The St. Michaels Museum at St. Mary’s Square cordially invites you to its annual meeting and lecture on Sunday, April 23, from 1 to2:30 in the St. Michaels Library Meeting Room at 106 Fremont Street in St. Michaels. 

We will begin with a very short business meeting including the election of the 2023-2024 Board of Directors. We will then turn to the work the Museum is doing to preserve a rare and remarkable St. Michaels home built by three free African American brothers in the mid-19^th century, the Chaney House. When completed, it will provide a window into the lives of the people who called it home 170 years ago.

The presentation will be Unpacking & Preserving the Chaney House (1851): Freedmen’s Housing and Architecture in a Shipbuilding Town.

Our speakers will be two experts in historic preservations. Robert Forloney and Michael Olmert. 

Forloney has a 25-year career in the museum field. He is a professor in Goucher College's Cultural Sustainability program as well as the museum studies programs at Johns Hopkins and the University of Delaware. 

Olmert is a professor in the English Department of the University of Maryland, College Park. He wrote The Official Guide to Colonial Williamsburg and Kitchens, Outhouses, & Privies (Cornell Press). His TV writing has given him three Primetime Emmys and admission to the University of Maryland Alumni Hall of Fame. 

The talk will cover where the Chaney house fits into the social and architectural history of the late 18th and 19th centuries and where the structure is now headed as a textbook on the history of enslavement, vernacular architecture, the principles of Georgian and Federal architecture, the nature of enslaved life and post-enslaved life as well as the architectural responsibilities of preserving the past without confusing or totally missing what it’s trying to tell us.

We hope you will join us as the Museum seeks to preserve and educate our community and its visitors regarding this important part of St. Michaels history.