John Work Garrett was raised in the tradition of encouraging and supporting the creative arts. All of Garrett's family were collectors, but John Work Garrett brought book collecting to a new level. His library of thirty-five thousand volumes included rare Marylandia with a special emphasis on the seventeenth century, particularly early voyages and maps, as well as ornithology, William Shakespeare, and other early imprints. Garrett also acquired a complete set of autographs of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. As John Pierpont Morgan and his private library were to New York, so John Work Garrett and his Evergreen House Library became to Baltimore. Like the Morgan library, Garrett's has become a research facility open to the public.

John Work Garrett was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on 19 May 1872 to one of the richest and most important families in the state. As captains of finance and transportation, members of...