MacAlpine Farm

MacAlpine Farm. Town of Riverdale Park. Three years after the death of his father, Charles Baltimore Calvert married Eleanor Mackubin (November 11, 1867). On the 203-acre portion of Riversdale that Charles inherited, the young couple built a farm they called MacAlpine, after the Mackubin family home in Scotland. In contrast to Riversdale plantation - a large farm staffed by enslaved labor growing tobacco for export – MacAlpine was a general farm that raised a variety of crops and livestock for home use and sale, and was staffed by hired labor. Although the house was large, it was smaller and more modest than Riversdale Mansion, where Charles grew up. The farmstead included a carriage barn, livestock barn, corncrib, and icehouse. , , Charles Baltimore Calvert was a gentleman farmer supported by family wealth and professional pursuits. Although the farm supplied the family and its servants with a wide range of foodstuffs and services, by the time of Charles Calvert's death in 1906, the modern world was already encroaching on the property. Calvert's daughter Charlotte and her husband Thomas H. Spence, a dean at the nearby University of Maryland (the institution cofounded by her father), lived on this property from 1917 to 1934. In 1934 the Spence's leased MacAlpine to the Longfellow School for Boys. By then, most of the outbuildings, including the carriage barn, icehouse, and water tower, had become obsolete and were removed.