James E. Hooper House (Baltimore, Maryland)

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The James E. Hooper House draws significance from its architecture and its association with James E. Hooper (1839-1908) for whom the house was erected in 1886. As a freestanding masonry dwelling executed in the Queen Anne style, the James E. Hooper House embodies the distinctive characteristics of a type and method of construction not commonly found in inner-city Baltimore where the rowhouse is the dominant type of domestic architecture. Blocks of Queen Anne-influenced masonry rowhouses do exist in great numbers and several freestanding Queen Anne frame houses are dotted around the fringes of the inner-city area, but a freestanding masonry Queen Anne house in this section of the city is rare. The house contains the distinctive features (most of which remain intact) of one form in which the Queen Anne style was expressed throughout the century though primarily in urban areas. The important stylistic feature of these houses is the characteristic irregularity of plan and massing, small scale classical decorative detailing, and use of multiple steeply-pitched roofs combined with the general largeness and simplicity of form and use of somber colored masonry exterior materials (here red brick with dark colored rock faced stone trim) that is characteristic of the Romanesque style almost contemporary to the Queen Anne style. As with the residence of Hooper, the house acquires importance from association with a person significant in Baltimore history. Hooper was the president, at the time this house was built, of William E. Hooper and Sons, a cotton milling farm in Jones Falls Valley which was founded by his father and believed to be the largest such operation in Baltimore at the turn of the century. He also served at least one term in the state legislature and on the boards of several community and civic groups. Another source of significance is that the Automobile Club of Maryland, now the Maryland affiliate of the American Automobile Association, was founded in this house at a meeting held in 1901 with Hooper as the first president.

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