Beall Dawson Historic House Museum

Though today Rockville, MD, is a bustling suburb of the nation's capital, it was but a small rural town when Upton Beall built this Federal-style home in 1815. Serving in a position of prominence as Montgomery County's Clerk of the Court, Beall hoped that the house's luxurious interior and Flemish-bond brick facade would impress his contemporaries and guarantee his elevated stature in a society that increasingly concerned itself with respectability and social display. Even today, the Beall-Dawson House stands as a monument to America's long tradition of architectural splendor.

Guided tours of the house take visitors through five different rooms: the front hall, the drawing room (which served as the public area of the house), the dining room, the bedroom, and the slave quarters. The attached Stonestreet Museum of Nineteenth-Century Medicine, which originally served as Dr. Edward Elisha Stonestreet's office, features period furnishings that reveal to visitors the vast revolution in medicine that occurred between 1850 and 1900. Visitors to the houses may also partake of the Montgomery County Historical Society's vast archival resources, which they keep on the grounds in the Jane C. Sween Research Library.