The History of United States Coinage As Illustrated by the Garrett Collection

Although T. Harrison Garrett was a founding member of the Baltimore Numismatic Society, he did not take an active part either in organization meetings or in-person attendance at coin sales, although there were some exceptions. He conducted his collecting activities with modesty and privacy. As his reputation and that of his collection spread, dealers eagerly offered him first chance at important collections and other properties acquired. In this way T. Harrison Garrett obtained many pieces which were not available in auction sales. With an eye for quality, Garrett rejected specimens, even rarities, which were not in a superb state of preservation. When the opportunity to acquire a finer specimen presented itself, he would buy the superior piece and sell or trade the lesser one. By the late 1880s the quality of his collection was unmatched by any other.

On Saturday morning, June 9, 1888, the Baltimore Sun carried a news item:

Mr. T. Harrison Garrett, second son of the late John W. Garrett, and the head of the banking firm of Robert Garrett & Sons, South Street, was drowned at a late hour Thursday night in a collision between his yacht Gleam and the steamer Joppa of the Maryland Steamboat Co. Mr. Garrett's life was the only one lost, his companions being merely roughly shaken up.

The collision occurred about three miles below the Seven Foot Knoll and eighteen miles from the Lazaretto Light, in this port. The Gleam was on her return trip to Baltimore with a pleasure party aboard, and the Joppa was bound for her landings on the Choptank River, having left Baltimore at 9 p.m. The yacht was sunk. The steamer sustained no damage. After making a fruitless search for three hours for Mr. Garrett, hoping that he had clung to some floating object, the Joppa transferred to the steamer Sue the passengers and crew of the Gleam and two gentlemen and five ladies who were passengers on the Joppa and who desired to return to Baltimore. The Gleam's crew was landed at Locust Point, with instructions to return to the scene of the disaster and renew the search for the body. The passengers were taken to Light Street wharf. The party on the Gleam, who were Mr. Garrett's guests, were George R. Snowden Andrews, of the firm of Andrews & Co., stockbrokers; William H. Blackford, president of the Maryland Life Insurance Co.; Joshua G. Harvey, president of the Western National Bank; and George A. Von Lingen, the German consul for the port of Baltimore. The invitations for the trip were sent out by Mr. Garrett Wednesday afternoon . . .

After T. Harrison Garrett's death in 1888, Evergreen was closed for several years. Later John Work Garrett wrote of his father:

I was already impressed with his knowledge of his books and of his prints, his other great hobby. I remember when he used to come home from his office down on South Street and talk with us youngsters, and then when we were packed off to bed, it was his habit to shut himself up in his reading room at the end of the hall upstairs-or what is now the writing room, then called the print room-and once there, no matter what went on in town, which was happily very much further away in those days than it is today, the orders were that he was to be left undisturbed. After his death in 1888 my mother took her three boys abroad and then lived with them for four years at Princeton, so for all these six years Evergreen House was shut up. I often think that the wonder of it is that none of his treasures, particularly the books, were lost.