“Standing on a hill facing the east and commanding a fine view of the Chesapeake Bay, whose broad shining waters could be seen for miles from the terraced lawn... was the old Mt. Pleasant mansion.”
Jacob and Johannah Giles
In the early 18th century, Jacob Giles owned over 5000 acres of land throughout Harford County and by the 1750’s had built a home named Mount Pleasant near Havre de Grace. A Baltimorean, he was married to Hannah Webster, the daughter of a Quaker family; upon her death, he remarried Johannah Drew. He possessed vast acreage as well as sawmills, iron furnaces, and farms, and was viewed as an important economic figure in Harford County.
He divided his estate between his six sons, which can be seen labeled as “Brothers Lot” on Hauducoeur’s “Map of the Head of the Chesapeake Bay and Susquehanna River." The mansion and surrounding acres went to his son, Jacob Giles Jr., whose will conveyed ownership of Mount Pleasant to Samuel Hughes in 1783.
According to the Maryland Historical Trust Inventory, “Mount Pleasant is part of the mystery [of Giles.] Although Giles was a Quaker, the house he built on the man-made plateau above a series of terraces cascading down to the bay was elegant and extravagant and certainly not modest in the Quaker fashion.”
The Georgian-style mansion, built with bricks imported from England, was described by historians as a work of art, magnificent, and revolutionary for its time. Various buildings and structures, including a smokehouse, a bridge and a one-acre cemetery, were built around the estate. According to Christopher Weeks, “The estate's owners then planted the terraces lavishly, as if to heighten the orderliness of the composition: around 1802 one neighbor wrote how much she loved to visit Mount Pleasant and its 'beautiful ... green and terraced lawns where the first violets and primroses and early spring flowers were to be found…'"