Hot discovery under a tin roof

摘要

Restoration workers at Ft. McHenry were surprised to discover a shake-shingle roof that survived nearly intact since it was built in 1829, when they peeled a layer of roofing tin from a 91-foot barracks porch.Scott S. Sheads, the National Park Service historian at the fort, reported that the roof over the second-floor porch of Barracks 1 is "the earliest intact roof on a military building that we know of."Interestingly enough, Sheads noted, the same roof shaded Baltimore Mayor George Brown, 31 members of the state legislature and Baltimore newspaper editor Francis Key Howard-grandson of Francis Scott Key-after they were jailed at the fort in 1861.