Perkins Square Baptist Church has been an institution on Edmondson Avenue since the mid-1950s occupying a grey stone church that began in 1913 as Emmanuel English Evangelical Lutheran Church. The two-story tall church was designed by local architect A. Cookman Leach and built by C.C. Watts.
Alfred Cookman Leach graduated from the Maryland Institute Freehand Division in 1896 and worked as a partner of the firm of Tormey and Leach. Examples of Leach鈥檚 religious buildings can be found across the city including the Highland Methodist Episcopal Church (built 1906) at Highland and Pratt Streets, the Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church South (built 1927) on Liberty Heights Avenue, and the Alpheus W. Wilson Methodist Episcopal Church South (built 1927) at University Parkway and Charles Street.
Established in 1888, the Emmanuel English Evangelical Lutheran Church had formerly occupied a building at the corner of Schroeder and Pierce Streets. Pastors from ten Evangelical Lutheran Churches throughout Baltimore participated in the cornerstone laying ceremony on July 13, 1913. The church had organized the first of a series of outdoor services the prior Sunday and planned to continue outdoor meetings at the site of their new building through July and August. Within the cornerstone, at the southeast corner of the building, the church placed, copies of The Baltimore Sun, the church constitution, the proceedings of the last synod, a list of officers of the congregation, a hymnal and a bible.
In the decade after WWII, the church, like many largely white congregations in the area, moved west to new neighborhoods at the developing western edge of Baltimore. Under the leadership of Reverend George Loose, Emmanuel Lutheran Church dedicated a new church on Ingleside Avenue in 1957 leaving their building at Edmondson and Warwick to Perkins Square Baptist Church.
Perkins Square Baptist Church was established in 1881 and takes its name from a small park and fresh-water spring located in the area of Heritage Crossing today. The congregation quickly grew to become one of the largest black Baptist churches in Baltimore and hosted regular community meetings, including a 1905 rally to campaign against the "Poe amendment" proposed by Senator Arthur Pue Gorman and the Maryland Democratic Party to disenfranchise black voters in Maryland. Virginia native Ward D. Yerby became pastor of the church in 1970 and led the move west to purchase the new church in January 1956. Rev. Yerby served as executive secretary of the Governor's Commission on Interracial Problems and Relations in the late 1950s.
Erected high on a hill above the Gunpowder River Valley, Perry Hall Mansion dominated life in northeastern Baltimore County in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Built in the 1770s by Harry Dorsey Gough, Perry Hall was named after the family castle near Birmingham England. The sixteen-room home, the seat of a vast plantation, soon became one of the leading houses in colonial Maryland. The mansion, considered a 鈥渟ister鈥 house to near by Hampton Mansion, turned from a house of raucous parties to a place of more reserved pleasure as Gough and his wife, Prudence, became ardent supporters of the early Methodist movement that had strong roots in Maryland.
Gough became a distinguished planter, a member of Maryland鈥檚 House of Delegates, and on the board of one of Maryland鈥檚 first orphanages. After Gough鈥檚 death in 1808, the mansion remained in the family for nearly fifty years. It was sold to a group of investors in 1852 that carved the plantation into lots for houses, many of which went to German immigrants. By 2001, the estate had dwindled to four acres and the house was sold to Baltimore County for use as a museum and community center. The County completed the first stage of restoration in 2004, and exterior restoration won an award from the Preservation Alliance of Baltimore County as an 鈥渙utstanding public project.鈥 The Friends are continuing with the restoration of this stately home.
The Shot Tower, when it was built in 1828, was the tallest structure in the United States until 1846. Once there were three such towers in Baltimore; now there are only a few left in the entire world. The design of the 215-foot tall Phoenix Shot Tower and its estimated 1.1 million bricks is based on Englishman William Watt鈥檚 1782 patented process of making shot by pouring molten lead through colanders down the open shaft of a high tower. As the molten lead spun and cooled in the air, it became 鈥減erfectly globular in form and smooth鈥 as was reported at the time. The 鈥渄rops鈥 were collected in a large water barrel at the tower鈥檚 base, then sorted by size and bagged for distribution. The finished product was called drop shot and was used for small game hunting, among other things. The Shot Tower annually produced 2.5 million pounds of it until 1892 when new methods of shot production made the Tower obsolete. In 1921, permits were granted to tear down the Tower and clear the site to make way for an automobile garage. In one of the first acts of historic preservation in Baltimore, public reaction against the demolition plans was strong, and leading citizens were able to raise funds for its preservation. On October 11, 1924, a group of Baltimore citizens bought the Shot Tower for $17,000 and donated it to the city with the understanding that it would be preserved. More than fifty years passed before the Shot Tower was opened to the public as a museum. In 1973, it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Today it is managed by Carroll Museums, a non-profit organization that also manages the Carroll Mansion on nearby Pratt Street.
