The handsome Victorian on Elkridge’s Main Street now known as the Brumbaugh House was built around 1870 and began serving as a doctor's office in the nineteenth century. The home’s most famous resident, Dr. Benjamin Bruce Brumbaugh, started his own sixty-year-long career working and living at the house in 1919. Dr. Brumbaugh served thousands of Elkridge residents over the decades and the house continues to tell his story today. Since 1985, the Elkridge Heritage Society has operated the house as a small museum to share the long history of medical care in their community.
Born on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Brumbaugh graduated from the University of Maryland Medical School with degrees in both pharmacy and medicine. When the United States entered World War I, Brumbaugh enlisted as a doctor for the U.S. Army. He was stationed at Fort Meade in Anne Arundel County where three infantry divisions trained before deployment to Europe. Brumbaugh tended to many of the 400,000 servicemen who passed through Fort Meade during the war.
After his discharge the military at the war’s end in 1918, a former advisor from the University of Maryland shared the news that Elkridge needed a temporary doctor. The town’s regular practitioner Dr. Ericson had suffered a stroke and was unable to work. When his predecessor passed away two months later, Dr. Brumbaugh took over the practice permanently.
For nearly fifty years, Brumbaugh worked alongside his wife, Miriam Smith, who was herself a doctor’s daughter up until her death in 1958. Over much of that time, Dr. Brumbaugh charged just $2 for an office visit or ​$3 for a house call. Over the years, Dr. Brumbaugh (or Dr. B as many of his patients called him) became something of a local celebrity with an office full of patients from the early morning to late evening. He did not raised his fees until 1969—but then it only went up by a dollar. In a 1970 Sun interview, Brumbaugh explained:
“I’d rather treat them for free of charge than have them think I’m overcharging. I was never out for the almighty dollar. I work just to keep alive, not for what I can get out of it.”
That same year, the community recognized his fifty years of service to the Elkridge community. Nearly four hundred neighbors and long-time patients pooled $3,900 in donations to buy the doctor a brand-new Mercury sedan. Howard County even changed the name of a road off Main Street to Brumbaugh Street in his honor.
Dr. Brumbaugh served three generations of Elkridge residents and continued working until he was ninety years old. By one resident’s estimation, he brought “thousands” of Elkridge babies into the world. Dr. Brumbaugh never kept count but reportedly delivered ten children for one family alone. There are many area residents who still proudly call themselves “Brumbaugh Babies.”
The year after Dr. Brumbaugh’s death in 1985, the Elkridge Heritage Society and local Rotary Club bought the home to preserve the doctor’s office and waiting room. A group of volunteer residents helped turn the second floor into an apartment to help pay the mortgage on the new local history museum. Fortunately, their efforts have preserved Doctor B’s story for residents and visitors to continue to appreciate today.
On February 6, 1968, the city paid $1,850 to buy four vacant, vandalized rowhouses on Emory Street—an unusual birthday celebration for famed Baltimore native Babe Ruth. Exactly seventy-three years earlier, George Herman “Babe” Ruth, Jr. was born at 216 Emory Street to George Ruth, Sr. and Katherine Schamberger. Katherine's parents leased the three-story rowhouse but George and Katherine didn't stay there long, moving first to Goodyear Street and then into an apartment above George's saloon on West Camden Street. In 1902, when Ruth was just seven years old, he was sent to St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys, a reformatory located at the southwestern edge of the city on Wilkens Avenue.
Ruth went on to baseball fame, playing for the Orioles, the Boston Red Sox, and the New York Yankees and earning the nickname the "Sultan of Swat," before his retirement in 1935. His family's old house on Emory Street followed a more humble course. In 1960, some locals proposed disassembling 216 Emory Street and relocating it to Memory Stadium. "Sooner or later, the urban rebuilders are likely to call Emory street run-down or the area useful for nonresidential construction and that will be the end of Pius Schamberger's house," the Sun speculated in 1961. The newspaper had good reason for their prediction; Saint Mary's School, where Ruth first learned to play baseball, was torn earlier that same year.
In 1967, the building's owner recieved a court order to repair or raze the building. But when the owner scheduled the demolition for December 10, local residents protested and the city stepped in. On November 18, Mayor McKeldin put a stop to the demolition, saying "To allow such a building to pass from the Baltimore scene is to allow an important part of our past to go unrecognized." Next February, the Mayor's Committee for the Preservation of Babe Ruth's Birthplace purchased the block with donations from committee members and the membership of Junior Orioles. While some members of committee worried about the location in a "run-down area" and proposed relocating the building to Memorial Stadium, preserving the building in place eventually won out.
In July 1974, the "Babe Ruth Shrine" opened as a national museum with exhibits on the life and times of Babe Ruth. After Oriole Park at Camden Yards opened in 1992, museum attendance soared to over sixty thousand people every year. In 2015, the museum undertook a major restoration to create a new entrance on the Dover Street side block, improve bathrooms, and add an elevator making the museum more accessible to all visitors.
Baltimore’s Locust Point was a rapidly growing neighborhood between the Civil War and 1920. One major factor in the neighborhood’s growth was an immigration pier and depot built in 1867 by the B&O Railroad and the North German Lloyd Shipping Company. Over 1.2 million immigrants landed at the pier between 1868 and 1914, making Baltimore the third largest port of entry in the U.S. at the time (after New York and Boston). B&O extended their railroad tracks up to the pier for the many travellers who purchased a combination ship and rail passage. Most of the earliest immigrants came from Germany but, by the 1890s, a larger number of people came from the Russian and Austrian Empires.
Seeing the ever growing number of immigrants, the local German United Evangelical Christ Church decided in 1904 to build a mission house, known as Immigrant House. The mission offered immigrants room and board, clothing, help in finding work, English lessons, and religious ministry. Sailors from the North German Lloyd ships could also stay there when their ships were in port. By 1916, the pastor reported that 3,710 people had stayed at the mission since it opened 12 years earlier.
While “The Great Wave of Immigration” from Europe ended in Baltimore with the outbreak of the first World War, Immigrant House remained a boarding home for sailors until the 1930s and truck drivers until the 1950s. Since then, the building has been used for church offices, storage, daycare, and Sunday school. The original boarding rooms on the second and third floors remained unoccupied and unchanged, though in deteriorating condition. Baltimore City designated both the church and Immigrant House as local landmarks in 2006.
The Baltimore Immigration Memorial, Inc. (BIM), formerly the Baltimore Immigration Project, was established to preserve and publicize the history of the 1.2 million immigrants who came here. In 2006, this group led the effort to design and install a sculpture garden, Liberty Garden, at the end of Hull Street on the grounds of what is now the property of Under Armour. The immigrants had disembarked at Piers 8 and 9, which were once located nearby.
BIM and the Locust Point Community UCC have since worked together for the creation of the Baltimore Immigration Museum on the ground floor of Immigrant House on Beason Street, not far from the Liberty Garden. The museum’s initial exhibit tells the story of global immigration in the nineteenth century, with an emphasis on the U.S. and Baltimore between 1830 and 1914. The stories of Baltimore’s major immigrant groups are told, as well as the story of anti-immigrant movements of the past.
Future projects at the Baltimore Immigration Museum will focus on migration and immigration since 1914, including the history of the migration of African Americans to Baltimore from 1914 to 1970, as well as the “new” immigrants, both Latino and Asian, who have arrived in Baltimore since the liberalization of U.S. immigration laws in 1965.