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The Gunpowder Copper Works, a once-prominent factory located along the Great Gunpowder Falls near Glen Arm, Maryland is the second oldest copper works in the United States. The factory operated from around 1811 to 1858 turning blocks of copper into thin sheets used for covering the bottoms of ships and boats to increase their speed and durability. Possibly the most intact industrial site of its kind along the Great Gunpowder Falls, the factory is located immediately past Factory Road on northbound Harford Road. The Gunpowder Copper Works was established around 1811 by Levi Hollingsworth, a veteran of the American Revolution and a prosperous merchant from Cecil County with major investments in shipbuilding. On a trip to England, Levi Hollingsworth studied the refining, milling and rolling of copper and brought back extensive machinery he needed to set up a factory in America. He likely established the factory soon after leasing a mill from Dr. Thomas Love and Caleb Dorsey Goodwin on this site in 1811. The Copper Works factory complex included two sets of sheet rolls, two refining furnaces, and later, and a cupola furnace for treating the slag. A water-wheel furnished the power. With a factory among in the fertile hills of Baltimore County, workmen eventually took to farming when business slowed. When the crops needed attention, workers left rolling and milling for another day. During the War of 1812, the Gunpowder Copper Works supplied the U.S. Navy with sheathing, bolts and nails. Levi Hollingsworth joined the Fifth Maryland Regiment in 1814 and was wounded in September fighting the British at the Battle of North Point. Shortly after end of the war, the dome on the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. was rebuilt using copper sheathing rolled by the the Gunpowder Copper Works using ore mined in Frederick County, Maryland. The Capitol Dome contract brought the mill national recognition as a copper supplier. The profit from the project allowed Levi Hollingsworth to buy out the Ridgely and Goodwin interests in the Gunpowder Copper Works in 1816. By the time Hollingsworth died 1822, the mill was the only copper refinery in operation south of the Mason-Dixon Line. By 1850, the Gunpowder Copper Works had produced between 550,000 and 1.5 million pounds of copper sheeting. After Levi Hollingsworth's death, the Copper Works sold to John McKim, Jr. and Sons. Operation of the copper works continued under the management of Isaac McKim until his death in 1838. Isaac McKim linked the Gunpowder Copper Works to the family's shipbuilding supply business on Smith's Wharf in Baltimore's harbor, now the site of the National Aquarium. After Isaac's death, his nephews bought out the other beneficiaries and ran the Copper Works. Haslett and William McKim were both active businessmen in Baltimore, serving on the boards of the Baltimore Dispensary, the Peabody Institute, the B&O Railroad, and the Maritime Insurance Company. William McKim served as an aide-de-camp to Commander John Spear Smith during the Baltimore Bank Riot in 1835. His uncle, Isaac, had served a similar position to Commander Smith's father, General Sam Smith, during the War of 1812. In September 1843, a notice in the Baltimore American, advertised the copper works for lease including:
"a sheet mill with two pairs of rollers, two pairs of large shears operated by a water wheel, two annealing furnaces, a tilt and bolt mill, a tilt-hammer operated by a water wheel, two furnaces, a blacksmith shop, carpenter and turning shop and a nail machine. Two refining shops with a slag furnace, coal houses and homes for workmen. The Dam is substantial and in good condition, and the water power is among the best in the vicinity of Baltimore. The works are on a good turnpike about 10 miles above Baltimore."In 1858, major rain storms in mid-June caused significant flooding in the area and along the Great Gunpowder Falls, which destroyed the dam at the Copper Works. The dam was rebuilt, but operation ceased later that year and the factory closed. The owners rented the property rented to a tenant operator in 1861 but it likely remained closed during the Civil War. The Maryland General Assembly incorporated the Gunpowder Copper Works as a state facility in 1864, naming Levi Hollingsworth's son-in-law, William Pinkney Whyte, president of the operation, and Enoch Pratt, one of the incorporators. Despite Whyte's prominence as a politician and Pratt's success in business, the newly incorporated copper works soon failed. The City of Baltimore bought the 303 acres of land on which the copper works sat in 1866 as the possible site for a future reservoir. In 1887, the Baltimore City Water Board sold the copper works to Henry Reier, who sold it to Henry E. Shimp for his "bending works at the Old Copper Factory on the Gunpowder," where he manufactured wheel rims, wagon-wheel spokes and wagon shafts. The facility never processed copper again, but Shimp's Eagle Steam Saw and Bending Mills continued operating into the twentieth century. J. Alexis Shriver, Harford County landowner, bought the property in 1910 and sold the plant's water wheels during a World War I scrap drive. By the mid-twentieth century, the facility stood in ruins but was acquired by the state as part of the new Gunpowder Falls State Park. There are at least four buildings from the original complex still standing along Harford Road just above Gunpowder River bridge. These include the Copper Works House with outbuildings, the Tilt-hammer House, the Foreman's House, and the spring house and bridge. Constructed about 1815, the Gunpowder Copper Works House is a one-and-a-half-story stone building reportedly used as a dormitory for the workers at the nearby plant. By about 1900, this building had been converted to a stable by J. Alexis Shriver then later converted to a residence. The small stone Foreman's House was built around 1815. Two more stories and a large shed dormer were added to the building later. The house sold to Henry Reier in 1877 and his family held it until 1938. The Tilt-hammer House, built about 1815, may have been the coppersmith's house at one time. When it served as the tilt-hammer house, this building is where copper was pounded into sheets. The building became a residence after 1925 and the only original parts of the structure are the exterior stone walls. Today, all of these buildings are in use as residences or offices. They are located within the Gunpowder Historic District and sit on land which has been incorporated into Gunpowder State Park.
The massive bronze sculpture of Orpheus at Fort McHenry represents an early 20th century celebration of the man who wrote the Star-Spangled Banner.
One of the most striking monuments related to the Battle of Baltimore is the nearly forty-foot tall statue of the Greek god Orpheus greeting visitors to Fort McHenry since 1922. Dedicated to Francis Scott Key as well as the Old Defenders, the sculpture takes a more allegorical approach than monuments to others involved in the Battle of Baltimore. The U.S. Congress appropriated $75,000 for a sculpture at this site in 1914 to mark the centennial of the Star-Spangled Banner-though the song did not become the national anthem until 1931. The Fine Arts Commission hosted a national contest to select the design, with Charles Niehaus' twenty-four-foot depiction of the Greek god of music and poetry selected as the most fitting memorial to Key. The bronze statue of a nude Orpheus playing the lyre stands atop a white marble base fifteen feet high. The low relief frieze on the base include a likeness of Key as well as other figures from mythology. World War I delayed the project for a eight years. President Warren G. Harding dedicated the monument on Flag Day in 1922 with a live broadcast from WEAR—the first time a president had been heard on the radio. Congress paid Niehaus $33,121 (above the original appropriation) for Orpheus with the Awkward Foot. Fort McHenry continued to serve as a military installation into the twentieth century. The Fort was briefly used as a city park from 1914 to 1917, when it returned to federal service as General Hospital No. 2 around World War I. When President Harding visited the Fort to dedicate the monument, the buildings had grown increasingly dilapidated. The Baltimore News American described the contrast between the empty fort and the new statue in August 1924:
"Deserted barracks and shacks gradually sink into ruin and weeds flourish where a great American victory of arms was won in the War of 1812. A movement is gaining headway to restore the ancient fort and transform it into a Federal park, worthy of its traditions and sightly to the tourists who come from distant places to visit the spot where a brilliant chapter of American history was written."The movement to restore the fort, with vocal support from locals in Baltimore, successfully reinvigorated the site. President Calvin Coolidge signed legislation in 1925 preserving Fort McHenry as a national park under the War Department--the first national park related to the War of 1812. Baltimoreans and visitors could stroll the grounds, walk along the water, and access this historic site freely once again. The National Park Service assumed stewardship in 1933. Six years later, the fort became the only NPS site with the dual designation of National Monument and Historic Shrine. Park service officials sought to distinguish historic sites of military importance with expansive natural landscapes in the west by using the categories of "National Monument" and "National Park." Outspoken locals pushed for the inclusion of "Historic Shrine" as it described the fort as a place of inspiration (for Key). James Hancock, President of the Society of the War of 1812, explained his position in a 1938 letter to Congressman Stephen Gambrill. The Fort, he argued, was "a distinctly historical place where people can go to review and renew those patriotic impulses that had much to do in making the national character." The defense of Baltimore took place both on land, at North Point, as well as by sea at Fort McHenry. However, interest in the Star-Spangled Banner story in the twentieth century—embodied by Orpheus—came at the expense of North Point. Decades of federal resources have focused public attention to the Battle of Baltimore on Fort McHenry.
