The Henry August (or Augustus) Rowland House is a historic
row house
In architecture and city planning, a terrace or terraced house (British English, UK) or townhouse (American English, US) is a form of medium-density housing that originated in Europe in the 16th century, whereby a row of attached dwellings party ...
at 915 Cathedral Street in
Baltimore, Maryland
Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic, and the 30th most populous city in the United States with a population of 585,708 in 2020. Baltimore was ...
. Built in the 1880s, this nondescript row house is historically important as the home of physicist
Henry Augustus Rowland (b. 1846) from 1889-90 until his death in 1901. It was listed on the
National Register of Historic Places and declared a
National Historic Landmark in 1975.
[ and ]
Description and history
The Henry August Rowland House is located on the north side of Baltimore's
Mount Vernon neighborhood, at the northeast corner of Cathedral and Brexton Streets. It is the southern of two adjacent row houses, which are typical of brick rowhouses built in the fashionable residential area in the 1880s. It is three stories in height, built out of red brick, and topped by a flat roof with a projecting carved wooden cornice. It is three bays wide, with the entrance in the rightmost bay, sheltered by an elaborate surround toppedy a shallow projecting bracketed hood. The building interior was reported in 1975 to be in good condition, with original features including a working
dumbwaiter.
Rowland purchased the house in 1889 or 1890 and lived there until his death in 1901. His wife and daughter continued to live there after his death. He was educated as a physicist at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute () (RPI) is a private research university in Troy, New York, with an additional campus in Hartford, Connecticut. A third campus in Groton, Connecticut closed in 2018. RPI was established in 1824 by Stephen Van ...
and in Germany, and was hired in 1876 by
Daniel Coit Gilman to help build the physics department of
Johns Hopkins University. His achievements include advancements in tools and understanding of
magnetism
Magnetism is the class of physical attributes that are mediated by a magnetic field, which refers to the capacity to induce attractive and repulsive phenomena in other entities. Electric currents and the magnetic moments of elementary particles ...
, and the development of a formula for translating heat into mechanical work. His best known work is in the development of a high-precision
diffraction grating for doing spectral analysis.
Isaac Asimov
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, birth_date =
, birth_place = Petrovichi, Russian SFSR
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, relatives =
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, death_date =
, death_place = Manhattan, New York City, U.S.
, nationality = Russian (1920–1922)Soviet (192 ...
characterized Rowland as "one of the few important 19th century American physicists."
See also
*
List of National Historic Landmarks in Maryland
*
National Register of Historic Places listings in Central Baltimore
References
External links
*, including photo dated 1975, at Maryland Historical Trust
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rowland, Henry August, House
National Historic Landmarks in Maryland
Houses in Baltimore
Houses completed in 1885
Houses on the National Register of Historic Places in Baltimore
Midtown, Baltimore