The Country Curator

Caretaker David Ferraro and his historic Patapsco home are a museum-perfect match.

- Christina breda antoniades

DURING A FEW RARE, wide-open hours on this unseasonably warm late-autumn day, 45-year-old David Ferraro is standing on his partially finished, historically accurate front porch, contemplating an afternoon bike ride. His plan is to cycle through the wooded trails of Patapsco Valley State Park, into historic Oella, over the Patapsco River across an iron bridge, and back home—16 miles in all.

He’ll begin and end in his own backyard—which he doesn’t own. The yard encompasses roughly two acres of the park, and gives him direct access to its more than 200 miles of trails and the river. He moved into the once-derelict early-19th-century stone home in 2014 as part of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources’ Resident Curatorship Program. It’s a sweet deal: Through the program, Ferraro gets lifetime rent-free living in exchange for restoration and maintenance of the historic home.

For Ferraro, who’s been director of architectural services for the Reginald F. Lewis Museum since 2011 and is an avid cyclist, kayaker, and runner, applying to become resident curator was a no-brainer.

“I had been looking at houses in the curatorship program for 15 years,” says Ferraro, sitting beside a wood-burning stove in the 1,000-square-foot home’s rustic kitchen after his ride. Many were a good fit architecturally, “but kind of far away from what was happening in the rest of my life.”

On the board of two nonprofits with ties to the park, Ferraro had spent countless hours within its boundaries. So when the Department of Natural Resources announced in 2011 it was seeking a resident curator for The Reserve Property, as the tract is known, “I was all over it. I knew right away this place had great bones.”