Thomas Kirby House (207 Mulberry Street)

As you turn the corner onto Mulberry Street, on the right is number 207, a blue-painted cross-gable house with a front portico, built about 1888 with reused materials from an older house. The owner, Thomas H Kirby, was a shipbuilder who had apprenticed with Lambdin before the Civil War, worked in Baltimore during the war, and returned in 1865. He purchased a shipyard on the end of Carpenter Street and built a marine railway in 1875 to haul vessels out of the water. The mule that powered the marine railway was stabled in Kirby’s backyard, and it daily crossed the marsh behind his yard on a narrow plank bridge on its way to and from the shipyard.