Museum of the Shenandoah Valley

The Gardens

History

The museum-published Gardens of Glen Burnie book describes over 250 years of the Glen Burnie landscape's history and details the creation of the twentieth-century formal gardens that grace the property today.

 

Pictured In Text

This elegant statue resides in the historic family cemetery on the Glen Burnie grounds where generations of Wood and Glass family members have been laid to rest.

 

Quickfact

Many of the bricks comprising the walkways in the gardens were purchased in the 1960s from the sites of demolished historic buildings in Winchester.

The Glen Burnie House had ornamental flower gardens as early as 1820. By 1955, when Julian Wood Glass Jr. acquired the site, the house and landscape were in disrepair. Beginning in 1956, Julian Wood Glass Jr., working with his then partner R. Lee Taylor, created the gardens we know today. In the late 1980s and in anticipation of opening the site to the public, Glass initiated a renovation of his gardens. When he died in 1992, before the renovation was completed, the Glass-Glen Burnie Foundation took responsibility for opening the house and gardens as a museum in 1997. Taylor, who served as the museum’s first curator of gardens, died in 2000; he is buried in the site’s historic family cemetery.

The history of the Wood and Glass families is available in the museum’s entertaining book, The Gardens of Glen Burnie: The History and Legends of a Virginia Legacy. The book is sold at the Museum Store and online.

  • The gardens will be open from April 2 through October 31 in 2013. The house will remain closed until 2014 for a comprehensive preservation project.