100 East 23rd Street
Baltimore, MD, USA

National Register of Historic Places - James E. Hooper House

Statement of Significant:

The James E. Hooper house draws significance from its architecture and its association with James E. Hooper (1838-1908) for whom the house was erected in 1886. As a free-standing masonry dwelling executed in the Queen Anne style, the James E. Hooper house embodies the distinctive characteristics of a type and method of construction not commonly found in inner-city Baltimore where the rowhouse is the dominant type of domestic architecture. Blocks of Queen Anne influenced masonry rowhouses do exist in great numbers and several free-standing Queen Anne frame houses are dotted around the fringes of the inner-city area but the free-standing masonry Queen Anne house in this section of the city is rare. The house contains the distinctive features, most of which remain intact, of one form in which the Queen Anne style was expressed throughout the country though primarily in urban areas. The important stylistic feature of these houses is the characteristic irregularity of plan and massing, small scale classical decorative detailing, and use of multiple steeply pitched roofs combined with the general largeness and simplicity of form and use of somber colored masonry exterior materials, here red brick with dark colored rock faced stone trim, that is characteristic of the Romanesque style almost contemporary to the Queen Anne style. As the residence of Hooper, the house acquires importance from association with a person significant in Baltimore history. Hooper was the president, at the time this house was built, of William E. Hooper and Sons, a cotton milling firm in Jones Falls Valley which was founded by his father and believed to be the largest such operation in Baltimore at the turn of the century. While serving in the Maryland General Assembly, Hooper sponsored child labor legislation. Another source of significance is that the Automobile Club of Maryland, now the Maryland affiliate of the American Automobile Association was founded in this house at a meeting held in 1901 with Hooper as the first president.