By Patricia Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Stephen Edward Patrick, 44, director of the Bowie city museums, died of suicide Aug. 24 after he stepped into the path of a freight train in Alexandria. He had recently learned that he had a brain tumor.
Mr. Patrick ran Bowie's multiple museums for the past 12 years and also taught classes on museums and historic preservation at Goucher College's Welch Center for Graduate and Professional Studies.
In Bowie, Mr. Patrick opened several new museums and oversaw funding for the return of four significant paintings from the 1740s for the Belair Estate museum. Under his leadership, the city restored a 1922 caboose at the railroad museum and restored the inside of the 1920s stable of the Belair Estate. One of his last projects was the Old Town Bowie Welcome Center and Children's Museum.
"I would say he built the city's museum system," said his longtime assistant, Pam Williams. Mr. Patrick was hired in 1995 as the curator of the newly opened Belair mansion, and the city's historic holdings quickly began to grow.
In addition to the mansion, stable and train station, the Prince George's County Genealogical Society Library came under the city's oversight. The Radio and Television Museum found a home in a restored 1905 house. Mr. Patrick forged a partnership with the Washington chapter of the National Railway Historical Society, and its Martin F. O'Rourke Memorial Library is now housed in Bowie.
"Stephen was very proficient at shepherding those types of collaborative efforts," Williams said.
A man who had a deep interest in the past, Mr. Patrick previously was executive director of the Hammond-Harwood House Association in Annapolis and curator of the George Washington Museum of the George Washington Masonic National Memorial in Alexandria.
He was born in Baltimore and raised in Timonium, Md. He graduated from the University of Delaware with bachelor's degrees in American studies and Russian, and he received decorative arts training at the Henry Francis DuPont Winterthur Museum. He received a master's degree in American studies from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg in 1990.
Mr. Patrick did research with the Historic Annapolis Foundation and was a curatorial intern at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia. He then worked as an assistant curator of Philadelphia's Masonic Library and Museum before moving to Alexandria in 1989 and to Annapolis three years later. He had lived in Arlington for the past several years.
In his spare time, Mr. Patrick was a board member of the Association of Railway Museums and a member of the American Association of Museums, the Small Museum Association, the Museum Education Roundtable, the Prince George's County Historic Museum Consortium, the Hillwood Museum and Gardens, the Virginia Association of Museums, the William and Mary Gay and Lesbian Alumni Association, the One in Ten Museum Project and Arlington County's Jamestown 2007 celebration.
He was an antique car enthusiast and belonged to the Washington area chapter of the Lambda Car Club.
Survivors include his partner of 14 years, Stephen J. Kogut of Arlington; his mother, Mary Kathryn Patrick of Reisterstown, Md.; his father, William E. Patrick of Jarrettsville, Md.; a sister, Mary-Beth Yachimowicz of Reisterstown; and two half-sisters, Jennifer Patrick of Forest Hill, Md., and Amanda P. Arment of Jarrettsville.