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Alfred G. Vanderbilt once said of Pimlico that it is 鈥渕ore than a dirt track bounded by four streets. It is an accepted American institution, devoted to the best interests of a great sport, graced by time, respected for its honorable past.鈥
Opened in 1870, Pimlico Racetrack is also Baltimore through and through. Engineered by General John Ellicott for the Maryland Jockey Club, the track was built after Governor Oden Bowie out-bid the rival Saratoga, New York racing club to host a special race by pledging to build a model track in Baltimore.
The track has been going strong ever since, even surviving an anti-gambling movement in 1910 when Congress carved out Maryland and Kentucky from a national prohibition on horse racing.
Although a devastating fire destroyed the old clubhouse in 1966, the seven furlong track, stables for a thousand horses, and even the new grandstands at Pimlico today still hold loads of Baltimore history and stories.
with research support from This story was created in partnership with the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Department of History, Public History Track.
Pine Street Station, the handsome, slate-roofed High Victorian Gothic building was built between 1877 and 1878 and designed by architect Francis E. Davis. The red brick structure, which is trimmed with painted bluestone lintels and adorned with ornate pressed metal roof finials and hip ridges, served as a court and jail for the area west of Lexington Market from 1878 to 1951. Originally built to protect the area's growing number of banks and police the often raucous blocks of theaters and taverns around Lexington Market, the station underwent a major transformation in the mid-twentieth century.
In 1952, the station became Baltimore's Bureau of Aid and Prevention and was officially renamed "Pine Street Station," a name that city residents had already used for years. During its tenure as the Bureau of Aid and Prevention (BAP), the increasingly run-down brick building served as a refuge for homeless women and orphan children and housed a police boys club. Though Pine Street made a safe haven for the city's disenfranchised while operating as the BAP and, according to an article in the Afro-American, the cells were tidied up and painted gray and peach to better suit its new residents, the Baltimore Sun later criticized the station for its practice of locking young people up with hardened female criminals and for a staff that did not have adequate training to work with children.
Though all manner of prisoners landed in Pine Street over the years, the tumult of civil rights activism in the 1950s and 1960s brought a new sort of inmate to the station: local female college students. Continuing its tradition of serving as a women's jail, city police often brought young women from Morgan State, Goucher College, and Johns Hopkins University to Pine Street after mass arrests during the 1950s and 60s civil rights demonstrations in Baltimore. Pine Street Station shut its doors in 1971 and sat vacant for twenty years while a planned extension of I-70 threatened the structure with demolition. Local preservation groups saved the building thanks to efforts that halted the highway at Leakin Park just outside of the city. In 1991, the University of Maryland acquired the building from Baltimore City and it currently houses the university's security department.
The Polish Home Club, known then as the Polish Home Hall, opened to six hundred members of the Polish community on August 11, 1918, in an area of Fell's Point known as 鈥淟ittle Poland.鈥 Baltimore鈥檚 Polish population grew rapidly in the late nineteenth century as Polish immigrants arrived at the port to work on the docks. By the turn of the century, the community was well-established with Polish churches, a Polish-language newspaper and financial institutions that offered loans to Polish people. By 1923, the Polish community had become large and organized enough to gain political representation through Baltimore鈥檚 first Polish city councilman, Edward Novak. The Polish Home Hall, erected at a cost of $81,000 and affectionately called Dom Polski, opened to great fanfare. Marked by a banquet and speeches by Wladislaus Urbanski and Rev. Stanislaus Wachowiak, the dedication ceremonies revealed a beautiful community hall for future events. The night followed with music by the Polish National Band and dancing. Two years after the hall opened, it hosted the Polish Falcons鈥 Alliance, an international Polish organization, for an annual convention and accompanying athletic contests in Patterson Park. When financial difficulties nearly led to the close of the Polish Home Hall, the Polish Home Club, organized in 1933 and led a community effort to raise funds for the building attracting around two thousand supporters. The Polish Home Club organized the first Polish Festival in 1973 at the Constellation Dock. The festival featured Polish food, music, dancing, and singing. In the years to follow, the festival enjoyed a long run at Rash Field, then Patterson Park, and currently, Timonium Fairgrounds. The largest draw to the Polish Home Club is its restored wood dance floor. The club hosts a dance every Friday and Saturday evening where they play traditional Polish music and pop and serve Krupnik, the house drink, at the bar. The hall is also available for community events and gatherings. The Polish population of Fell's Point has dwindled and a thriving Latino population has filled the void. As the neighborhood around the club changes, some fear that Polish traditions might be lost. However, the Polish Home Club hopes to stick around and be a cultural resource for future generations of people with Polish heritage.
