Barbara Holdridge, a co-founder of Caedmon Records that pioneered the audiobook concept, recorded some of the most famous writers and poets of the 20th century, and later established Stemmer House Publishers, was also the doyenne of one of Maryland’s grandest historic houses. Holdridge died earlier this month at her home in Baltimore.
She was 95.
In 1950, Holdridge, who was Barbara Cohen at the time, and her close Hunter College friend, Marianne Roney, who later became Ms. Mantell, had just graduated from college and both were working in New York City.
Holdridge worked for a publisher and Mantell wrote label copy for a record company.
The two women had for some time been discussing the idea of recording authors reading their own works and since poet Dylan Thomas was giving a reading at the 92nd Street Y that evening, asked if they could record the Welsh poet and he agreed.
It was their first hit in 1952 when it became available and by the end of the 1950s, had sold more than 400,000 copies.
Some of the other authors they recorded for posterity included William Faulkner, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Carl Sanburg, and actors such as Boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone, Vanessa Regrave, and Maggie Smith reading plays.
“Under Ms. Holdridge and Ms. Mantell, Caedmon earned dozens of Grammy nominations and became the gold standard for spoken-word recordings,” reported The New York Times at Holdridge’s death.
In 1959, she married Lawrence Holdridge, a hydraulic engineer, and the couple, who had a penchant for older homes, moved to Baltimore, eventually settling into the old Quaker meeting house in Dickyville that had been built in 1819, and later to a home on Old Court Road.
Not long afterward, a real estate agent called the Holdridges and said she had listed a house that they simply must see.
It was Stemmer House on Caves Road in the Green Spring Valley, and they wasted no time telling the agent they’d purchase it.
“I remember we stood on the front steps and said, ‘We’ll take it'” Holdridge told The Baltimore Sun in a 2011 interview.
In 1973, they paid $295,000 for the seven bedroom house and its surrounding grounds comprising 27 acres.
The history of the house, which is not indigenous to the site, was built in 1751 by the director of the Principio Ironworks, “a pre-Revolutionary British owned operation, on the property purchased from Dr. Charles Carrollton of Annapolis,” according to a 1977 Sunday Sun Magazine story.
The house was originally located on Philadelphia Road near Stemmer’s Run in Essex.
With the coming of the Revolution, the property was confiscated by the state and sold to Capt. Ulrich Bernard Stemmer, who was engaged in the West Indie trade, and legend has it that the good captain had another wife and a branch of the Stemmer family in the West Indies.
The house passed to Robert Howard in 1800, whose 2,000 acres required the maintenance and extensive labor force of enslaved people and ironworkers.
Howard’s descendants kept the property until the early 20th century when it was sold to the Golombowski family, who were truck farmers, and had plans to sell off as much of the house’s interior and architectural details and ornamentation.
Motivated to save the house from decay and abandonment, in 1931, Mrs. Austin McLanahan, wife of the president of the old Baltimore Savings Bank, purchased Stemmer House.
The stunning Georgian period house was also known for its salmon-colored brick.
She had purchased a site 15 miles away in the Green Spring Valley atop a hill at Caves Road and near Park Heights Avenue in Owings Mills, and under the superb guidance of noted local architect Bayard Turnbull, and Goucher Tase, who earned the moniker “the last of the Gilt-edged builders,” every brick, every interior wall, which were brick, along with doors and woodwork, were dismantled, numbered and transported to the new site.
Once there, the house along with a brick dairy house was carefully and authentically reconstructed.
Even ancient boxwoods were removed and transplanted at the site. A high oval garden wall, in the English style, and a swimming pool, were added.
The McLanahans never spent a night in the house as Mr. McLanahan did not want to leave his home near the city, so their daughter, Jean, and her husband Francis Taliaferro, moved into the house and remained there for 40 years until selling it to the Holdridges.
The Holdridges spent their occupancy there filling the house with antiques, art and sculpture and Greek amphora from 500 B.C. to modern art from the 20th century.
An avid gardener, Holdridge spent her days tending six acres of her property which consisted of formal gardens, and also planted more than a 100 trees.
Holdrige later established Stemmer House Publishing that specialized in children’s books, and oversaw its operation from the basement of her home.
She sold the business in 2003 and retired.
Her husband died in 1998, and by 2011, she decided to sell Stemmer House and move to smaller quarters.
“I have a sense of obligation to this estate,” she told The Sun in 2011. “I felt it was time to turn it over to people who can do what I cannot. People who have children who can grow up the way my daughters did, learning about nature from this place.”
The house and carriage house are listed on the National Register of Historic Places and cannot be torn down.
“Sometimes in the night,” she told The Sunday Sun Magazine, “we hear sounds like walking footsteps, and we like to think it’s the friendly ghost of Capt. Stemmer roaming the rooms of this house to which he gave his name.”
That was a great story.
It’s amazing how they rebuilt it brick by brick.
Great write-up as always, Fred. Just a quick comment, placement onto the National Register does not prevent a building from demolition. Only local protection such as the Baltimore County Landmarks List has that power. We lose national register sites every year. Just recently we lost Choate House in Randallstown.