Just after midnight May 28, 1895, a mob of roughly 20 masked men descended on the old Ellicott City Jail, held the jailers at gunpoint and seized Jacob Henson, a young Black store clerk who’d been convicted of murdering his boss, a white store owner.

They dragged Henson into the night and hanged him from a nearby dogwood tree. While Henson already faced a sentence of death, the lynch mob feared that the governor would reduce his sentence.

Henson is one of two Black men kidnapped from the old jail on Emory Road and lynched.

Like the paint peeling off its walls, the jail’s three-story structure has a layered history, including a darkly racist past of lynching and holding enslaved people who’d escaped.

From January 1852 until slavery ended in Maryland on Nov. 1, 1864, the jail — then just the basement of a home — held those freedom seekers and anyone charged with aiding such escapees.

The jail was expanded with a stone structure added onto the old home in 1878.

No one has been held there since the mid-1980s, when it was replaced by the Howard County Detention Center in Jessup. The Howard County Sheriff’s Office cleared out in 2008.

Now Preservation Maryland, a nonprofit that works to protect historic buildings, stories and communities statewide, is embarking on a plan to transform the structure into a new headquarters, education research hub and community space.

The redevelopment will acknowledge the structure’s history rooted in racism, the group says.

“The essential goal for us has been to place at the center of our effort to redevelop the site a genuine attempt to have the difficult conversations, but have them sensitively, and bring in the voices that should be brought into these kinds of conversations around not only what has happened, but how that’s acknowledged,” said Laura Houston, Preservation Maryland’s director of revitalization initiatives.

The launch of the project comes at a time when the administration of President Donald Trump has sought to play down the role of racism in American history in federal museums and websites.

In August, for example, Trump said he thought the Smithsonian focused too much on “how bad slavery was” rather than on the “brightness” of America. The administration also ordered some National Park Service sites, including in Harpers Ferry, to take down materials related to slavery.

Henson’s lynching in 1895 was the second associated with the jail.

On Sept. 18, 1885, Nicholas Snowden was abducted from the jail and killed, marking the county’s first lynching. Snowden had been arrested five days earlier on allegations of assaulting a 9-year-old Black girl.

The jail also included what the Howard County Historical Society called “dark cells” where those awaiting execution were held until the next morning.

During World War II, German prisoners of war were housed in the jail, working on local farms during the day, according to the historical society.

Houston said information about the jail’s dark history will be displayed on signs in a courtyard acknowledging “the layered history that the site has and making it regularly accessible to the community.”

Preservation Maryland is partnering with the University of Maryland’s School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation on the project. A groundbreaking is expected next spring.

The university plans to turn part of the old jail into a research hub. The space would provide opportunities for experienced preservation practitioners to connect with students, as well as make technology and other resources available for ongoing fieldwork and publications.

Michelle Magalong, an assistant professor of historic preservation at the University of Maryland, wants students to be exposed to a variety of skills and techniques, not only to help them build professional skill sets but to “ensure underrepresented trades aren’t lost to time.” Students will learn skills ranging from ancient and traditional preservation methods to artificial intelligence-aided research and documentation.

“We hope to create a more just pipeline into preservation by amassing a variety of people, skills and knowledge,” Magalong said in a statement.

A recent tour of the building was like stepping back in time.

There were rusty handcuffs, no-contact-visit phone stations (black corded phones hanging on the wall that an incarcerated person would use to talk to a visitor through a window), metal bunk-bed barracks, toilets and original doors.

Near the original entrance were sets of smaller cells, including one labeled “special confinement,” and two sets of cells that appear to have held four people at once.

The jail’s top floor, which includes a sky bridge connecting to the old courthouse, included offices and an intake center. Hanging from the wall was the business card of a sheriff’s chaplain and instructions for security officers dated March 15, 2006.

Houston said her group will seek to preserve as much of the jail’s original structures as possible, particularly the exteriors. The nonprofit wants to keep some of the cells to acknowledge and retain the history inside.

The project will include Americans with Disabilities Act features, including an elevator and designated parking spaces. An environmental component will improve the site’s stormwater management.

While the final cost is still being determined, Preservation Maryland has received federal pandemic relief dollars as well as funds from the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development, state bond bills, and other philanthropic and federal sources.

Howard County Executive Calvin Ball welcomed the project: “Given its multifaceted history, the former Ellicott City Jail serves as an ideal place where we can preserve and bring forth our county’s past, while breathing new life into a once vacant historic structure and giving it purpose once again.”

This article has been updated to better reflect what Preservation Maryland wants to acknowledge about the building's past.