Built around 1905 in the vernacular Beaux Arts style, the Polish Home Hall originally functioned as a town hall and home to the volunteer fire company of Curtis Bay. In 1919, when Baltimore City annexed the area from Anne Arundel County, the Wise brothers took over the building to sew sailcloth for the shipping industries emerging in the area. In 1925, the United Polish Societies of Curtis Bay purchased the building and returned it to use as a community space. Polish American children attended school and learned both English and Polish in the space, which was a few block from St. Anthanasius Catholic Church. The hall was also used for social functions, such as dances. Local residents, Casmir and Catherine Benicewicz, served as caretakers of the Polish Home Hall until the 1980s when it became too much for the pair to handle. They passed responsibility on to another Polish organization but the building soon began to suffer from neglect. The Polish Home Hall was no longer used for community events and became dilapidated.
In the early 2000s, the Baybrook Coalition, a non-profit community development corporation, sought to revive the hall as a community space. Carol Eshelman, director of the Coalition from 2002 until 2010, researched the deed of the dilapidated building and tracked down Catherine Benicewicz. A beautiful friendship and impressive rehabilitation endeavor began with Benicewicz deeding the building to the Coalition. The rehab was funded by a bond issue spearheaded by House Representative Brian McHale and State Senator George W. Della Jr. and supplemented by funds from the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation in addition to donations from local citizens and businesses. Donald Kann served as the architect for the renovation. 鈥淭he Hammers,鈥 local craftsmen volunteers, completed much of the work on the building. The Polish Home Hall was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2007 when it reopened.
At its peak in the late nineteenth century, the Poole & Hunt Foundry and Machine Works employed over 700 people, making it one of the largest employers in the Jones Falls Valley after the textile mills. The company manufactured an impressive array of machinery: turbines, boilers and looms for the mills, screwpile lighthouses, railroad machinery, and transmission equipment for cable cars. Perhaps their greatest contribution was to the construction of the United States Capitol Building, to which the company manufactured the structural elements of the dome and cast the columns of its peristyle, made structural elements for the House and Senate wings, and built the derricks, steam engines, and lifting equipment that made the construction of the Capitol possible.
Robert Poole emigrated as a child from what is now Northern Ireland to Baltimore in the 1820s. When he was old enough to work, he found employment at the machine shop of Lanvale Cotton Mill (located near where Penn Station is today) and later worked at Savage Mill. In the 1830s, Poole worked for Ross Winans, the millionaire engineer for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Through these early jobs, Poole gained experience working on machinery for mills and the railroad鈥攖wo key markets for the company he would later form.
By the late 1840s, Poole was running his own shop in downtown Baltimore with partner William Ferguson. After Ferguson retired in 1851, German Hunt, an executive at the firm, became a partner. The shop burned in 1853 and the company relocated to Woodberry along the Northern Central Railway and near the prospering textile mills. Poole oversaw the shop while Hunt handled the business side downtown. By 1890, the complex included a massive 80 foot high erecting shop, signaling the impressive scale of machinery being manufactured by the company.
In 1854, Captain Montgomery Meigs, a US Army Corps of Engineers official in charge of the US Capitol extension project, commissioned Poole & Hunt to build steam engines and derricks for the construction of the Capitol Building, along with structural ironwork for the roof. Within a year, Meigs offered Poole & Hunt the opportunity to bid on work for the columns of the Capitol dome. The firm won with an extremely low bid, 2/10s of a cent per pound. Poole & Hunt continued to work on the columns until 1859 when Meigs was replaced and the contract for the remainder of the columns went to New York foundry Janes, Fowler, Kirtland & Co.
