to me, should be the architectural ideals of a republic. No house could
be freer of unessential embellishment; in detail it is plain almost to
severity; yet the full impression that it gives, far from being austere,
is of friendliness and hospitality. An approachable sort of house, a
"homelike" house, it is perhaps less "imposing" than some other
mansions, coeval with it, in Virginia, in Annapolis, and in Charleston;
and yet it is as impressive, in its own way, as Warwick Castle, or
Hurstmonceaux, or Loches, or Chinon, or Chenonceaux, or Heidelberg--not
that it is so vast, that it has glowering battlements, or that it stuns
the eye, but for precisely opposite reasons: because it is a consummate
expression of republican cultivation, of a fine old American home, and
of the fine old American gentleman who built it, and whose descendants
inhabit it to-day: Charles Carroll of Carrollton, last to survive of
those who signed the Declaration of Independence.

The first Charles Carroll, known in the family as "the Settler," came
from Ireland in 1688, and became a great landowner in Maryland. He was a
highly educated gentleman and a Roman Catholic, as have also been his
descendants. He acted as agent for Lord Baltimore.

His son, Charles Carroll of Annapolis, or "Breakneck Carroll" (so called
because he was killed by a fall from the steps of his house), built the
Carroll mansion at Annapolis, now the property of the Redemptionist
Order.

The third and most famous member of the family was Charles Carroll of
Carrollton, "the Signer," builder of the manor house at
Doughoregan--which, by the way, derives its name from a combination of
the old Irish words _dough_, meaning "house" or "court," and _O'Ragan_,
meaning "of the King"; the whole being pronounced, as with a slight