Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church is Maryland’s mother church of the AME Church. It is one of the foundational churches in the AME Connection. After meeting on Saratoga Street for almost 100 years, Bethel AME moved to 1300 Druid Hill Avenue in 1911.

In April 1815, preachers Daniel Coker, Henry Harden, and Richard Williams led about two hundred members of the Lovely Lane and Strawberry Alley Meeting Houses and the African Church on Sharp Street to separate from the Methodist Episcopal Church. Calling themselves “The African Methodist Bethel Society,” the group arranged to occupy the former German Lutheran Church on Fish Street (now Saratoga), and created a rent-to-own agreement with its owner. The brick church was built in 1762 and enlarged in 1785. It had three stories in front and two in the rear, with a pulpit, pews and galleries inside. Bethel Church was founded there on April 23 or June 3, 1815. The African Bethel School operated in the church basement to educate Black children. The school hosted exhibitions to celebrate Bethel’s milestones, such as its founding anniversary, and demonstrate its students’ talents.

Coker and the church trustees registered incorporation papers for the “African Methodist Bethel Church or Society in the City of Baltimore” at the Baltimore court house on April 8, 1816. The next day, six delegates traveled from Baltimore to Philadelphia. The assembled delegations established the African Methodist Episcopal Church and ordained Richard Allen to be its first bishop.

Bethel became the owner of its church building on March 7, 1838. The building, however, required work. The church and its land flooded when Jones Falls did – hence “Fish Street” – which caused damage and inconvenience. A flood in June 1838 destroyed Bethel’s school library, which held a thousand books. In addition, the congregation outgrew the building by the early 1840s. Construction on a new church began in August 1847. The Romanesque style church was consecrated on July 9, 1848.

In 1909, the Baltimore City Council condemned the church in order to widen Saratoga Street. The Bethel congregation had to find a new home and purchased the church formerly used by St. Peter’s Protestant Episcopal Church at Druid Hill Avenue and Lanvale Street. Built in 1868, the church was in the middle of thriving West Baltimore. The move placed Bethel closer to its congregants – half of the city’s Black population lived in the neighborhood by 1904 – and among two other relocated Black churches, Sharp Street Memorial and Union Baptist. The opening services took place on January 8, 1911.

Over its history, Bethel has led action to address causes affecting Black Baltimoreans through mutual support, education, benevolent societies, and organizing. Bethel’s members assisted people escaping slavery, an effort that took place within a larger network of African Methodists. During the Civil War, Bethel hosted special lectures for the US Colored Troops and held fundraisers to support soldiers and their families. At the start of World War I, the congregation expanded to 1,500 members as a result of Black migration from rural areas into the city. Members were active in the Civil Rights Movement and other political causes, including the denouncement of the Vietnam War. In the 1970s, church members established a women’s counseling center and supported Black liberation in South Africa. Contemporary lay ministries using Bethel Church as a base have addressed the needs of women, the homeless, senior citizens, pregnant teenagers, and drug and alcohol addicts.

Today, Bethel A.M.E remains a bastion in Baltimore’s African American community dedicated to community enrichment and spiritual guidance.

1300 Druid Hill Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21217

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.”

1325 Madison Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21217

The Baltimore Black Musicians Union opened a meeting hall and boarding house at 620-622 Dolphin Street around the 1940s. Due to the discrimination of Baltimore's downtown hotels at that time, traveling black musicians would stay overnight in the rooms located in part of the building. Both locals and traveling musicians also used the building for meetings and socializing.

Even in the late 1970s, the building continued to be used for music education. Former neighborhood resident Catherine Bailey recalled in a recent post on the Baltimore Old Photos Facebook Group:

“I used to have marching band practice in the basement as a little girl. We were the pride of Baltimore!”

The building later operated as the meeting hall for the Elks fraternal organization and as Mrs. Joanne’s After Hours club.