By this point, Poole & Hunt had made a name for themselves. Robert Poole would build his Second Empire mansion "Maple Hill" across the Jones Falls in Hampden overlooking his factory, while German Hunt resided in fashionable Bolton Hill. Poole involved himself in the lives of his workers by funding the construction of housing, churches for multiple denominations, a general store, and a circulating library. The library closed after Poole donated funds to the construction of an Enoch Pratt Free Library branch in Hampden. The company also cast the iron columns for the library, which originally shared the building with the Provident Savings Bank, also controlled by the Poole family. Robert Poole and German Hunt were also involved in establishing the Woman's College of Baltimore, which became Goucher College. German Hunt served on the college's first board of trustees and Poole donated a significant amount of cash to the endeavor.
In addition to overseeing the lives of local residents, Robert Poole and German Hunt maintained close relationships with the textile mill owners. Robert Poole's daughter, Sarah, married James E. Hooper, who would become president of the Mt. Vernon-Woodberry Cotton Company before splitting off and forming Hooperwood Cotton Mills adjacent to Poole's industrial campus.
German Hunt retired from the company in 1889. Poole made his son George partner and renamed the company Robert Poole & Son. The company was now the largest machine shop and foundry in Maryland, employing over 700 workers at its peak. It garnered national acclaim in trade journals for its impressive manufacturing feats. The Leffel Double Turbine, used to power mills, was praised for its efficiency and durability, and became popular with manufacturers across the country. By the 1880s, the company made a name for itself building machinery for cable car powerhouses along the East Coast and in the Midwest. In 1901, the Calumet and Hecla 65' sand wheel manufactured by Poole, the largest of its kind in the world, made the cover of Scientific American, bringing more national attention to the firm.
Robert Poole died in 1903 and the company continued under the name Poole Engineering & Machine Company. In 1905, the company added an administrative building to the campus. In 1916, to meet manufacturing demand, a new erecting shop was added. World War I brought a new wave of commissions to the company. The company manufactured naval artillery mountings and operated an ammunition works in Texas, Maryland.
In 1934, hard hit by the depression, the company sold much of its original campus to the Franklin Balmar Company, which during World War II was commissioned to provide components to the Manhattan Project's atomic bomb. Some of the buildings were sold to Hooperwood Cotton Mills. The campus was later used by the Aero-Chatillon Company to manufacture components for aircraft carriers.
A kitchen cabinet manufacturer was using the site in 1972, and by the 1990s, a rock climbing gym had taken over the massive erecting shop and artists had set up studios on the campus. In 1995, a large fire that began at the rock climbing gym claimed the life of a firefighter and destroyed the erecting shop and machine shops.
After years of vacancy, the development firm Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse tackled the large site with a preservation and rehabilitation focus. Designed by architects Cho Benn Holback + Associates, the site is now a thriving complex of residences, offices, shops, restaurants, and even a new crop of hard-at-work artisans. The burned out erecting shop was transformed into apartments, and condos were built on the site of the original machine shop. Not least of its notable attributes, the restoration of Clipper Mill has won, not one, but two historic preservation awards from 糖心影视.
The handsome Tudor Revival turrets of the Poppleton Fire Station (Engine House #38) stand out next to the modern glass facades of the University of Maryland BioPark on Baltimore Street. Designed by local architects Benjamin Buck Owens and Spencer E. Sisco, the station opened in 1910 equipped with the most modern fire-fighting tools available.
After the tragedy of Great Baltimore Fire destroyed much of the city's downtown in 1904, the Baltimore Fire Department grew quickly and built scores of new firehouses. A close look above the building's arched entrance reveals a small tribute to the bravery of the Fire Department鈥檚 mission with a stone carving of firemen racing to extinguish a fire.
with research support from Jewish Museum of Maryland
Today, the entire south side of the block between Exeter and Lloyd is occupied by the Helping Up Mission, a transitional housing and recovery center which has recently completed renovation of the several historic buildings that it occupies. Their building at 1017-1021 E. Baltimore Street has long history of providing care to the residents of East Baltimore since it first opened in 1877 as the Presbyterian Eye, Ear & Throat Charity Hospital.
The hospital鈥檚 mission was 鈥渢o serve the suffering poor of East Baltimore.鈥 By the early 1900s, when tuberculosis was rampant in the neighborhood, its patients included many Russian Jewish families.
Across Baltimore Street from the hospital stood the Brith Sholom Hall at 1012 E. Baltimore Street (demolished in the fall of 1998. A self-help institution for Russian Jewish immigrants, the Independent Order of Brith Sholom formed in 1902. Under the leadership of Cabman Cohen, it helped newly arriving 鈥済reenhorns,鈥 raised money for Jewish causes at home and abroad, and served as headquarters for men鈥檚 lodges and women鈥檚 auxiliaries. It moved to this location in 1914.