On Baltimore County's historic Patapsco Neck along the Old North Point Road at the intersection of Old Battle Grove Road stands the second oldest known military monument in Maryland and the third oldest known in the United States. It is one of Maryland's least visited War of 1812 sites – the Aquila Randall Monument.
On July 21, 1817, Captain Benjamin C. Howard’sĚýFirst Mechanical VolunteersĚýformed up early in town and marched six miles to the North Point battleground. Accompanying them were wagons conveying the monument blocks to be assembled and dedicated on site that day. The monument’s construction was directed by Lt. Thomas Towson, a stone masonĚý“who aimed at simplicity and neatness.” With a final application of whitewash it was dedicated to honor Private Aquila Randall a member who was killed in a skirmish just before the Battle of North Point, September 12, 1814. The company was joined by other 5thMaryland Regiment officers at the monument while Captain Howard delivered a modest appropriate address:
“….I can picture to myself the sensation of those who in far distant days will contemplate this monument…and the melancholy event which has caused our assemblage at this spot…This monument which we are now erecting, will stand as a solemn expression of the feeling of us all…But I regret that the spot, which is made classic by the effusion of blood, the sport where the long line stood un-appalled by the system and advances of an experienced and disciplined foe, has been suffered to remain unnoticed. It is here where her citizens stood arrayed soldier’s garb, that honors to a soldier’s memory should have been paid. To mark the spot be then our care.…”The inscriptions on the monument read:
Light and music onced poured out the windows and door of the Sphinx Club on Pennsylvania Avenue but only club members (and musicians) could get inside to enjoy the drinks and entertainment. Today, the building sits boarded-up and waiting on a planned redevelopment by the Druid Heights CDC to bring back music and life to the block. In December 2002, Sevety-three-year-old jazz singer and educator Ruby Glover gave a tour of the Avenue to a Baltimore Sun reporter lamented the sight of the Sphinx Club sitting vacant. "It was always kept so well. Tilghman must be turning over in his grave." Charles Phillip Tilghman founded the club in 1946 and ran the business as an elegant private club up until his death in 1988. Tilghman recruited Furman L. Templeton, director of the Baltimore Urban League (with offices nearby at 1841 Pennsylvania Avenue), to chair of the club's advisory board. Glover recalled the scene:
There's nothing there that even gives you the image. It was always so pretty, so lit up. It really was a private club. And my impression was that it was for elite blacks. That was where they hung out. And you could always sing when you went in because they kept a house band, Chico Johnson and his organ trio and Earlene Reed, singing in there.Ruby Glover recalled how musicians always went to the Sphinx Club right after nearby jazz venues, including Club Tijuana on Clifton Avenue, Red Fox on Fulton Avenue, and The Comedy Club and The Ubangi Club on Pennsylvania Avenue, closed for the night. She explained:
And whomever was down The Avenue performing, after the clubs closed that's where you went. Put on a good show in there. If you were a musician all you had to do is ring the bell. They'd tell you, 'Hey, come on in here, give us a little song.'But four years after Charles Tilghman's death the "old Sphinx Club" shut down. By 2002, the Baltimore Sun described it as "dreary." The building continued to remain vacant and boarded for over two decades. Fortunately, the Druid Heights Community Development Corporation is seeking to change that. In 2011, the Druid Heights CDC announced their plans to turn the building and an adjoining property into the Negro Baseball Museum and Restaurant—bringing new jobs and visitors to Avenue again.
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The classically styled Old Town National Bank building at 221 N. Gay Street was constructed in 1924 as a bank headquarters. The first floor still retain an array of historic details, including a two-story lobby, cornice and parapet wall, grand marble stairway, and even vault spaces.
In 2010, 91ĘÓƵ celebrated the renovation of the building and the conversion of the bank into a Holiday Inn Express Hotel. The work by owner Old Town Properties LLC and local architecture firm Kann Partners included refurbishing and repairing a host of historic features ensuring the building is preserved for future generations to appreciate.
Union Baptist Church traces its origins to 1852 and a group of fifty-seven worshipers meeting in a small building on Lewis Street. It was the fifth oldest African American congregation in Baltimore and financed entirely by African Americans. The first pastor of the church was the Reverend John Carey. In 1866, the Lewis Street congregation merged with members of Saratoga Street African Baptist Church, forming Union Baptist Church. When Rev. Harvey Johnson arrived in 1872, he found a modest congregation of perhaps 270 members.Ěý Harvey Johnson’s dealings with the Maryland Baptist Maryland Baptist Union Association (MBUA) in particular, and with prejudiced white Baptists in general, served as a proving ground for his leadership and vision. He took the skills honed in the battle for equality among all Baptists and transfered those skills as he entered the fight for equaliy among all people. Johnson’s original cause of friction with the MBUA stemmed from its paternalistic approach to black people and black Baptist churches. Not only did black ministers categorically receive less pay than white counterparts, but black churches were slow to realize full and equal political priviledges within the state denomination governing apparati. This problem was more troubling once, thanks in no small part to Johnson himself, black numbers in the state’s Baptist churches began grow. By 1885, Union Baptist's membership surpassed two thousand members for the first time. Rev. Johnson's response to this discrimination was two-fold: economic independence and institutional autonomy. This situation exploded throughout the 1890s as Johnson urged black congregations to free themselves of white purse strings, and to get out of the Union Association altogether. One of Rev. Johnson's most controversal speeches brought this issue to fore. In September 1897, speeking in Boston, Johnson made, "A Plea For Our Work As Colored Baptists, Apart From the Whites." Johnson called for black Baptists to move as a group toward self-determination. The Union Baptist Church’s Gothic design features stained glass windows created by John LeFarge, the renowned artist known as the inventor of the art of using opalescent stained glass.
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The Warden's House on Monument Street is a remarkable work of architecture and a unique reminder of the history of justice and injustice in Baltimore. The Warden's House was erected between 1855 and 1859 as part of a larger city jail designed by local architects, Thomas and James M. Dixon. Originally, this structure served as both a gateway through the jail's perimeter wall and a residence. The warden's apartment was to the structure's west side and a suite for a clerk was to the east. Unsurprisingly, it more closely resembles a fortress than a house, with battlements on the towers, projecting turrets, and lancet windows.
The main jail was altered beyond recognition and the wall was torn down in the mid-1960s to make way for the expansion of the Baltimore City Detention Center. But the Warden’s House survived and won recognition for its unique Gothic design when the Baltimore Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation made it a local landmark in 1986. The site itself has an even longer history as the site of the city's first jail erected in 1800.
In the eighteenth century, a local sheriff controlled the city jail and, according to John H.B. Latrobe, chief counsel for the B&O Railroad, revenue from the jail's operation made up a "most lucrative part of his income." Prior to the Civil War, some of that income was from the sale of Black Americans who had been arrested as runaways, regardless if they were enslaved or free. If the prisoner could not prove he was free or if an "owner" did not claim them, they would be sold at a court-ordered auction. The jailers and wardens would receive a portion of the sale.
For the new jail, the state legislature established a system where the warden worked under the supervision of a board of visitors and was paid a fixed salary. Though the jail would still benefit from arresting suspected runaways by charging a fee for boarding them.
Early prisoners included famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison who spent seven weeks there in 1831. In October 1832, the jail held seventy-five people: forty as "debtors" and thirty-five on criminal charges. The latter group included two eleven-year-old Black boys charged with setting fire to a lumberyard.
By the early 1850s, reform-minded observers sought a new jail where the city could avoid mixing children with "old and hardened prisoners." In February 1851, a grand jury reported on the "inappropriateness of the structure" and the "limited capacity" of the building (then holding over 240 people) to the judges of the City Court. In 1855, a design competition awarded the project to Thomas and James M. Dixon, construction began in 1857, and, by December 1859, the new building was complete. Supervised by warden Capt. Thomas C. James, the new jail had three hundred cells in two separate wings. The Sun observed: "Baltimore can now boast of a prison in point of appearance, stability and comfort, second to none other in the country."