620-22 Dolphin Street, Baltimore, MD 21217

The first building for the Avenue Market, originally known as the Lafayette Market, was built in 1871. In the twentieth century, the market and the Old West Baltimore neighborhood thrived as the Pennsylvania Avenue became a center of Baltimore culture. When the wooden market burned to the ground in 1953, merchants banded together to rebuild it.

The market survived as many of the neighborhood's historic buildings were abandoned, and in the 1970s, demolished in the name of urban renewal. Enthusiasm for urban renewal in the 1970s waned, and by the 1990s, the Lafayette Market was in desperate need of a makeover. It closed in 1994 for renovations and reopened in 1996 as the Avenue Market, an homage to Pennsylvania Avenue, the cultural heart of the neighborhood. The market was again renovated in 2012.

1700 Pennsylvania Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21217

Close beside the Gwynns Falls is Ellicott Driveway, completed by the city in 1917 as the kind of stream valley parkway envisioned by the Olmsted Brothers landscape architectural firm in 1904.

Ellicott Driveway was built on top of the millrace that once carried water to Three Mills operated by the Ellicott Brothers near Frederick Road. In the 1800s, twenty-six gristmills along the Gwynns Falls and others on the Jones Falls and Patapsco River contributed to Baltimore's first economic boom. Besides their Ellicott City mills, the Ellicotts built the Three Mills complex in this area and were partners in the five Calverton Mills upstream at Leon Day Park. The Ellicotts also helped build the Frederick Turnpike so wagons could carry their products to ships at their Inner Harbor wharf.

The Ellicott Driveway was completed by the city in 1917 as the kind of stream valley parkway envisioned by the Olmsted Brothers landscape architectural firm in 1904. The diversion dam for the millrace created a dramatic waterfall: "Baltimore's Niagara Falls." In 1930, the Municipal Art Society of Baltimore praised the route, writing:

"so gracefully following the curves of the stream in Gwynn's Falls park [Ellicott Driveway]... adapts itself to the con91ĘÓƵ of the terrain and... takes full advantage of natural beauty."

Today, the route is closed to cars and trucks and reserves its natural beauty for bicycles and pedestrians along the Gwynns Falls Trail.

Ellicott Driveway, Baltimore, MD 21216

Franklin Square Park is one of the oldest parks in the city, with its origins in the estate of Dr. James McHenry, who lived at a home known as Fayetteville located near Baltimore and Fremont Streets in the early 1800s. Born in Ireland, James McHenry arrived in Philadelphia in 1771, settling in Baltimore with his family the next year. During the Revolutionary War, McHenry joined the Continental Army, becoming a secretary and friend to General George Washington. After the war, McHenry served as the Secretary of War to George Washington and John Adams, before retiring to Baltimore in 1800 and continuing to live quietly at his home until his death in 1816. James and Samuel Canby, successful development speculators from Wilmington, Delaware, purchased 32 acres of land from the heirs of Dr. James McHenry in 1835 with the goal of developing the estate. Two years later, they offered two-and-a-half acres of land to Baltimore for the nominal sum of $1 with city's promise that they would maintain the land as a public park forever. The City Council accepted but made a condition of their own by offering to erect a "handsome iron railing, six feet high" and a paved sidewalk around the park when the James and Samuel could build eight or more "three-story brick houses, to cost at least $10,000 apiece." The park was an enormous success, as on a single Sunday in the spring of 1850 when over 3,300 locals came for a visit. The Sun reported, "At almost every hour of the day, numbers may be seen promenading through the walks." The grand Waverly Terrace on the east side of the square was completed in 1851 at a cost of $160,000 offering, according the Baltimore Sun, a rowhouse block "much handsomer than any yet finished in this city, and displaying the pure Italian style of architecture." The Aged Women's and Aged Men's Homes, built in 1849 and 1864, located at the site of the present day Franklin Square Elementary/Middle School and a handful of churches began to fill the blocks around the park.

Watch our on this square!

W. Fayette Street and N. Carey Street, Baltimore, MD 21223