On April 19, 1861, just one week after the attack on Fort Sumter by Confederate forces marked the beginning of the Civil War, a train carrying Union volunteers with the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment pulled into the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad's President Street Station. At the time, railroad cars traveling south of Baltimore had to be pulled by horses along Pratt Street to Camden Station on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad to the west. However, a mob of Southern sympathizers started to attack the train cars and forced the Union troops to get out and start marching through the city streets.
The mob continued their attack with bricks, paving stones, and pistols, leading the Union troops to respond by firing into the crowd, starting a violent skirmish that left four soldiers and twelve civilians dead, 36 soldiers and an unknown number of civilians wounded, along with the loss of much of the regiment鈥檚 equipment. One of the soldiers killed, Corporal Sumner Needham of Company I, is often considered to be the first Union casualty of the war.
President Street Station, where the infamous Pratt Street Riot began, was built in 1850 as the Baltimore terminus of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad. Largely replaced in 1873 by Union Station (now known as Penn Station) which connected the Pennsylvania Railroad and Western Maryland Railway, President Street Station continued to serve a limited number of passenger trains through 1911, later serving as a freight station and then warehouse. By 1970, a fire had destroyed the train shed leaving only the head house. In the 1990s, President Street Station started a new life as the Baltimore Civil War Museum.
Built between 1914 and 1919, Preston Gardens is a linear park along Saint Paul Street. Few people know that Preston Gardens was once the site of a thriving black community up through the early twentieth century. Black lawyers, religious leaders, and countless others occupied a mix of homes, offices and social halls built on Saint Paul, Hamilton, and Courtland Streets from the early to mid-nineteenth century.
The neighborhood originally developed as an affluent district just north of downtown back when Mount Vernon Place was still a forest and a dueling ground. As the city鈥檚 African-American population grew following the U.S. Civil War, black household largely moved to south Baltimore and central Baltimore 鈥 keeping close to both the black institutions that predated the war and potential places to find work around the harbor. By the late 1890s and early 1900s, the district passed out of fashion with many middle-class African Americans as they followed white Baltimoreans in moving out into the northwestern suburbs now known as Bolton Hill, Madison Park, and Druid Heights.
Unfortunately, this out-migration and a series of 鈥渋mprovements鈥 to St. Paul Street between the 1910s and 1930s resulted in the demolition of nearly all of the buildings in this area. The creation of Preston Gardens and Saint Paul Place began in 1914 as a project of then Mayor James H. Preston. An ordinance passed that year gave the city authority to condemn and tear down what Preston called "blighted" buildings in the area. Critics called the plan 鈥淧reston鈥檚 Folly鈥 after the Mayor used loan money originally designated for harbor improvements to pay for the costly improvements. The park was designed by architect Thomas Hastings and the was dedicated in 1919.
In 1926, an article in the Afro-American newspaper recalled:
"When you pass through the beautiful Preston Gardens, now almost the heart of Baltimore鈥檚 humming business section, you are passing through a section where some beautiful brown-skinned girls and chivalrous youth who glided across hardwood floors to the tune of the old-time waltz while proud matrons and father looked on."
Mercy Hospital tore down a row on St. Paul Street containing some the few surviving buildings from this district in 2008.
A raked mast of a Baltimore Clipper ship stands tall on land in Rash Field on the south end of the Inner Harbor. Accompanied by a block of pink granite inscribed with four names of lost crewmembers, the installation serves as a memorial to the Pride of Baltimore I.
The Pride was modelled after the Chausseur, a clipper ship launched from Fells Point in 1812 and captained by Thomas Boyle, a privateer, known for his highly successful acquisition of goods captured from British ships. In 1814, Boyle undertook a journey across the Atlantic, past the blockade of British ships on the Chesapeake. When he reached England, he boldly issued a proclamation stating:
I do therefore, by virtue of the power and authority in me vested (possessing sufficient force) declare all the ports, harbors, bays, creeks, rivers, inlets, outlets, islands and seacoast of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, in a state of strict and rigorous blockade. And I do further declare that I consider the force under my command adequate to maintain strictly, rigorously, and effectually, the said blockade.