This public jail and several private slave jails that proliferated in early 19th century Baltimore all made money by boarding the enslaved for a fee. For instance, travelling families or slave traders would all want someplace to keep their enslaved workers while they stopped for the night. As the Civil War began, and especially after slavery was ended in Washington, DC in 1862, these jails were also used by local enslavers to house their enslaved workers in order to prevent them from running away.
The buildings where prisoners were held remained almost unchanged for a century until they were transformed in the 1960s. The Warden's House is one of the only jail buildings that has been preserved. The gateway had long since been converted into the warden's living room. In 1974, they were converted into offices while keeping the building's distinctive interior intact.
At present, change is coming to the Baltimore Jail once again; threatening the Warden's House and the nearby 1898 Maryland Penitentiary with demolition. In July 2015, Governor Larry Hogan announced the immediate closure of the Baltimore jail following years of concerns and controversy over conditions for inmates and corrections officers. In the spring of 2016, the Maryland Division of Corrections (MDC) released their preliminary plan for the demolition of the Baltimore City Detention Center including this local landmark. Planning is now underway but preservationists are still working to keep this unique reminder of Baltimore's history from disappearing forever.
with research support from Maryland Zoo
Put Druid Hill Park's tennis and basketball courts, roads, reservoir, conservatory, and zoo all aside for a moment. In essence, the park is 674 acres of forest and tree-shaded lawn, an oasis of green in the center of a busy city of brick and asphalt. Lawns bound and slope all over the park, but the one that has always reigned supreme is the one that cascades down the hill in front of the Mansion House toward the reservoir.
"Buttercups bloom and children play joyously amid the grasses and sunshine," waxed one Sun reporter poetically of the Mansion House lawn. Since the park's founding in 1860, the grassy hillside attracted thousands upon thousands of visitors for music concerts, Easter egg rolls, public rallies, patriotic celebrations, Boy Scout campouts, private picnics, golf and track practices, and quiet kite-flying afternoons. It has remained open, green, and welcoming—and trim—all the while. Before anyone used lawnmowers, sheep trimmed the Mansion House lawn and other grassy spaces in Druid Hill Park. The newly elected governor of Maryland, Oden Bowie, supplied the park with its first flock of Southdown sheep in 1869 from his family farm. The sheep remained at work until the 1940s when they were sidelined by automobiles. (Apparently, with increased traffic inside the park, the sheep wandered in front of cars too often.) Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of American landscape architecture, thought that sheep did a better job trimming grass than lawnmowers. Active in the latter half of the twentieth century, Olmsted designed many of America's most famous city parks (although not Druid Hill). Several of these also maintained flocks, including Central Park in New York, Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Franklin Park in Boston, and Washington Park in Chicago. Some wealthy estate owners kept sheep for the same purpose, including John D. Rockefeller, who replaced his fleet of lawnmowers with sheep in 1913 after doing a cost and quality analysis that favored the ruminants. "What a beautifully peaceful thing it was to see the sheep moving out in the early morning and drifting homeward again at the end of the day," wrote Roland Mepham in 1966 of his turn-of-the-century childhood in Druid Hill Park. Mepham's father had been the park's blacksmith and wheelwright. Milton Stanley, a neighborhood kid who often visited the park, was amazed by their canine caretakers. "It seemed a near miracle to an inner city boy," the high school principal recalled in 1979, "that the shepherd dog could perform his job with such intelligence and expertise." A handful of shepherds tended the sheep over the years. The longest-serving of these was George McCleary, affectionately known as "Mr. Mac." He was a fixture in Druid Hill Park for twenty years, from 1906 to 1926. Devoted to his collies and sheep, he also mentored many young park enthusiasts. Writing in The Sun in 1958, Malcolm Lowenstein recalled visiting the shepherd almost every afternoon after school and "practically living" at the park on weekends. Mr. Mac "was better than any teacher we had in school," he wrote. "His favorite subject was animals, and the good sense exhibited by so many of them. We all learned a great deal about animal and human nature from him." When Mr. Mac turned seventy-eight, City law forced him to retire. The sheep continued on the job for another two decades but have long since disappeared from Druid Hill Park. They are replaced by tractor-sized lawn mowers whose weekly din is deafening, louder even than a seventeen-year swarm of cicadas. It really makes you think: there is something to be said for sheep and a shepherd, quietly trimming and teaching.
Visiting any zoo in the world today, you expect to find it surrounded by a fence. It might seem difficult, then, to imagine that for nearly a century there was no fence around the Baltimore Zoo. The zoo was open to anyone who visited Druid Hill Park, anytime day or night. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after the Zoo’s founding in 1876, Druid Hill Park attracted residents of every race, age, and background. The park served as an oasis of natural beauty in the middle of an increasingly crowded industrial city. Visitors strolling through the park would happen upon a small zoo at its center. By the mid-twentieth century, the Zoo had grown in size and automobile traffic within the park had increased. People could drive past several of the Zoo’s animal exhibits and sometimes stopped to picnic or just to observe the animals for a few minutes. This casual and carefree approach to visiting the Zoo by day, however, had a disturbing and destructive counterpoint by night. The local press reported all too frequently on grisly acts of vandalism against Zoo animals. A 1968 report issued by the Baltimore Zoological Society, a friends group that supported the Zoo, noted that over the course of a single year, thirty-one animals were killed by vandals and another forty-nine killed by marauding packs of wild dogs. Stoning and poisoning were the most common causes of vandal-induced death, underscoring intentional cruelty. The Society advocated strongly for a perimeter fence and for charging admission to the Zoo, to protect the animals and to raise the revenue necessary to support their care. The anticipation of these proposed changes sparked criticism in the op-ed pages of local newspapers. Some writers lamented the loss of unrestricted access to all parts of the park while others charged discrimination. One citizen complained in a letter The Baltimore Sun on July 8, 1970:
“First the animals were fenced in, now the public is fenced out. Once the turnstiles are in place and admission fees in force, the days of a casual stop at the zoo... will be over. A zoo visit becomes an organized expedition, money in hand, while penniless urchins are left outside to peer in at their financial betters.”Despite criticism in the press, the Zoo completed its fence project in late 1970, erecting a nine-foot barrier around its three-mile perimeter. The Zoo also began to charge a fifty-cent admission fee to visitors over the age of fourteen. Vandalism and budget considerations prompted these moves, but by then the fence was also required by the U.S. Department of Agriculture under the Animal Welfare Act of 1966. In addition to the USDA, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums also now requires that all of its accredited members (including The Maryland Zoo) have secure perimeter fences to protect animals within a facility and to act as a secondary containment system. While some may have felt inconvenienced by the Zoo’s new perimeter fence, the benefits were immediate and undeniable. Within one year of erecting the fence, the Zoo could afford to hire its first full-time veterinarian and reported not a single case of vandalism against its animals.
When the first official World’s Fair in the United States – the Centennial Exhibition – closed in Philadelphia in November 1876, the Maryland delegation chose not to abandon their state exhibit hall. Instead, the wooden building (described as “a cross between English Tudor and Swiss Chalet”) was disassembled piece by piece, transported to Baltimore, and then reassembled on a shady hillside in Druid Hill Park. The structure was well received in its new incarnation. “It is the opinion of those who have seen the building at Philadelphia, and since its re-erection here,” wrote a correspondent for The Sun on April 17, 1877, “that it is far prettier in the present situation than among so many other buildings at the centennial.” The Maryland Building is one of only two buildings to survive the exhibition; the other is the Ohio Building. By recommendation of Baltimore’s Park Commission, it became a museum “of interest and attraction to the public” that housed “curiosities that have been gradually collecting in one of the basement rooms” of the adjacent Mansion House. The museum opened in April 1877 with Otto Lugger, a trained naturalist, in charge. For the next many years, Professor Lugger presided over an increasingly eclectic collection that included the basement curiosities as well as assorted donations from eager citizens and the Maryland Academy of Sciences. Thus, visitors could browse “a handsome and increasing ornithological collection” in one room, costumes and ceramics in another room, and a center hall full of fire-fighting equipment (including an elaborately decorated hand pumper donated by General George Washington to the Friendship Fire Company of Alexandria, Virginia.) When the Park Board granted use of the Maryland Building to the Natural History Society of Maryland in 1936, most of the curiosities were removed and distributed around town to the Baltimore Fire Department, the Fort McHenry Museum, and the Maryland Historical Society. In their place came exhibits dedicated to local flora, fauna, geology, and archaeology. Inside the walls of the old wooden building a new museum took shape, one that showcased rocks, minerals, and fossils; birds, butterflies, reptiles, and mammals; and, most amazingly, the thirty-foot-long reconstructed skeleton of a baby blue whale that had washed ashore in Crisfield, Maryland in 1876. In the 1970s, after a 40-year run, the Natural History Society moved out of the Maryland Building so that the operating arm of the Zoo, the Baltimore Zoological Society (BZS), could move in. By this time, the Zoo had fenced in its campus and since the Maryland Building was on the inside of the fence, it made sense for it to become part of the Zoo. A 1978 renovation outfitted the building with offices and an auditorium, allowing it to function as both BZS headquarters and a public education space. Ever since, the Maryland Building has served as a busy work space for Zoo staff. The Maryland Building underwent a second major renovation in 2009. With great care and attention paid to the structure’s historic restoration, it was given a new lease on life, and, in 2010, the project earned a prestigious Maryland Preservation Award from the Maryland Historical Trust.
