How to Move a Historic Mansion? Tug it Across the Chesapeake Bay

An innovative way has been used to transfer a historic 18th century mansion across the Chesapeake bay. If innovation and progress are long-held values of American culture, they do have a certain downside. As new things come into fashion, older things are often simply abandoned and left to rot. That’s true for small things, like old clothes, but it’s also true for large things, like buildings.

As local economies rise and fall, so do neighborhoods and the dwellings within them. That’s what happened with the historic mansion known as Galloway in Easton, Maryland. In an effort to save the venerable old house from being destroyed to make way for new development, its current owner put it on a barge and had it moved 50 across Chesapeake Bay and then taken to a new site in Queenstown, where it will be restored and continue its remarkable ‘life’, according to a report from local television station WJLA.

There’s a website dedicated to the building’s big move, which says that the Georgian mansion has been sitting empty and neglected. It was originally constructed in the years 1760-1764, for William Nichols and new wife, Henrietta. It sat in the middle of what was then their 600-acre plantation in Talbot County. Galloway was where the couple’s four children were all born, and where both parents died early – by 1778.

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