Boyle was incredibly successful in maintaining his blockade and returned home to Baltimore in March 1815, continuing to collect goods and evade capture. His ship was renamed 鈥渢he Pride of Baltimore.鈥
The twentieth-century version of the Pride of Baltimore was launched in 1977 as an ambassador ship as part of the project to revitalize the inner harbor and to represent the city and state during its travels around the world. The clipper ship logged 150,000 miles before a sudden squall in the Atlantic, near Puerto Rico, capsized the ship in 1986. There was no time to send a distress signal. Eight crewmembers survived four days in a lifeboat. The captain, Armin Elsaesser, 42, and three crewmembers, Vincent Lazarro, 27, engineer; Barry Duckworth, 29, carpenter; and Nina Schack, 23, deckhand, were lost.
In 1988, a second Pride of Baltimore was launched as a memorial to Pride I and its lost crewmembers. The Pride of Baltimore II has sailed 250,000 miles and visited 40 different countries.
Today the site of Under Armour's world headquarters, five of these buildings used to house Procter & Gamble's Baltimore Plant: Process Building (1929), the Soap Chip Building (1929), the Bar Soap Building (1929), the Warehouse (1929), and the Tide Building (1949). The company selected this Locust Point site to build a soap manufacturing plant because of its proximity to cargo shipping routes and the city鈥檚 transportation infrastructure along the Atlantic seaboard.
The plant was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999. According to the Registration Report held at the National Archives, 鈥淭he size of the Procter & Gamble Plant and the timing of its opening in the early years of the Depression made the plant an important local source of employment and economic stability.鈥 The Plant鈥檚 architectural construction and importance in industrial history were also factors in its inclusion.
Local development company Struever Bros, Eccles & Rouse transformed the Procter & Gamble campus into the Tide Point office park in 2004. Construction costs for this 15-acre adaptive reuse project totaled $66 million. Under Armour continues the legacy of Baltimore鈥檚 once-dominant garment industry, although the actual manufacturing mostly takes place overseas. Founder Kevin Plank began the company, focusing on wickable athletic shirts, from his grandmother鈥檚 rowhouse in Washington D.C. in 1996 before moving its headquarters to Baltimore in 1998. As of 2019, the company employed 14,500 staff worldwide and brought in an annual revenue of $5.3 billion.
The architecture represents only one portion of the peninsula鈥檚 significance, however. Between 1800 and the outbreak of World War I, nearly two million immigrants first stepped foot on U.S. soil from this location at Locust Point--second only to Ellis Island in New York. Immigration from Europe, and particularly Germany, rose dramatically after the B&O Railroad and the North German Lloyd Company established an agreement in 1867 that brought ship passengers to the immigration pier along the B&O Railroad. The federal government established an immigration station here in 1887, on land belonging to the railroad. The outbreak of World War I ended the heyday of Baltimore as an immigration hub. The Baltimore Immigration Memorial, located on the site of the Locust Point Immigration Depot, interprets this history today. Imagine arriving in Baltimore by steamship in the late 19th century. How might it feel to see landmarks such as Fort McHenry or Federal Hill?
Built in 1890, Public School No. 32, now better known as home to the Baltimore Montessori School, is a rare historic community school building, one of scores built in the late 19th century to support the city's rapidly growing population.
Like most school buildings at the time, Public School 32 was designed by the Baltimore Inspector of Buildings J. Theodore Oster, who served in the position from 1884 through 1896. The building shares a number of features that can still be found on old school buildings throughout the city, such as the double stair (one stair for girls and one for boys) along with the tower above. Born in Maryland in 1844, Oster had followed his father, Jacob Oster, to work as a carpenter and draftsman in their firm J. Oster & Son and rose to his position after serving as assistant building inspector in the early 1880s.
Contractor James B. Yeatman broke ground for the new building on Guilford Avenue in Feburary 1890 with the plan to have the building ready for students by the fall. The building had a front of pressed brick with with brown sandstone trim and included six class-rooms, two clock-rooms and a teachers' room on each floor. 1890 eventually set a new record for the Baltimore public school system with a total of 11 new school buildings completed thanks to the availability of "special funds for the purchase of sites and the erection of school-houses"聺 provided by a building loan to the city of $400,000 in 1888 and 1892.
When the building opened that fall, Catherine S. Thompson became one of the teachers and went on to become the longest serving educator at the school remaining through her retirement as principal in 1926. A graduate of Eastern High School at the southeast corner of Alsquith and Orleans, Thompson began her career in education at the age of 17 in School No. 6 in East Baltimore. Thompson became the head of the school in 1905 and remained there for over 20 years. She lived nearby at 1601 Calvert Street and after her death on December 5, 1937 she was buried in Greenmount Cemetery, just a few blocks east of the school where she worked for years.
