What to See in Westminster - Top Sights and Attractions

Building in Carroll County, Maryland. Carroll County Almshouse and Farm, also known as the Carroll County Farm Museum, is a historic farm complex located at Westminster, Carroll County, Maryland. It consists of a complex of 15 buildings including the main house and dependencies. The 30-room brick main house was originally designed and constructed for use as the county almshouse. It is a long, three-story, rectangular structure, nine bays wide at the first- and second-floor levels of both front and rear façades. It features a simple frame cupola sheltering a farm bell. A separate two-story brick building with 14 rooms houses the original summer kitchen, wash room, and baking room, and may have once housed farm and domestic help. Also on the property is a brick, one-story dairy with a pyramidal roof dominated by a pointed finial of exaggerated height with Victorian Gothic "icing" decorating the eaves; a large frame and dressed stone bank barn; and a blacksmith's shop, spring house, smokehouse, ice house, and numerous other sheds and dependencies all used as a part of the working farm museum activities. The original Carroll County Almshouse was founded in 1852 and the Farm Museum was established in 1965.

It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.^[1]

Building in Westminster, Maryland. Baker Memorial Chapel is a building on the campus of McDaniel College, in Westminster, Maryland, that was dedicated April 20, 1958. The chapel was built in memory of W.G. Baker, Joseph D. Baker, Daniel Baker, and Sarah Baker Thomas. When the initial endowment was announced in 1955 both the donor's identity and the identity of the memorialized individuals were unknown. As conceived, the new chapel was to have a capacity of approximately 900, and was "expected to be of Georgian colonial architecture in keeping with the design of other recent buildings on the campus."

The chapel was designed by architects Otto Eugene Adams and E.G. Riggs, of Baltimore. The Chapel steeple, 113 feet tall, is visible for miles around and was originally topped by a stainless steel cross 6 feet in height. The wood panels of the chancel were designed to complement the antique organ console which was originally in the Bruton Parish Church, at Williamsburg, Virginia. The organ in the new chapel was given by two alumni, father and son, Roger J. Whiteford, a prominent Washington attorney and graduate in 1906, and his son Joseph S. Whiteford, a graduate in 1943, president of the Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company, Boston, Mass. The organ, with its 2,310 pipes, is held to be the largest in the area. The Whitefords also gave the carillon installed in the steeple.^[2]