Friends of the Historic Johns Hopkins House, a new Crofton-based nonprofit, wants to buy Johns Hopkins’ childhood home and turn it into a community center, but the current owner is “not interested.”

Don Bailey, president of Friends of the Historic Johns Hopkins House, began the group’s pursuit of the property last fall. At first they tried to get Anne Arundel County to buy the house. Now, the group has bigger plans.

Whites Hall, the former 13-acre plantation where the house sits, has had a few owners over the years who wanted to transform the property, although none met with success. In 2017, Robert Brown launched his bid to restore the deteriorating historic site. To do so, he created the now-shuttered nonprofit The Johns Hopkins House Inc. and eventually bought the property in 2022.

The vision was to turn the property into a tavern and arboretum. There were also plans to offer scholarships to minority students. However, Brown failed to repay a loan from the former owners, and the property was posted for auction in 2023. The state shut down Brown’s nonprofit that same year after alleging he misled donors by soliciting contributions under the pretense that the nonprofit was financially stable when it faced thousands of dollars in debt and a foreclosure lawsuit. As a result, Brown is permanently banned from soliciting charitable donations in Maryland.

Sam Asgari, a Potomac-based real-estate investor, and his wife bought the historic Gambrills property for $915,000 in January 2024 in hopes of “restoring it to its former glory.” Asgari told the Capital Gazette in January he hoped to explore the possibility of using the site as a country inn or wedding hall and opening a museum dedicated to those who were enslaved at Whites Hall. In September, he said that the house was headed toward either demolition or collapse if it didn’t receive a major cash infusion. The same month, he listed the house for a little over $1 million but says the house is “not on the market anymore.”

“We’re not contemplating demolition [of the] property unless the property is in extremely bad shape. I mean, it’s in disrepair right now, but it’s not in that condition that will fall right now,” he said in a phone interview Tuesday.

Since then, the house has remained unchanged and Asgari says he’s “not interested” in selling the home to Bailey’s nonprofit due to Bailey’s brief time as the chair of Brown’s nonprofit.

“The prior nonprofit foundation members claim they had no idea what’s going on with Bob Brown, and he did all those things by himself alone. Now that’s not what I believe,” he said.

It is unclear what Asgari has planned for the property. He wants to sell to Anne Arundel County; however, he said there has been no interest so far. Anne Arundel County does not plan to purchase the property, said Renesha Alphonso, spokesperson for the county.

“I would hope that [Asgari] comes to the understanding of what we’re trying to do to save and restore the house for the community,” Bailey said.

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