When the nearby Benjamin Banneker Elementary School, previously known as Colored School No. 113, closed in the early 1960s with the continued desegregation of the Baltimore City public school system, the school expanded with the addition of a large new building just to the south on Guilford. Designed by the firm of Wheeler, Bonn, Shockey and Associates, the new building was designed to contain, "14 classrooms, 2 kindergartens, 330-seat auditorium, gymnasium, cafeteria, health suite, library, instructional materials center, administrative offices, and utility rooms" at a cost of a $962,000. The school took on the name Mildred Monroe in 1980, to honor a long time custodian at the building and a friend of many students.
After the school closed in 2001, it served as a homeless shelter and then as a location for the fourth season of The Wire on HBO, highlighting the challenges of Baltimore's public school system. In the past few years, both buildings have taken on new life as the home to the Baltimore Montessori Public Charter School.
Built in 1877, this historic school on Division Street originally served only white students until 1910 when the building was first used for black students from Public School No. 112. In March 1911, the school was officially designated Public School 103 and later named in honor of abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet. The building contained twelve classrooms; the spaces separated by sliding doors that could open and combine two or three classrooms into an auditorium.
While the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson had held that racial segregation, such as in Baltimore's public school system, was legal when the public facilities were "separate but equal", schools for black students in Baltimore were anything but. The academic year for black children was one month shorter than the school year for white students, with the expectation that children would leave school to find agricultural work. The prejudice and racist beliefs that undlie this approach is evident in a 1913 remark by Baltimore school commissioner Richard Biggs: 鈥淪top at once the so-called high education that unfits Negroes for the lives that they are to lead and which makes them desire things they will never be able to reach.鈥
Public School 103 is best known for its' most famous student, Thurgood Marshall (1908- 1993), who attended the school from 1914 to 1920. It was at this school that Thurgood shortened his name from the original Thoroughgood. Thurgood sat in the first row, as his classmate Agnes Peterson later recalled, 鈥渉e was always playing, and so they had to keep right on top of him.鈥
When he began attending PS 103 at age six, Thurgood's family lived with his Uncle Fearless Mentor (or Uncle Fee) at 1632 Division Street. Mentor worked as the personal attendant to the president of the B&O Railroad, wearing a suit and a bowtie to work daily, and was home nearly every afternoon to talk with Thurgood and his brother Aubrey. Marshall later attended the Colored High School which opened in January 1901 at the northeast corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Dolphin Street occupying a building erected in 1891 for the English-German School No. 1 previously located on Druid Hill Avenue.
R. House was built on the southwest corner of the intersection of Remington Avenue and West 29th Street in 1924 as the Eastwick Motor Company garage. Up until the 1920s, most of Baltimore鈥檚 car dealerships were located in the "automobile triangle" bounded by Mount Royal, North Avenue, and Howard Street. The 2-story rectangular brick building, constructed to expand Eastwick, reflected the growing importance of Remington to automobile sales and service in the 1920s. Directories referred to the building as the "Dodge Maintenance Building" in the late 1920s, but the design makes clear that it was always intended to work as a showroom as well.
In 1926, Harter B. Hull, a successful automobile magnate in Memphis with Baltimore ties and a rising star in the dealership world, purchased the Eastwick Motor Company. After his untimely death in 1930, Gilbert A. Jarman, an officer and director of the Hull operation, assumed ownership control. Jarman Motors, Inc. expanded over the years and occupied the property up until 1968. Anderson Motor Company bought the property in 1994.
The Seawall Development Corporation purchased the property in 2014 and began a $12 million conversion of this former 50,000-square-foot automotive building to turn it into the R. House: a 鈥渇ood hall鈥 featuring ten chefs.
Though the Baltimore Sun heralded the structure at the southeast corner of Howard and Lexington as an Art Deco design icon from the time of its construction in 1934, this building's role as an early and vital witness to a historic, but long over-looked Civil Rights sit-in makes the Read's Drug Store building truly noteworthy. Five years before the better known Greensboro, South Carolina sit-in protests at Woolworth's, students and citizens made civil rights history on this spot.
