What Was in Stephen West’s Warehouse? A History Intern’s Discovery
- London Town
- Aug 12
- 3 min read
My name is Elizabeth Fitzpatrick and this summer I was a history intern at Historic London Town and Gardens. I am currently a student at Washington College, majoring in art history and minoring in museum, field, and community education. Interning at London Town has given me the opportunity to use what I’ve learned about historical research and museum interpretation in an actual museum environment. I spent my summer at London Town researching colonial tobacco port warehouses in order to better understand the history of the Carpenter’s Shop.
The Carpenter’s Shop is a reconstructed building that stands on the same site as the original 18th-century building. It is just one of many buildings that would have stood in colonial London Town. The Carpenter’s Shop served several purposes during its original existence, but the reconstruction is currently furnished as it might have been when it was owned by William Brown, a cabinet-maker and joiner.
Before the Carpenter’s Shop building was used by William Brown, it was owned by Stephen West Sr., a prominent citizen of London Town involved in the ferry and ordinary-keeping businesses. West purchased the land in 1724 and built the structure at some point between 1725-1740. It is likely that West used the Carpenter’s Shop building as a warehouse to store tobacco or supplies for the tavern he owned on the lot next door.
A notice in the Maryland Gazette from January 1746 announced that a warehouse owned by Stephen West burned down. The warehouse contained tobacco, corn, and fodder, which indicates West’s involvement in the tobacco trade. While the dates of the warehouse fire do not line up with the construction of the Carpenter’s Shop, the notice can still be used to speculate what West was using the Carpenter’s Shop to store.
To discover what else Stephen West may have been storing in the warehouse, I spent a lot of time poring over digitized issues of the Maryland Gazette from the Maryland State Archives. The advertisements in the Gazette show what was being imported and sold in Maryland during the time Stephen West owned the Carpenter’s Shop building. These imported goods came from all over the world. For example, clothes and fabric from Europe and India, and rum and sugar from the West Indies.
Colonists in Maryland relied on imports for almost all of their manufactured goods. To meet demand, many colonial merchants bought tobacco from planters who did not want to export it themselves and kept a solid supply of imported goods to sell to the planters in exchange. West was likely purchasing imported goods for his own use, to resell, or for his tavern.
My internship was designed to explore the possibility of converting the back room of the Carpenter’s Shop into a representation of Stephen West’s Warehouse. Representing the presence of the warehouse will help visitors visualize London Town’s connections to the tobacco and maritime trade that played a huge part in the development of London Town during the colonial era.
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