On August 5, 1948, Mayor Thomas D’Alessandro and other Baltimore City dignitaries came by motorcade to Druid Hill Park for the official opening of the Baltimore Zoo’s new Reptile House. They pulled up in front of a small, yellow-brick building a short distance from the Zoo’s main campus. A crowd of several hundred people gathered for the ceremony and then walked inside, eager for their first glimpse of the scaly and slick, slithering and hopping new residents. They entered an oval room with a shallow, tile-lined pool at its center where small alligators and turtles swam. Set into the walls of the room were brightly lit tanks containing an eye-popping array of local and exotic snakes, lizards, and amphibians. Artists employed by the City’s Bureau of Parks had painted woodland, desert, or swamp scenes inside each tank to mimic the natural habitats of the occupants. The visitors moved from tank to tank, admiring the 250 animals ranging in size from a four-inch worm snake to a twelve-foot python. If any visitors looked up to see the murals of marine life decorating the arched walls, they might be reminded of the building’s fascinating past. With funding from the federal Works Project Administration, this same building—a former pump house for a park reservoir that was later filled and turned into a softball field—had been converted ten years earlier into Baltimore’s first aquarium. It showcased Chesapeake Bay fish and several exotic species. There had even been talk of exhibiting a pair of penguins and a manatee from Florida, but neither event came to pass. Unfortunately, the aquarium was short-lived. Fred Saffron, one of its primary backers, recalled that in late 1941, “our biologist had to go into war work, and the park laborers took over. Within a month, the alligators and the terrapin were all that were living.” By the time Arthur Watson, newly hired director of the Baltimore Zoo, arrived on the scene in early 1948, the aquarium stood empty. A lifelong snake enthusiast and a showman by nature, Watson smelled opportunity and was quick to act. “When we open, we’ll have one of the best collections of snakes in this country,” he promised. “We’ll be short only a cobra, mambo and python.” To make good on his promise, he sent his newly hired reptile curator—an eighteen-year-old named John E. Cooper—on a collecting expedition to the Ogeechee River in Georgia. Cooper returned with many specimens, and somehow Watson also found a python by opening day. Within months, Cooper left the Zoo, on to future adventures as a biology teacher, naturalist, science writer, cave diver, and expert on crayfishes and cave fauna. His successor, the legendary Frank Groves, would oversee the Reptile House and its intriguing residents for the next forty-four years, until his retirement in 1992. During his tenure, Groves published countless scientific papers, earned a national reputation as a serious herpetologist, and pioneered breeding programs for several species that had never been bred in captivity before. The Reptile House closed its doors permanently in 2004, but Groves’ interests in research, captive breeding, and education passed to his successors and became hallmarks of the Zoo’s amphibian and reptile program continuing to this day.
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Disc golfers playing on Druid Hill Park’s course sometimes toss their Frisbees accidentally over the Maryland Zoo’s perimeter fence. The discs land alongside a flat, understated red-brick building whose bland exterior contrasts with a fascinating interior. This is the Zoo’s Animal Hospital. Since 1984, it has been the hub of medical research and animal care for a wonderfully diverse array of wild patients, ranging from five-gram ruby-throated hummingbirds to five-hundred-pound lions. Before the Animal Hospital was built, the Zoo’s veterinary staff worked out of a small sick ward in the basement of another Zoo building. Their move into the hospital afforded incredible new opportunities. The facility was equipped with a full surgical suite, an intensive care unit, separate wards for mammals, birds, and reptiles, as well as a quarantine ward, a veterinary laboratory, and a medical library. Today, the hospital also houses the Zoo’s Panamanian Golden Frog Conservation Center and its Animal Embassy, including an outdoor mews, where the program animals known as “Animal Ambassadors” live. The Baltimore Zoological Society (BZS), a non-profit organization formed to support and ultimately manage the Zoo, first proposed an animal hospital in its 1976 Master Plan. It then took several years to secure theĚýnecessary funding. Dr. Torrey Brown, then Secretary of the State Department of Natural Resources and a board member of BZS, and Dr. John Strandberg, Director of Comparative Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, were instrumental in the effort. The Animal Hospital officially opened in January 1984 at a cost of $3.8 million that the State of Maryland funded with a grant. From the beginning, the Zoo’s veterinary staff has worked closely with colleagues at Johns Hopkins University. They have also collaborated with veterinary and human medicine experts to add depth to the Zoo’s medical program. A local dentist who volunteered his services to the Zoo recalled that “while doing a root canal for one of the Zoo’s medical staff, I was asked if I wanted to help out.” He went from never doing a root canal on an animal before to adapting his own equipment to the task to eventually becoming a member of the American Association of Veterinary Dentists. The Animal Hospital has seen its fair share of extraordinary patients, too. There was the male Kodiak bear that broke the x-ray table under his massive weight. And the tiny golden frog that visited the O.R. to have an even tinier tumor removed. A bald eagle, found injured along the Gunpowder River, was treated for broken bones in its shoulder. That same eagle was released soon thereafter by then-President Bill Clinton at a 1996 ceremony marking the down-listing of bald eagles from endangered to threatened. More recently, an African penguin got a new lease on life after successful cataract surgery. In addition to patient care, the Animal Hospital remains to this day an epicenter of important medical research, veterinary training, and ongoing wildlife conservation work that often involves partners such as the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
At the edge of the Disc Golf Course in Druid Hill Park where the greens give way to weeds and woods, you might notice a set of stone steps that lead nowhere. Trace their path downward through the wild overgrowth and you can pick out remnants of a stone foundation wall and a rusted iron fence. This abandoned spot used to be a popular destination. Under the vines and overgrowth are the Three Sisters Ponds, all now empty. There were originally five of these man-made basins, created in 1875 to stock trout, shad, and other local species bred in a nearby fish hatchery house. The picturesque little building, also completed in 1875, was designed by George A. Frederick, the same architect who designed Baltimore’s City Hall and several other Druid Hill Park landmarks. Early on, the building was described as “a two-story Gothic structure of blue stone, with white marble trimmings, the main building projecting from octagonal wings on either side.” By 1925, the building was abandoned and ultimately destroyed by vandals, who broke windows, stripped it of its bronze fittings, and set it on fire in 1940. The city demolished the charred ruins for safety reasons. At least one of the ponds stocked fish well into the twentieth century, but, in 1884, the center pond became a sea lion exhibit. The pond’s first occupant arrived by train from California in the middle of the night after an eight-day journey. The sea lion “slipped out upon the bank” of Pond No. 2, “gave a plunge headforemost, and was out of sight,” reported the Baltimore Sun. In 1896, Captain Cassells, superintendent of Druid Hill Park, declared that the sea lions were “the show attraction of the park, particularly to every child who comes here.” To give the sleek celebrities more space, the center pond was enlarged, merging five basins into three, but it would still prove to be only a temporary home for such large animals. In 1910, the sea lions relocated to a new exhibit on the main campus of the Zoo a short distance away. Despite the loss of the sea lions, Three Sisters Ponds remained beautiful, well-tended, and popular for several more decades. The name “Three Sisters Ponds” dates to at least the 1920s. Its origin is unknown but may reference the Native American use of the term to describe three staple crops – corn, beans, and squash – traditionally grown in close proximity and for mutual benefit. One of the three became a casting pond where anglers could practice their sport inaugurated in 1928 for the Maryland Open Bait Casting Tournament. Another of the ponds, around the same time, became a favorite destination of the Baltimore Model Yacht Club. On weekends, those who sailed model yachts and those who enjoyed watching them flocked to the pond. In winter, ice skaters came. As the decades passed and recreational use of Druid Hill Park changed, Three Sisters Ponds became a quieter spot. One police officer who occasionally patrolled the park in the late 1960s and early 1970s remembered the place fondly. “The ponds gave the occasional visitor like me a sense of privacy, escape, and personal oasis,” wrote Philip B.J. Reid, who later became an FBI agent. “Encircled by an array of multicolored plants and trees and well-manicured lawns and shrubs, and home to various species of birds and the occasional deer, the setting was beautiful, serene, and majestic.” The City cut off water to the ponds in the 1960s and since then, nature has slowly reclaimed the site. A master plan for Druid Hill Park published in 1995 recommended their renovation, but nothing has happened there yet.
