A few years ago I spent Christmas in Key West (which I highly recommend by the way) and toured Ernest Hemingway’s house museum.  He moved there in 1931 and his wife collected the furnishings and chandeliers that are still present today.

You’ll see a few of the polydactyl cats (they have extra toes) in the photos from the many that reside there.  They are descendants of Hemingway own personal cats.

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St. Michaels, Maryland is one of my favorite places to be in the U.S. and is a great place for the appreciation of old homes. Imagine a quaint historic town with cute little shops and big-city caliber restaurants and you’ve got a good feel for the “downtown”. Drive away from the town area, down winding roads and past lush greenery, and you’ll find hundreds of miles of waterfront property and some of the most picturesque scenery anywhere. … and your historic home of your dreams can be right there at the water’s edge. … and you can catch Maryland’s treasured blue crab right in your back yard. I can’t take it. It’s just too good to be true.  That’s why I see more smiles on peoples faces than anywhere else I visit on the East Coast.

St. Michaels is located in what I believe to be the most beautiful county in all of Maryland (but I’m biased), Talbot County. You can get a good overview of the region by seeing this map.

The photo above is of the Tarr House, purportedly one of the oldest houses remaining in St. Michaels from that era.

Each year St. Michaels holds a Christmas home tour and if you’re in the area in December, you should check to see if it coincides with the timing of Christmas in St. Michaels when the home tours run.  Of course, any time of year is worth a trip to St. Michaels and during the warmer months it is at it’s peak.

The photo below will take you to our first photo tour from St. Michaels and only represents a small sampling of what is there.

This tour is a two-for-one: The house and it’s furnishings via the Museum’s official site, and a great photo tour from CuriousExpeditions.com, whose photo set of the museum is here on Flickr.

Be sure to scroll down to the audio track at the bottom of the Curious Expeditions blog post and take a listen.  It is from an 1898 Emerald Polyphon with 22-inch diameter discs and featuring 16 tuned orchestral bells playing in unison with 2 sonorous music combs.

Hopefully you’ve seen the rest of the house in our previous tour.  Here is the bonus footage – a walk down into the basement and through the underground storage areas.  This is the final footage to complete the tour of this magnificent property.

You can watch the tour via the video below or watch in the recommended method – full-screen high-definition by clicking here and once there, click on the four arrows in the lower right to expand to full screen.

Stauffer’s Mansion is in Lancaster, PA and was built in 1870 by John Frederick Sener.  Today it is a public park due to granddaughter to Sener, Elizabeth Ludgate having willed it to the township.  I was driving by after lunch and requested permission to take a quick series of photographs of the exterior.  Click the image for the photo tour.

Loch Aerie, AKA Glen-Loch, AKA Lockwood Mansion was built in 1865 by William E. Lockwood, esq., a Philadelphia businessman, in Chester County Pennsylvania. It was designed by famed architect Addison Hutton with landscape design by Charles Miller, the Fairmount Park landscape designer. The design is described in the 1958 Historic American Buildings Survey as being of Italianate Design with Victorian Gothic details.

At the time, it was one of the largest estates in all of Pennsylvania and was comprised of 684 acres. It was so large that it had 4 railroad stations on the property.

The Pennsylvania blue marble and blue limestone was quarried directly on the estate. Water to the home traveled from a distant spring 2600 feet away and was capable of supplying 12,400 gallons in a 24 hour period.

By 1877, the home had a telephone so that Mr. Lockwood could call for assistance in case any “burglers or tramps” were on his property. He was so concerned about safety that the all the doors and windows were wired with a burglar alarm.

Lockwood wanted to become a “Country Farmer” and built the home 25 miles from the city of Philadelphia, where his business, W. E. & E. Dunbar Lockwood, manufacturers of patent folding boxes, envelopes, tags, etc., was located.

After 20 years of driving by this old home, I finally got my chance at a tour which you can view in the video below. Stay tuned for the video tour of the basement in the weeks ahead.

You can watch the tour via the video below or watch in the recommended method – full-screen high-definition by clicking here and once there, click on the four arrows in the lower right to expand to full screen.

Once you have viewed the tour, don’t forget to view the HABS documentation on Loch Aerie below and visit here if you would like to receive email updates when new tours are added to the site.

Video Tour:

Loch Aerie Mansion Tour from Old House Tours on Vimeo.

Photo Tour:

For more information, take a look at the Historic American Buildings survey on the home performed in 1958: