When Margaret Ann McKaleb inherited her father’s 420-acre Taneytown estate in 1843, her husband, Colonel Andrew Ege, hired Baltimore builder Benjamin Forrester to construct a Greek Revival mansion on the land the following year. It took three years to finish. Forrester worked alongside sculptor William Henry Rinehart on the marble mantelpieces inside, and the finished house came with 25 rooms, a glass-enclosed cupola, and outbuildings that included a smokehouse, ice house, and carriage house.
Construction relied on the labor of enslaved workers on Ege’s plantation, a fact the property acknowledges as part of its documented history. Ege went bankrupt and the estate changed hands several times, eventually passing to Maryland Supreme Court Chief Justice George Washington Clabaugh in 1873 and staying in his family for decades as a summer retreat from Washington, D.C. The house sat empty from 1929 until Dorothy and Richard Mollett bought it in 1987 and spent years restoring it into the 40-room hotel it is today.