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A giant carrot, a house made of cheese, and barnyard chickens were among the attractions that greeted visitors to the Baltimore Zoo’s new Children’s Zoo when it opened in Druid Hill Park in 1963. “Most children’s zoos are full of fairy tale stuff, like Humpty-Dumpty, Little Red Riding Hood, and Jack and the Beanstalk,” declared Arthur Watson, the Zoo’s director. “This one will be different. It will emphasize living things and nature.” And it did, along with its share of whimsy. The Children’s Zoo was a combination petting zoo, storybook land, and barnyard intended to make every child’s “first introduction to animals a pleasant one,” said Watson. Young visitors could board Noah’s Ark (formerly a Chesapeake Bay fishing boat), climb into a tree house, ride a miniature train pulled by a replica 1863 C.P. Huntington locomotive, visit cows in a Pennsylvania Dutch milking barn, and wander in, out, and around other fantastical structures with animals everywhere. Chickens, ducks, and peacocks roamed freely while rabbits, sheep, goats, and donkeys stood within petting distance. More exotic fauna such as monkeys, parrots, and a baby tapir were also in residence but out of hand’s reach. Interest in adding a barnyard feature to Druid Hill Park “to give city children a view of country life” had been floating around since 1937 when Baltimore City Councilman Jerome Sloman first proposed the idea. It took twenty-six years, and Watson’s unrelenting advocacy, to turn idea into reality. From the moment he was hired as the Zoo’s first professional director in 1948, Watson made it his mission to increase attendance. He believed that a children’s zoo was central to this mission and he eventually secured the necessary approvals and funding for construction. In the meantime, children’s zoos had become popular all around the country. Watson and his architect, Louis Cuoma, researched similar attractions to help conceptualize their own. Referring to his competition at other major zoos, Watson announced with typical bravado, “Let them compare our new [children’s zoo] with those and they’ll find that Baltimore has the best in the country.” The site for the Children’s Zoo was carefully chosen to avoid tree removal and to be within walking distance of the main zoo. The milking barn was constructed on site but most of the fantastic structures and over-sized animals were created in the big, bright workshop of Adler Display Studios on Penn Street in southwest Baltimore. The zoo-within-a-zoo was enclosed to contain free-roaming children and animals, but also to allow the zoo to charge admission of fifteen cents for each child and twenty-five cents for adults. Watson rightly anticipated that ticket sales would soon cover the $250,000 cost of building the Children’s Zoo. While seemingly modest, the price of admission for a family could add up at a time when the hourly minimum wage was only $1.25. The rest of the Zoo remained free but the Children’s Zoo’s pay-to-play policy sparked debate in the City’s op-ed pages. Some felt that the policy was exclusionary while others saw a need for the Zoo to generate revenue in order to grow and improve. Curiosity apparently outpaced criticism, with more than twenty-five thousand people visiting the Children’s Zoo in its first ten days. It would continue to attract the Zoo’s youngest visitors for just over two decades, until it was replaced in the 1980s by the expansive Maryland Wilderness exhibit, an ambitious new children’s zoo with a very different look and feel.
The Columbus Monument is a forty-four foot tall brick and cement obelisk standing in a small park at Harford Road and Walther Boulevard. The monument to Christopher Columbus was erected by French consul, Charles Francis Adrian le Paulmier Chevalier d'Anmour, in 1792, to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival to the Americas.
After discovering that the newly created United States had no monuments dedicated to Columbus, the Chevalier decided to erect a monument to commemorate the Italian explorer and colonizer. The base of the monument was incised with the words “Sacred to the memory of Chris. Columbus, Octob. XII, MDCCVIIIC.” The work was unveiled on August 3, 1792, to honor the date the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria set sail from Palos, Spain then more formally dedicated two months later on October 12th. It remained the only monument dedicated to Columbus in America for another sixty years.
225 years later, in the middle of the night in late August 2017, a small group of unnamed protestors smashed a sledgehammer into the base of the obelisk breaking the incised stone panels. The event was recorded and shared on YouTube on August 21, 2017. Coming less than a week after protestors poured paint over the Key Monument on Eutaw Place, the video explained that “tearing down monuments” is linked to “tearing down systems” that maintain white supremacy.
Historians, activists, and indigenous people in North and South America have long rejected efforts to honor Columbus as a national hero. As early as 1977, participants in a UN-sponsored conference on discrimination against indigenous peoples in the Americas discussed replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day. A statue of Christopher Columbus statue outside Union Station in Washington, DC splashed with red paint in an act of protest back in 1991.
In Baltimore, the controversy was perhaps more unexpected. Perhaps because the monument was located on private property—Villa Belmont, located at the present-day intersection of Harford Road and North Avenue—it was half-forgotten more than once. In the 1880s, a local historian felt compelled to debunk a popular rumor that the obelisk memorialized a horse named “Columbus” instead of the man. When the monument was relocated to Harford Road in 1963 it was replaced by an expanded Sears Roebuck Company parking lot.
Soon after the monument moved to northeast Baltimore, the city’s Columbus Day Parade (an annual tradition since the erection of the 1892 Columbus Monument in Druid Hill Park) followed. But the parade moved again in 1977 first to East Baltimore and then to the Inner Harbor after a third monument to Christopher Columbus was erected on Eastern Avenue near Little Italy in 1984. Even if the parade has moved on, however, the complicated legacy of the monument and the commemoration of Christopher Columbus remains.
School 33 Art Center was established in 1979 as a center for contemporary art in South Baltimore. Formerly known as Public School 33, Baltimore City erected the brick and brownstone building in 1890. It operated as an elementary school up until 1975 when a new school opened just a few blocks away. The South Baltimore Community Committee sought help from then Mayor William Donald Schaefer in revitalizing the vacant and vandalized building. Based on the success of Long Island City's P.S. 1 in New York and the strong national presence of alternative space programs in the late 1970s, Mayor Schaefer proposed a similar program for Baltimore, thus creating School 33 Art Center.
As this building represented a significant component of Baltimore's architectural heritage, the renovation exemplified the City's belief in the revitalization of unused urban resources. The renovations were made possible with federal funds from the United States Department of Commerce, Economic Development Administration and through the City's Public Works Improvement Program.
After an extensive two-year restoration to allow for the creation of adequate gallery, studio and classroom spaces, School 33 opened its doors in July 1979, becoming Baltimore's original alternative space for contemporary art. The program offerings included one gallery exhibition space (today expanded to three), studio facilities for professional artists, and classrooms for ceramics and printmaking workshops.
For thirty-eight years, School 33 Art Center has been a bridge between contemporary artists and the public. Through exhibitions, studios for artists, classes for adults and children, as well as special events and workshops, the center works to insure a vibrant future for contemporary art and artists in Baltimore. The three gallery spaces, multi-use classrooms, permanent, on-site collaborative installations, and an environmentally-friendly outdoor garden fed by a rainwater collection system are examples of School 33's commitment to maintaining and expanding the potential of our historic building.
