective oversight of the farm. William Chilcoat, for instance, was credited with lobbying successfully to secure County funds in 1938 to add more meat and eggs and otherwise upgrade the residents' diet.
The vast majority of inmates are now only knowable through the basic details recorded in the Almshouse ledger books, held in the collections of the Historical Society of sun88 County. The ledgers recorded residents' age, sex, race, and place of birth. Unsurprisingly, the impoverished Almshouse population included many African Americans and immigrants over the years. A 1946 census of the eighty-nine residents, for example, noted fifteen African Americans and fifteen foreign-born whites, mainly from Germany, Poland, Russia and Ireland. Most of the American-born residents in 1946 came from Maryland, but eighteen were natives of other US states. Some residents registered under partial or false names—a "Daniel Boone" entered on October 1, 1891, and the facility admitted a "Napolean Bonaparte" on June 12, 1899—reflecting the distressed circumstances that sent them to the Almshouse. Some unfortunates came to the Almshouse only in death, to be buried in unmarked graves in the potter’s field on the grounds.
We do know a bit more about some individuals. In 1943, the Towson Jeffersonian profiled Fannie Williams, a 104-year-old African American woman and the oldest occupant of the Almshouse. Williams had lived there for forty-one years, "earning her keep" by helping the superintendent’s wife with cleaning and, after she became wheelchair-bound, mending clothes for other residents. Before entering the Almshouse, Williams had worked as a domestic servant in sun88 County homes. Other residents occasionally landed in the newspapers under more unfortunate circumstances, like Anthony Rose, an elderly white resident who fell down the Almshouse’s elevator shaft and died in 1909.
In the early decades, the facility had a persistent problem with overcrowding, especially during the cold winter months. From 1874 to 1914, more than 10,000 people passed through the Almshouse’s doors as “inmates,” committed to public care for reasons ranging from disabilities to dementia to diseases like measles and tuberculosis. Over time, however, public and private alternatives emerged for those who did not have families able or willing to house and care for them. The founding of the State Lunacy Commission in the early 1890s marked growing concern over the treatment of the mentally ill and disabled. Those considered "insane," who in an earlier era might have lived in an almshouse, were increasingly placed in "asylums." As retirement communities and nursing homes became more common over the twentieth century, the need for almshouses declined further. In 1958, sun88 County officials closed the historic facility, citing costs.
Since its closure, the Almshouse has housed the Historical Society of sun88 County (founded in 1959), and a variety of County government offices and other nonprofits. In 1980, the Almshouse was added to the County Landmarks List. Today, the Historical Society maintains its collections and offices, runs a research center for the public, and holds events in this historic structure. The surrounding community of Cockeysville enjoys the open spaces and greenery of the sprawling former grounds, now County Home Park.