The house went up around 1870 on a short street in downtown Annapolis, a few blocks from the water and the walls of the Naval Academy. The earliest owner we can name lived and died inside it. His name was Matthew Strohm.
Strohm came to the Academy in 1867 to teach gymnastics and stayed for forty-two years. Annapolis knew him as the Boxing Master. Two generations of naval officers learned to take a punch from him. He was a Civil War veteran, a Past Master of the Masons, an Odd Fellow, a Red Man and a member of the German Aid Society. He and his wife Louise raised five children here.
He retired in 1909. The Evening Capital wrote that he “had just begun to take life easy when death called him.” On the morning of June 21, 1910, after ten days of illness, his heart gave out. He was sixty-six. “Prof. Strohm was a man of jovial and genial disposition,” his obituary said, “and was always good-natured.” He died at home.
They did not take him to a funeral parlor. The service was held in the house, two days later. The rector of St. Anne’s read the Episcopal burial and the Masons followed with their own rite. Some fifty floral pieces filled the rooms, many of them sent by officers he had trained. The paper called it “one of the most largely attended that Annapolis has ever known.” When it was over, a long line of carriages and people on foot followed him down the street to St. Anne’s Cemetery.
More than a century later, Brandon and Michael moved in. Something thuds on the stairs at night. The shower curtain will not behave. Noises come from the home office when nobody is in it. They tell the whole story in Season 2, Episode 1.
Old houses make noise. Wood shrinks, pipes knock, a street settles under its buildings. Nobody can say who is on the stairs. But this was a man who spent his life in motion, whose heart was the one muscle he could not train, and whose last public appearance was his own funeral, held in these rooms.
If you hear him on the stairs, let him pass.