The church on Wildwood Parkway, now used as the New Covenant United Methodist Church, was originally built for the Central Methodist Episcopal Church South in 1930.
The church's original congregation was organized around 1866 and, in 1876, erected a sanctuary on Edmondson Avenue near Harlem Park. In 1926, the church purchased a property on the street then known as Wildwood Driveway and, in November 1929, sold the building on Edmondson Avenue and announced plans to begin building a three-story Sunday school designed by architect Guy E. Gaston.
Construction on a new church began in May 1930 with a cornerstone laying ceremony attended by three hundred people. The building was estimated to cost $65,000. Around 1954, the congregation merged with the Summerfield Methodist Church after the Rehoboth Church of God in Christ Jesus Apostolic purchased the latter congregation’s building on Poplar Grove Street.
Through the years, the church offered a variety of programs and religious services. In February 1965, the church (then known as the Central-Summerfield Methodist Church) offered an “old-fashioned minstrel show” in their fellowship hall. While minstelry had a long history as popular entertainment for white Baltimoreans, the show was a particularly striking choice given the neighborhood's ongoing transition of largely segregated white to segregated black between 1960 and 1970.
Eventually, the church became the Wildwood Parkway United Methodist Church and operates today as the New Covenant United Methodist Church.
]]>The Archdiocese of Baltimore established New Cathedral Cemetery on forty acres of the old "Bonnie Brae" country estate in 1869. The church spent seventeen years moving bodies and headstones from the 1816 Cathedral Cemetery at Riggs and Fremont Avenues and, in 1936, moved hundreds more from St. Patrick’s Cemetery on Orleans Street.
Among the scores of well known locals buried on the grounds are Clarence H. 'Du' Burns, Baltimore's first black Mayor, Sister. Mary Antonio of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, and four former Orioles players (all in the Baseball Hall of Fame).
]]>Well known for its sports programs, Edmondson-Westside High School is a landmark near the western edge of the city. Originally known as Edmonson Avenue High School, when construction began on the school on Athol Avenue it was the city's first new high school since Forest Park opened in 1924.
The school expanded in the early 1980s with a move into the former Hecht Company store on Edmondson Avenue. Hecht's opened in 1955 but closed a little more than twenty years later after Hoschild Kohn's and other retail stores had left for shopping areas in the western suburbs.
]]>Like James Keelty, who built many of the rowhouses in Edmondson Village, many of the neighborhood’s new residents were Catholic and attended church to the east at St. Edward's on Poplar Grove or farther west at St. William of York. After James Keelty’s daughter died in 1922 at the age of six, he decided to build a new church for his neighbors and donate the building to the Archdiocese who dedicated the building as a memorial to Nora Bernardine Keelty.
Completed in 1929, the church was designed by architect Francis E. Tormey who also designed the Furst Memorial Chapel at Most Holy Redeemer Cemetery and churches including St. Piux V (1907) at Edmondson Avenue and Schroeder Street, St. Josephs's (1913), and St. Bernard's (1926).
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