“I have lived in one house in Baltimore for nearly 45 years. It has changed in that time, as I have—but somehow, it still remains the same… It is as much a part of me as my two hands. If I had to leave it, I’d be as certainly crippled as if I lost a leg.” —H.L. Mencken

The sofa arrived on a dreary, wet evening this past winter after residing in the Annapolis office of former Maryland Senate Majority Leader Mike Miller for the past decade. The rain and damp weather didn’t diminish Brigitte Fessenden’s enthusiasm one bit.

“It was wrapped in a plastic cover and carried in by two women,” says Fessenden, president of the Society to Preserve H.L. Mencken’s Legacy, with a smile. “I think Mencken would’ve enjoyed watching that while he smoked his cigar.”

Shuttered for 23 years and recently reopened pre-quarantine, the longtime home of the journalist, essayist, and cultural critic known as the Sage of Baltimore faces Union Square in southwest Baltimore. In fact, the prolific Mencken, author of such works as Happy Days, Notes on Democracy, and The American Language, did much of his entertaining in the sitting room, where the sofa offered respite to F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others.

“It’s one more piece of the puzzle,” says Fessenden, who has spent much of the past year meticulously researching, recollecting, and reinstalling Mencken’s original chairs, lamps, carpeting, bookshelves, piano, and paintings and placing everything back where it was when the former Baltimore Sun newsman lived in the three-story rowhome.

The attention to his study alone, a palpable step back in time, is striking. (It was here where Mencken’s “councils of war” plotted strategy against various government book-banning efforts and where Mencken persuaded Clarence Darrow to defend John Scopes in the Scopes Monkey Trial.) Mencken’s own lightweight, early 1900s L.C. Smith & Bros. typewriter, for example, has been restored to remarkable condition—evocative of a refurbished Stradivarius—with functioning type bars, spool, roller knob, and keys.

Nearby sits his favorite brand of thin replacement leads for his pencils, his sharpener, his memo pads—produced by the “Universal Atlas Cement Co.”—a box of Pilot brand staples, a bottle of Sheaffer Skrip ink, and five-cent mailing labels. His wooden chair is solid, upright, and worn—like those of all serious writers.

After the unexpected 1997 closure of Baltimore’s City Life Museums, which previously operated the Mencken House, the three-story brick home basically sat vacant. For the most part, the home’s belongings have been kept in storage by the Maryland Historical Society. Since his death in 1956, Mencken artifacts have scattered far and wide, including to the Enoch Pratt Free Library’s H.L. Mencken Room, private collectors, and the Smithsonian. Fessenden only recently discovered Mencken’s famous red suspenders in a wrongly marked box. “That made me happy,” she says with another smile.

That it took the city more than a dozen years to disperse a private $3-million bequest to fix the place up would not have surprised the acerbic Mencken. “Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under,” he once said.

Mencken’s legacy, of course, is complicated. There is no denying his stature as one of this country’s original thinkers. There is also no question he displayed anti-Semitism and used the racist pejoratives of the time. But Mencken also published black writers as founder of the groundbreaking American Mercury magazine. At the moment, there is the hope that the restoration and reopening of his home will not just attract visitors there, but will spark renewed interest in his work.

Going forward, there is additional hope the Mencken House can serve as a foundation for continued neighborhood development around the graceful, 2.5-acre city park at its doorstep. There’s even aspirations Mencken can become a Baltimore institution in the way the Edgar Allan Poe, whose home, of course, is a popular destination, has become inseparable from the city’s identity. But obstacles remain.

“Not all geniuses are movie-star good-looking,” says Jeff Jerome, former curator of the Poe House and now outreach coordinator with Mencken House, referring to the challenges of promoting the image of the portly, middleaged, sometimes dour, and often sarcastic writer. “At least Poe was weird-looking.”

Given that the property that once housed The Sage of Baltimore, H.L. Mencken, has been vacant for 20 years, it’s fair to assert that there are those in the city with limited knowledge as to just who he was. Even those overseeing a new project to turn the house into a museum—as well as an office space for the Baltimore National Heritage Area (BNHA)—acknowledge that there is a bit of forgotten history to the writer and journalist beloved by academics and scholars alike.

“As we get further in time, Mencken and his work is less and less well known,” says Jackson Gilman-Forlini, a historic preservation officer for the Baltimore City Department of General Services. “And what’s important is we have a museum that is relevant for contemporary people.”

Though widely recognized as a deeply talented writer of novels like The American Language and autobiography Happy Days, as well as a long-time columnist for the The Baltimore Sun and the The Evening Sun, Mencken is a controversial figure for his views that have often been called racist, misogynistic, and Anti-Semitic. Excerpts from his diary published by the Baltimore Evening Sun in the late ’80s revealed hateful language toward minorities, and there is much debate on his legacy and his place in history.

With this in mind, the museum that will occupy the first floor and half of the second floor of the H.L. Mencken House on Union Square in Southwest Baltimore will showcase his personal belongings and life inside the place he called home for most of his life, but it will also be a thoughtful consideration of how his ideas fit within a modern landscape.

To achieve this, the BNHA is partnering with the Society to Preserve the Legacy of H.L. Mencken—a local organization which holds the writer in high esteem—to find a consultant who will mediate and curate an all-encompassing experience and ensure that all sides of Mencken’s story are told.

“We want to use the space to start a dialogue,” says BNHA’s executive director Shauntee Daniels. “We want to shine a light on who he was, and show how people thought at that time.”

Though the house has been abandoned for an extended period of time, Gilman-Forlini says it is in decent shape compared to other preservation projects—thanks to a loyal group of neighbors who have tended to it. Interestingly, the house has only changed hands two times in its 140- year existence (after Mencken, it was taken over by the University of Maryland and later by the city). As such, its original architecture largely remains intact, serving as a time capsule for the tastes of that time.

“It’s a very elegant home,” Gilman-Forlini says. “It also is representative of how people in the city lived at that time and up to the present. We want to tell that story and preserve that.”

It’s also important to note that all preservation is being done through a private bequeathment. No taxpayer dollars were used in the project, which organizers are hopeful can be fully operational by next year, with the potential for the house itself to open to the public later this year. Baltimore has no shortage of historical homes—the Poe House and the Carroll Mansion are a few examples. The plan is for the H.L. Mencken house to also serve as the main office for the BNHA, where it can operate and work on other preservation initiatives throughout the city.

“We need to bring attention to neighborhoods that are long forgotten,” Daniels says. “It’s unreasonable to leave the house derelict. And for the Heritage Area, it’s a great opportunity to be in a historic property and to make sure it remains open to the public.”