In June of 2025, we traveled to Frederick, Virginia. We originally did not have this location on our visit list; however, we saw it was close to one of our other stops and decided to visit the building to find out more about Heritage Frederick.

The building is located just around the corner from the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, so we left our car parked and walked on down Heritage Frederick. As we mentioned in our other posts, parking can sometimes be a bit tricky to find in this downtown area on the weekends, so the short walk was not too unpleasant on a nice sunny day.

We toured the entire building when we were there, looking at a lot of local history related to Frederick and some information that was related to the history of the building itself. We produced a video about our visit, and later we discovered some intriguing paranormal claims as well.

The building that houses Heritage Frederick sits at 24 East Church Street, an imposing Federal-style townhouse raised in 1824 by Dr. John Frederick Baltzell, a University of Pennsylvania–trained physician from one of Frederick’s early German families. Set across three original town lots laid out by land speculator Daniel Dulany, the property announced its owner’s status with fine brickwork and a deep garden court stretching behind the house. From its earliest days, the address was part of the city’s most prominent corridor, steps from churches, banking houses, and the courthouse square.

Baltzell and his wife, Ruth Ridgely, raised a large family here, and period views show outbuildings crowding the rear yard—kitchen workrooms, wash spaces, and service sheds that kept the household supplied. After Dr. Baltzell’s death in 1854, Ruth sold the residence to Colonel Alexander Baird Hanson, whose family added a one-story office wing on the east side. That wing, used by their son and by Baltzell before him, hints at the house’s dual identity as both a refined home and a workplace in a bustling county seat.

Like many Frederick households before Maryland’s 1864 emancipation, the home’s first owners participated in chattel slavery. Archival research at Heritage Frederick has identified enslaved people—among them Hester Ann Diggs and her children—whose labor maintained the house and garden before manumissions and freedom reshaped their lives. The documentation, preserved in inventories and manumission papers, anchors the site’s grandeur to the brutal truths of the era and to the people whose names survive in the record.

Hanson’s tenure spanned the city’s greatest trial: the July 9, 1864 ransom demanded by Confederate General Jubal Early. As president of the Frederick County Bank, Hanson helped front the cash that spared the town from destruction, and the family’s Church Street address remained an emblem of civic leadership until 1870, when the property changed hands again. The house thus witnessed Frederick’s transformation from a canal-and-turnpike market town to a rail-linked commercial hub.

The third owner, leather magnate and railroad founder John Henry Loats, purchased the property in 1870. Childless after the early death of his infant son, Loats devised the house by will as the Loats Female Orphan Asylum, with a life tenancy reserved for a relative. When she married in 1881, trustees took possession, and in June 1882, the first three girls moved into the high-ceilinged rooms. A matron and superintendent governed daily life; second-floor bedrooms became dormitories; the rear wing housed the kitchen and laundry; and the garden became a play yard.

For seventy-four years—1882 through 1956—the house sheltered 103 girls, many of whom later recalled the home as a place of discipline, schooling, and care. Some attended public schools; others continued at Hood College or hospital nursing programs. Long-serving matron Maud Davis guided a generation through the Depression and war years, a steadfast presence whose framed likeness still appears in Heritage Frederick social posts and exhibits interpreting the site’s orphanage era.

When the orphan home closed in 1956, the Historical Society of Frederick County (today’s Heritage Frederick) acquired 24 East Church Street in 1959, moving from its earlier headquarters at the Steiner House. By 1960 the new Museum of Frederick County History opened inside, and in 1972 the building—also documented by the Historic American Buildings Survey as “Loat’s Female Orphan Home”—joined the National Register of Historic Places. Since then, changing exhibitions and a research center have continued the site’s public mission.

Because it is both a grand townhouse and a long-running children’s institution, the building carries a reputation for lingering presences. Guides who include East Church Street on downtown ghost walks point to the orphanage era as fertile ground for stories: the clatter of hurried steps on the dormitory landing, a door that latches after lights-out, and a faint scent of starch and soap in the laundry rooms where steaming coppers once boiled. The popularity of Frederick’s historic district ghost tours keeps such lore in circulation each fall.

Staff and visitors sometimes speak of “the matron” as a catch-all figure—a silhouette glimpsed at the top of the main stair after closing, a habit of straightened chairs in the double parlor, the sense of being watched kindly but firmly when one lingers too long in the former study space. Whether these impressions are the power of suggestion in a house with strict routines baked into its woodwork or something else entirely, the stories tie modern experiences to the authority figures who once ordered life here.

Other tales gravitate to the basement, a warren beneath thick brick walls where food was stored and chores kept the household running. Visitors on after-hours programs have traded photos and anecdotes of strange shadows or “cold pockets” near the old service areas—accounts typical of nineteenth-century workspaces that feel, even in daylight, somewhat apart from the city above. Similar to the majority of house-museum folklore, individuals share these claims based on their personal experiences, not as scientific evidence.

Because Frederick itself cultivates a wider haunted identity—Civil War echoes, undertakers’ shops, and creaking Victorian storefronts—the stories at 24 East Church Street sit within a broader cityscape of candlelit walks and seasonal programming. Heritage tours, downtown calendars, and regional listings help sustain this blend of history and haunt, situating the orphan home alongside other local sites that lean into October’s appetite for the uncanny.

Taken together, the building’s layered past explains why it speaks so strongly to visitors. It begins with Dr. Baltzell’s aspirational brick mansion on a prominent street, folds in Frederick’s painful entanglement with slavery, survives a wartime ransom, and then hosts a home where rules, chores, lessons, and hopes shaped the lives of more than a hundred girls. Whether one comes for documented history or for the whispered possibility of something that lingers, Heritage Frederick’s house is a place where the city’s memory still feels close to the surface.