Today, as a program of the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts, the center's goal is to remain an engaging and relevant center for the arts, by showcasing and sustaining emerging and established contemporary artists, and training budding artists from Baltimore and beyond, well into the future.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Catholic residents of Hampden belonged to the St. Mary of the Assumption parish in Govans, a distant walk from the burgeoning neighborhood. Since the industrial mill village had been built by the owners of the mills for their predominantly white Protestant workers, they had made no accommodations for Catholics to worship in the area. At least until an Irish-Catholic immigrant named Martin Kelly started a small Catholic community. Kelly erected the first non-company housing along Falls Road east of the mills, which grew into the Hampden we know today. Kelly’s extended family occupied many of the sixteen homes Kelly erected in the 1850s. Others were likely owned by mill employees who could afford to leave the mill villages or by shopkeepers selling goods to other residents in the mill villages. Kelly built a large home for himself on Hickory Avenue, known colloquially as the Kelly Mansion. Fellow Catholics likely knew the house well. Seeking a place to worship closer to home, Kelly persuaded a priest to hold services in his home's parlor, using the piano as an altar. After Kelly's death, his son John donated the land and funds for a new Catholic church in Hampden called St. Thomas Aquinas. Rev. Thomas Foley laid the cornerstone of St. Thomas Aquinas Church on May 12, 1867. The building, designed by famed local architect George Frederick and constructed at the cost of $20,000, was completed on June 18, 1871. Archbishop Martin John Spalding attended the dedication. Today, the church complex consists of the church, rectory, school, and convent. The school was founded in 1873 and the current building went up in 1937. At the time, the school had 320 pupils and a staff of eight, hired from the School Sisters of Notre Dame. In 1973, St. Thomas Aquinas clustered with nearby parishes. Grades one to five attended St. Thomas Aquinas, while middle school students attended St. Bernard's in Waverly. Middle schoolers returned to St. Thomas Aquinas in 1996, seven years after St. Bernard's had become a Korean National Parish (which closed just a year later in 1997). The school reached a crisis point in 2010 when the archdiocese closed thirteen of sixty-four parochial schools in Baltimore. St. Thomas Aquinas avoided closure due to the leadership of its principal, Sister Marie Rose Gusatus. The school took in students from surrounding parishes. However, the school only remained open for another six years. In 2016, the Archdiocese closed St. Thomas Aquinas School along with Seton Keough High School in Southwest Baltimore and John Paul Regional School in Woodlawn. While the archdiocese claimed enrollment in Catholic schools had begun to stabilize after decades of declining enrollment, funding remained low as enrollment costs were kept low to make the schools more affordable. Also, in response to the need for costly improvements, the archdiocese decided it would be best to consolidate the schools.
While Baltimore is remembered for the city’s role in fabricating ships and railcars, the companies that made the large machines required to build those ships and railcars have largely been forgotten. The Detrick & Harvey Machine Company buildings is one of the last remnants of Baltimore’s place in the history of machinery manufacture.
The Detrick & Harvey Machine Company began downtown, a block from the Inner Harbor, in an area of Baltimore where both the buildings and, ultimately, the streets themselves were lost to the 1904 Fire. Before Jacob S. Detrick founded his machine company on Preston Street, he operated the Enterprise Machine Works (featured in the 1882 volume “Industries of Maryland”). Around 1883, Alexander Harvey, a recent graduate of Harvard University and Baltimore native, joined Detrick in his machine shop by and the two soon formed the partnership of Detrick & Harvey.
The company outgrew Detrick's original downtown location by 1885 and moved north to Preston Street just east of the Jones Falls. There they began the construction of an impressive factory complex. Around 1890, the company’s name changed to the Detrick & Harvey Machine Company. They were well known for their metal working machines, notably their planers and the band saw filing machine first offered by Enterprise Machine Works. Alexander Harvey passed away in 1914 at age 57.
The next year, on August 17, 1915, the Bethlehem Steel Company purchased the company and the complex became the Bethlehem Steel Detrick & Harvey Plant. Examples of large D & H machines are in two notable local collections: a large planer at the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum's repair facility and another at the Baltimore Museum of Industry. The Yellow Cab Company purchased the facility in 1929 and continue to operate there until the early 1980s.
The Maryland School for the Blind (MSB) was established in 1853. Formal education for blind people in the U.S. and western Europe was still a relatively recent invention. In 1765, Henry Dannett established the first school with this mission in Liverpool, England. The first school in the United States to follow this model was the New England Asylum for the Blind, now known as the Perkins School For the Blind, established in March 1829. In Maryland, the new school was established thanks to the efforts of David E. Loughery, a graduate of the Pennsylvania Institution for the Instruction of the Blind, and Washington County native Benjamin F. Newcomer, a wealthy industrialist and philanthropist. Together, they were able to generate enough interest in creating a school for the blind that the Maryland General Assembly incorporated the school in 1853. David Loughery was appointed the school’s first superintendent. Frederick Douglas Morrison, a national leader in his profession, began his forty-year tenure as superintendent in 1864. He had a lasting impact on the school for several reasons. He was instrumental in the founding of the American Association of Instructors of the Blind; he moved the campus to North Avenue in 1868; and officially changed the name to The Maryland School for the Blind. He also founded The Maryland School for the Colored Blind and Deaf in 1872 and served as the superintendent of both schools. The practice of segregated education for black blind and deaf students continued up until 1956. John Frances Bledsoe became superintendent in 1906 and two years later relocated the school in 1908 to the present campus in northeast Baltimore. During his thirty-seven years at the helm of the school, Dr. Bledsoe oversaw its expansion and professionalization. It was during this period when the school began its residential program with the construction of four cottages and Newcomer Hall. The latter was named for Benjamin F. Newcomer who was one of the founders of the school and who served on the board of directors for over forty years.
Walters Bath No. 2 opened in 1901 serving residents living in the busy industrial neighborhoods of southwest Baltimore. The construction of the bathhouse was supported by Henry Walters, art collector and philanthropist. Despite living in New York, Walters supported the construction of four bathhouses spread out spread out across the city to improve public hygiene and sanitation. Bath No. 2 on Washington Boulevard is the only one of the four that still stands. Designed by architect George Archer, the bathhouse features a less-ornate version of the Renaissance Revival architecture that was popular at the turn of the twentieth century. The forty-foot front façade with four bays facing the street is the only part that is more than strictly utilitarian in design. A large stone plaque across the top of the building reads "THE WALTERS PUBLIC BATHS." Unlike earlier luxurious bathhouses, which date back to the early nineteenth century in Baltimore, Walters bathhouses were erected to improve the sanitary conditions of the crowded industrial city that Baltimore had become. The bath offered a shower, spray, or tub bath to those who usually could not afford access to similar facilities. To oversee this step forward in public health, Baltimore City created the Free Public Bath Commission to supervise the bathhouses as well as comfort stations, swimming pools, school shower programs, and portable shower baths, all of which were operating by 1925. When the building opened in 1902, Bath No. 2 charged three cents for adults and one cent for children for soap and towels, and 2 ½ cents per hour for laundry privileges. Later, the public bath system upped the fee to five cents, a charge that remained until the entire public bath system was closed at the end of 1959.
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Built in 1873 by the Maryland Baptist Union Association for black Baptists in south Baltimore, Leadenhall Baptist Church has long been a center of activism and source of strength for African Americans in south Baltimore and the Sharp Leadenhall neighborhood. The church was designed, built and furnished by the firm of Joseph Thomas and Son. Established 1820, the company manufactured building materials along with church, bank and office furniture. Many notable community leaders from Sharp Leadenhall, including Mildred Rae Moon and Martha Roach, were members of the congregation, leading the fight to preserve the neighborhood from demolition for highway construction in the 1960s and 1970s. The church was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.
By the time of the Civil War,the Thomas firm operated the largest steam turning mill works in the South at Park, Clay and Lexington Streets. The fire of 1873, which destroyed much of what is now the Retail District, began in the Thomas plant.
Today, Leadenhall Baptist Church continues to play an important role in neighborhood life, holding recreational and academic programs for neighborhood children and supporting community residents. However, similar to other churches in the community, many congregants live outside the neighborhood, and commute back for services on Sundays.
