As Christopher Mielke led a group through the historic Hammond-Harwood House in downtown Annapolis last week, he urged its members to view the rooms from an unconventional perspective.

In the lavishly decorated upstairs guest bedchambers, Mielke's focus was not on the people who slept or took their tea there.

Instead, the docent asked his guests to think about what the room would have been like for the people who tended to the fireplace and did the other chores — the enslaved Africa-Americans who lived in the house during the first half of the 1800s.

“For [them], this would have been a work space,” said Mielke, a Lothian resident.

The Hammond-Harwood House offered an hourlong tour Tuesday called “The African-American Experience.” It commemorated the end of slavery in Maryland on Nov. 1, 1864, with the adoption of a new state constitution.

Because the state was not part of the Confederacy during the Civil War, it was not covered by President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.

Mielke told the stories of African-Americans who lived and worked at the Maryland Avenue mansion in the 18th and 19th centuries, culled from about 10 weeks of research the Ph.D, candidate did over the summer.

“In many ways, this house is such a microcosm for the experience of African-Americans, particularly in the 19th century,” he said.

The tour, which Mielke had given once before in August, centered on the lives of three enslaved women who lived at the house in the 1800s: sisters Mary and Matilda Matthews, and another woman named Juliet.

Mielke pieced together their stories by combing through old legal documents, census reports, tax records, letters and other primary sources, he said.

The Hammond-Harwood House likely had about one to five slaves at any given time during the first half of the 19th century.

The part of the mansion that now houses the museum staff's offices was once the slave quarters, Mielke said.

Most of the slaves in the house were women and, given the building's urban location. their duties were mostly domestic.

But Mielke used different parts of the house and different stories to get across the point that enslaved African-Americans had a variety of tasks and talents.

A chair in the upstairs study may have been made by John Hemings, a slave of Thomas Jefferson's — and a half brother of Sally Hemings, the president's slave and mistress. John Hemings built furniture and other items for Jefferson, Mielke said.

About a dozen people attended Tuesday's tour.

In August the tour drew more than 50, said Rachel Lovett, curator and assistant director of the museum. The museum, which is open for tours Tuesday through Sunday from April to December, plans to offer the tour again, Lovett said.

Barbara and Art Gill of Annapolis toured the house for the first time Tuesday.

They recently started taking more tours of historic spots around the city, and Art Gill said he was happy to hear a fresh perspective.

“As nice as it is, as wonderful as it is, as interesting as it is, you don't think about the people who had to do all the work — the slaves, in other words,” Gill said. “That's the part that impacted me the most, thinking about: ‘Oh wouldn't that be a nice place to eat? But oh, what about the people who are having to make it ready to eat and clean it up?'?”