The First Unitarian Church of Baltimore has stood at the corner of Charles and Franklin Streets for over two centuries. Inside the 1818 landmark, visitors can find beautiful Tiffany glass and original furnishings designed by the architect and crafted by noted Baltimore artisans. Beyond the building’s remarkable architecture, the congregation has served as the spiritual home to many local civic leaders, such as Enoch Pratt and George Peabody. Recognizing the significance of the building as the oldest purpose-built Unitarian church in North America, First Unitarian Church was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1972. The history of the church began in 1817, when Baltimore had sixty thousand inhabitants and Mount Vernon Place was the undeveloped edge of the city. A group of leading citizens met in the home of merchant and city councilman Henry Payson on February 10, 1817, and, according to church histories, committed “to form a religious society and build a church for Christians who are Unitarian and cherish liberal sentiments on the subject of religion.” The original name selected for the church, The First Independent Church of Baltimore, reflected the independence of thought and action that became the hallmark of this group of freethinkers and those who succeeded them through subsequent generations. The church was later renamed First Unitarian in 1912. Designed by Maximilian Godefroy, the French architect of Saint Mary’s Chapel and the Battle Monument, the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore is recognized as the finest American example of French Romantic Classicism. Dedicated on October 29, 1818, the church was a daring modern design when it was constructed. It utilizes the basic shapes of the cube and the sphere with a minimum of detail on the flat planes to emphasize the geometry of the structure. The chancel features a pulpit, designed by Godefroy and executed by William Camp, and two sets of sedilia. One set of two chairs and a loveseat was designed by Godefroy and is original to the church; the other set was designed by Tiffany and added in the 1890s. In the late nineteenth century, the church undertook a major reconstruction of the interior of the sanctuary to improve the acoustics of the space. Joseph Evans Sperry designed a barrel-vaulted ceiling with supporting arches. The reconstruction also added a large Tiffany mosaic, seven Tiffany windows, and a magnificent Henry Niemann organ. The Tiffany mosaic of the Last Supper, designed by Tiffany artist Frederick Wilson, is composed of 64,800 pieces of favrile glass. The Niemann organ and the church’s Enoch Pratt Parish Hall (built in 1879 at 514 N. Charles Street), were both gifts of Enoch Pratt, a member and leader of the church for sixty-five years. The First Unitarian Church of Baltimore is important to Unitarian Universalists throughout the country because of a landmark sermon delivered by the Rev. Dr. William Ellery Channing on May 5, 1819, at the ordination of the church’s first minister, Jared Sparks. The sermon, which defined the essence of Unitarianism in the United States and led to the formation of the denomination in 1825, came to be known as the Baltimore Sermon. Channing emphasized freedom, reason, and tolerance and taught that the way we live is more important than the words and symbols we use to describe our faith, a truth that has inspired a commitment to social justice along with theological diversity. This spirit helped shape the work of the congregation and its members over the decades. In 1874, the congregation organized Baltimore’s first vocational school for teenagers. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the First Unitarian Church sponsored an Industrial School for Girls, a Boy’s Guild, and Channing House, a settlement house for South Baltimore. Church members have contributed to the city through public service and philanthropy in many ways up through the present day.
The Southern District Police Station at the corner of East Ostend and Patapsco streets was constructed in 1896. The building was designed by local architect Jackson Coale Gott. Born in 1829, Gott established his own firm in 1863, joined the American Institute of Architects in 1871. His works include the Maryland Penitentiary completed in 1894, two years before the police station. For close to a century, the building served as a police station complete with holding cells and a courtroom until the station closed in 1980.
In 1999, the building was given new life when it was bought and renovated by the South Baltimore Learning Center (SBLC). The police station still holds its original floors, a jail cell, and even bullet holes in the former shooting gallery. In their historic building turned state-of-the-art learning center, SBLC educates over a thousand adults each year with a variety of adult education and related life-skills training focusing on adult literacy and helping students achieve a Maryland High School Diploma.
Just a few blocks away from the Peabody, stretching along Calvert Street between Madison and Monument Streets, stands another massive Italian palace, built for another educational institution.
The patron here was the Society of Jesus, a Catholic religious order. Visitors can see arched windows with elaborate moldings and a heavy Italianate cornice unifying the northern half, containing St. Ignatius Church (designed by Louis L. Long and completed in 1856) with the southern (designed by O’Connor and Delaney of New York and finished in 1899). Besides the parish church, this huge red brick palace housed Loyola College and Loyola High School until they split into two separate institutions and moved away in 1922.
Since the mid-1970s, the long vacant southern section has been imaginatively re-used for two theaters designed by James Grieves and the firm of Ziger, Hoopes, and Snead for the Center Stage repertory theater.
1621 Bolton Street is the childhood home of Walter Sondheim, Jr.: a local business executive and civic leader who is best known for his role as president of the Baltimore City School Board as the city first sought to put an end to racially segregated school following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. In their decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." In contrast to many southern school districts, Sondheim led the school board to immediately respond to the ruling with a new policy that, at least officially, allowed white and black students to attend any school regardless of their race. Leaders in Baltimore’s African American community had lobbied for more resources for the city’s black students as far back as the 1860s. In 1867, for example, the Baltimore Association for the Moral and Educational Improvement of the Colored People successfully petitioned the city to provide funds for the education of black children. And, in 1882, Everett J. Waring, Reverend Harvey Johnson, and others succeeded in pushing the school board to establish the first “colored” high school for black students, which went on to become the school we know today as Frederick Douglas High School. In the early 1950s, Baltimore’s NAACP and Urban League began advocating to integrate Polytechnic Institute, particularly the school’s elite engineering program. Their efforts culminated in a contentious hearing at the school board in 1952 where among others, Thurgood Marshall battled against the Poly Alumni Association and others to integrate the school. With Walter Sondheim as the chair, board members voted five to three to integrate, and fifteen African American students entered the program at Poly that fall. Despite this victory, attempts to integrate Baltimore’s all-female Western High School and Mergenthaler School of Printing (better known locally as “Mervo”) failed in 1953. Efforts of challenging these decisions were put on hold as Marshall and others from the NAACP knew the case from Topeka, Kansas, Brown v. Board of Education, would be heading to the U.S. Supreme Court. When the unanimous Brown decision came out in May 1954, Baltimore already had years of advocacy and attention to the issue of desegregation. While Baltimore did not experience the violence that desegregation sparked in other cities, the city never successfully integrated its schools. In the fall of 1954, six white students enrolled in formerly all-black schools and sixteen hundred black students enrolled in formerly all-white schools. By 1960, African American students became the majority in the school system. In 1961, 75% of the city’s schools were either 90% black or 90% white. In 1973, the U.S. Office of Civil Rights threatened to withhold federal funds charging that the city was not doing enough to integrate the schools.
Trinity Baptist Church at the corner of Druid Hill Avenue and McMechen Street tells the story of Baltimore's connections to the national civil rights movement and radical Black activism in the early twentieth century. One of the church's influential early activist leaders was Reverend Garnett Russell Waller. In July 1905, Waller joined fellow activists W.E.B. Du Bois, William Monroe Trotter at the Erie Beach Hotel in Ontario, Canada in founding the Niagara Movement—a new civil rights organization that ultimately developed into the NAACP. Trinity Baptist Church was then located at Charles and 20th Streets and Waller, who served as the Niagara Movement’s Maryland secretary, lived nearby at 325 E. 23rd Street. James Robert Lincoln Diggs, educator and succeeded Waller as pastor of Trinity Baptist Church beginning around early 1915. Diggs shared Waller's commitment to activism and was also a participant in the 1905 founding of the Niagara Movement. In 1918, Diggs helped to establish the Baltimore chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) in 1918. The UNIA-ACL was first established in Ohio in 1914 by Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican-born activist. Diggs was close with Garvey and presided over his marriage to Amy Jacques Garvey in 1922. In May 1920, Diggs led the congregation's move to Druid Hill Avenue after the congregation purchased the 1872 St. Paul's English Evangelical Lutheran Church for $40,000. The church quickly put their new building to work—hosting the 1920 annual convention for the National Equal Rights League in October. The conference was presided over by Rev. J. H. Taylor, secretary of the Maryland Association for Social Service, with speakers including founding member Monroe Trotter, lawyer Nathan S. Taylor from Chicago, and Trinity’s own Rev. Diggs. The church also served as a center for local activism. For example, on February 1, 1921, 500 people gathered at Trinity Baptist Church at Druid Hill Avenue and Mosher Street to protest the release of a white man, Harry Feldenheimer, on a $500 bail soon after police arrested him for an attempted assault on a 10-year-old black girl named Esther Short. The Afro-American reported that participants in the meeting criticized the “brutality of the local police, exclusion of qualified men from the police force and from juries in the city, and the Jim Crow arrangements for colored people in the Criminal and Juvenile Courts.” Regrettably, Diggs health began to decline around the fall of 1922 and he soon entered a hospital. On April 14, 1923, he died at home and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery. Rev. Garnett R. Waller died in Baltimore in 1941 but the church both individuals supported continues to this day.
Baltimore activists have a long history of fighting discrimination and segregation in the city’s public establishments. In the years after World War II, the NAACP and their allies worked to end segregated seating at Ford’s Theatre on Fayette Street and drew national attention to the fight for equal rights in Baltimore. Ford's Theatre opened in 1871. It was built by John T. Ford, a Baltimore native, and the owner of the Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. infamous as the site of President Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Like many other theatres in downtown Baltimore, Ford's enforced a strict policy of racially segregated seating. As early as 1947, Baltimore’s branch of the NAACP began picketing the theatre. At that time, NAACP executive secretary Addison Pinkney stated that the protest had gone on for ”the entire season” and “reduced the average attendance to less than one-half capacity of [the] building.” Unfortunately, theatre management was resistant to changing their discriminatory policies. Protests continued for five years with national and international stars joining the fight. In 1948, celebrated singer and Civil Rights activist Paul Robeson walked a picket line in front of the theatre. In 1951, Basil Rathbone, the British actor famous for playing Sherlock Holmes, declared: “You may depend on my taking a firm stand of disapproval of the segregated theatre in Baltimore and to inform any management to whom I may in future contract myself and the case of any play in which I play.” By 1950, the protests were hurting the theatre’s bottom line. The theatre, which was operated by United Booking Office Inc. of New York, leased the building from Baltimore theatre mogul Morris Mechanic. By 1950, United Booking Office reported that Ford’s, once one of the most prosperous theatres in the nation, had its box office receipts cut almost in half, attributing the decline to the NAACP protest and to the poor selection of plays. In 1952, the protest gained another strong ally: Maryland Governor Theodore R. McKeldin. Speaking in early 1952 at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, McKeldin declared that he wanted Ford’s opened to African Americans because they had been “needlessly affronted” by its policies. “We are going to walk together,” he said. “I am an optimist, and we must win. We are going to stop this evil thing.” On February 1, 1952, Ford’s dropped its segregation policies and was finally open to all. In 1964, the Sun recalled, "Almost every theatrical star from the last century has played there, from James W. Wallack and Maude Adams to Katharine Cornell, and the building has gained a reputation for everything from cats on stage to deer in the balcony and bats in the dressing rooms." Unfortunately, neither theatrical or Civil RightsĚýhistory could save the three-story theatre from the wrecking ball. The building was torn down in 1964 to make way for the parking garage that stands on the site today.
On October 13, 1935, William “Little Willie” Adams and Victorine Quille were married at Saint Peter Claver Catholic Church. The young businessman and the school teacher each came from different backgrounds. William Adams, originally of Zebulon, North Carolina, arrived in Baltimore at age fifteen. Over the next six years, Adams worked his way up from running numbers and cutting sail cloth into rags at a shop on Caroline Street to owning three businesses (a bicycle shop, candy store, and barbershop). Victorine Adams grew up in a working-class family in Baltimore. She graduated from what is now Frederick Douglass High School and enrolled in the teacher training course at Coppin Normal School (now Coppin State University). Shortly after completing the two-year training course and beginning work as a teacher, Victorine met William Adams. The pair married in 1935 and, soon thereafter, William and Victorine emerged as an influential couple in the political, social, and economic spheres of Black Baltimore. They owned several businesses along Pennsylvania Avenue (including Club Casino and the Charm Centre) and made loans to Black business owners throughout the city in the 1940s and 1950s. But they also started to use their money and connections to push for political change. In 1946, Victorine founded the Colored Women’s Democratic Campaign Committee of Maryland (CWDCC) to interest Black women in politics and increase their participation in the social, civic, and economic development of the city. The CWDCC’s home base was the basement of the Adams family home on Carlisle Avenue in the neighborhood of Hanlon Park. When they moved to Hanlon Park in July 1949, the couple were the first Black residents in the community—most of their neighbors were white and Jewish. The basement served as the headquarters for many voter registration and get-out-the-vote campaigns, as Victorine trained volunteers how to vote using an instructional model table-top voting machine from the Automatic Voting Machine Corporation of Jamestown, New York. The couple helped many successful Black politicians win office in their campaign to diversify Maryland politics: Harry A. Cole to the Maryland State Senate in 1955; Verda Welcome to the Maryland House of Delegates in 1962; and Parren Mitchell to the United States Congress in 1970. Their home also served as the base for subsequent successful political campaigns by Victorine. She won her own seat in the Maryland House of Delegates in 1966 and became the first Black woman to serve on the Baltimore City Council after a successful race in 1967. The Adamses continued to be involved in Baltimore politics and philanthropy throughout their lives, whether they were fundraising for the now-defunct Provident Hospital or supporting the William L. and Victorine Q. Adams Foundation, which awarded scholarships to Black residents of Baltimore City for undergraduate studies in business-related fields. Their Hanlon Park home sold shortly after Victorine died in 2006. William moved to an apartment at Roland Park Place where he died in 2011.Ěý
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Douglas Memorial Community Church was built is 1857 for the Madison Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church. The building boasts a grand Greek Revival design by architect Thomas Balbirnie with a sanctuary that seats a thousand people and an “undercroft” designed to hold six hundred.
In 1925, the congregation of the Douglass Memorial Community Church split off from the established Bethel A.M.E. Church on Druid Hill Avenue and acquired the building on Madison Avenue. In July 1949, Dr. Marion C. Bascom became a senior pastor at the church; a position he continued to hold up until his retirement in March 1995. Before his death in 2012, Pastor Bascom had dedicated his life to activism including everything from participating in the protests at Gwynn Oak Park to leading efforts to create new affordable housing in the Upton neighborhood. Speaking about his involvement in a July 4, 1963, protest at Gwynn Oak, Pastor Bascom explained:
“I am the one who said all along I will not go to jail, but I will help others who go. But this morning I said to myself, I have nothing to lose but my chains. So if I do not preach at my pulpit Sunday morning, it might be the most eloquent sermon I ever preached.”
The Arena Playhouse at 801 McCulloh Street has been occupied by the Arena Players, an African American theater troupe, since December 1961. Established in 1953 as an outgrowth of the “The Negro Little Theater”, the Arena Players spent a decade performing at varied locations including Coppin State University, the Druid Hill YMCA, the Great Hall Theater of St. Mary’s Church in Walbrook, and the Carl J. Murphy Auditorium at Morgan State University.
When the theater moved to McCulloh Street at the end of 1961 they took over a building with a long history. Originally known by the address of 406 Orchard Street, the three-story building was erected in the mid to late nineteenth century. By 1890, the building operated as a livery attached to the Hartman & Moore Carriage Factory near the northern end of a row of seventeen buildings between McCulloh Alley and Little Monument Street. Around 1892, Patrick Gaierty acquired the livery and continued to operate it as "University Stables" up until his death in August 1911. Shortly after Gaierty's death, St. Mary's Protestant Episcopal Church acquired the building and turned it into a church hall.
In 1918, during World War I, the church hall was converted into the War Camp Community Service Club for Colored Soldiers with a dance hall, food, bath facilities, and accommodations for two hundred sailors or soldiers. In the 1940s, the building hosted the St. Mary's Hall Nursery School and offered low-cost childcare for local Black families.
By the early 1950s, the city had extended McCulloh Street through the middle of the block leaving two short rows of houses and commercial buildings. The adjoining carriage factory had been turned into a factory for the Baltimore Chair Company. And, by 1960, the church hall had been turned into a 13,500-square-foot warehouse and S.J. Stackhouse & Son, Inc. advertised the building for lease (noting the building's "new hearing plant" and "very good condition").
The Arena Players moved in at the end of 1961 and, by November 14, 1969, managed to purchase the building in a deal financed solely by ticket sales. In 1974, Arena Players met with the Neighborhood Design Center (NDC) to seek the group's assistance in planning the expansion of their 200-seat theater. NDC recruited Leon Bridges, a Black architect who had opened an office in Baltimore in 1970, and Bridges drafted a plan for the redevelopment of the building at an estimated cost of $755,000. Between August 1975 and October 1976, the group undertook a major renovation to add a new large theater to the building. The work was supported by a $50,000 mortgage from the Ideal Building and Loan Association, $120,000 in gifts from community groups and individuals, a $3,000 grant from the Maryland Arts Council, and a $321,000 federal grant administered by the city's Department of Housing and Community Development. The new 300-seat theater was commemorated on October 22, 1976 with a performance of Langston Hughes' Little Ham.
For many years, the Arena Playhouse was one of the only venues dedicated to showcasing the works of Black playwrights and performers. While Black performers now have more opportunities, the theater on McCulloh Street continues to be a treasured institution today.