William Read started his Read's Drug Store chain at this corner, but the current building, designed by prominent Baltimore architects Smith & May, was built by Arthur Nattans bought the business from Read in 1899. Nattans grew the Read's chain to over forty locations by the early 1930s and planned the downtown location as a flagship store - a modern and well-appointed building, detailed with ornate terra cotta panels depicting sailing ships and chromed railing with swimming dolphins on the interior balcony elements commemorating the 300th anniversary of founding of the Maryland colony.
Like many downtown lunch counters in the early 1950s, the Read's chain maintained a strict policy of racial segregation. Discontent with the widespread policies of segregation and discrimination downtown led the Baltimore chapter of the Committee on Racial Equality (CORE) to start a campaign to end segregation at lunch counters on Lexington Street from Kresge's at Park Avenue to McCrory's right next door to Read's. At the same time, students from Morgan State University began working to desegregate the Read's Drug Store's Northwood Shopping Center location, just outside of Morgan's campus.
On January 20, 1955, CORE and Morgan state joined forces and a group of student activists from Morgan staged simultaneous "sit-in" demonstrations at the Howard & Lexington and Northwood Read's locations. According to an article in the Baltimore Afro American, an unnamed Read's official called Morgan State and pleaded with the school to call the protests off because the stores were losing business. School leaders and protesters held firm and within hours a Read's official announced that Read's Drug Store would end segregated lunch counters across all of their establishments. The front page headline for the Afro American on January 22 read, "Now serve all," with the announcement directly from Read's Drug Stores President Arthur Nattans Sr., "We will serve all customers throughout our entire stores, including the fountains, and this becomes effective immediately." Five years before the iconic Woolworth's sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, Baltimore's Morgan State students and CORE activists led one of the first successful student-led sit-in protests in the nation.
The 82,000 square-foot Reginald F. Lewis Museum opened in 2005 and immediately made history as the first major building in downtown Baltimore designed by African American architects鈥攁 joint effort between Philip Freelon of a North Carolina firm, the Freelon Group, and Gary Bowden of a Baltimore firm, RTKL Associates. Both architects are fellows of the American Institute of Architects, rare achievements considering that in 2016 African Americans make up just 2% of registered architects in the United States. The museum represents the character, pride, struggle, and accomplishments of Maryland African Americans, and was the second largest African American museum in the United States at the time of construction. The museums took the name of Baltimore businessman Reginald Lewis, the first African American CEO of a Fortune 500 company, TLC Beatrice International. Lewis grew up in West Baltimore and, before his death in 1993, he expressed interest in building a museum to African American culture. The Reginald F. Lewis Foundation, which Lewis established in 1987, provided a $5 million grant for the construction of the museum in Baltimore. The museum board turned down an offer to reuse the Blaustein City Exhibition Center on President Street after focus groups showed that people were not interested in taking over the site of an old museum. "African Americans are tired of left-over seconds," museum board vice chairman Aris Allen Jr. told the Baltimore Sun in 2005. Architects Freelon and Bowden sought to design a distinct building that evokes the spirit of African American culture. The black, red and yellow facade takes its colors from the Maryland flag. A bold red wall slices through the facade, representing the journey of African Americans and the duality of accomplishment and struggle. The building won several awards from local and state American Institute of Architects chapter. The museum is an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institute and along with permanent exhibits, includes space for special exhibits, an oral history and recording studio, a 200 seat auditorium, and a classroom and resource center.
with research support from Baltimore City Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation
The site of this Franklintown Road church has been home to a church since 1835, when Colonel John Berry helped establish Summerfield Methodist Episcopal Church. Today, the Rehoboth Church of God in Christ Jesus Apostolic occupies a Gothic Revival landmark that replaced the original country church in 1920. The building was designed by Wyatt & Nolting and G.N. MacKenzie and has been the home of the Apostolic congregation since 1954.
A devout Methodist, Colonel John Berry purchased the site of this church in the early 1800s. Tired of traveling three miles from Calverton Heights to the closest Methodist Episcopal Church, Berry decided to establish a new chapel close to his Baltimore County home.聽A stone chapel was dedicated in the fall of 1836, the church expanded in 1878, and in the 1880s, a Sunday School building was constructed. By 1920,聽the congregation had outgrown the stone chapel. Even with several later additions since 1835, the building seated only聽275 people鈥攁 fraction聽of the over 450 Methodist families in the parish. The congregation decided to demolish the original chapel and construct a new church.
The present Gothic Revival structure was designed by G.N. MacKenzie and Wyatt & Nolting, a prominent local architectural firm. An article published in The Christian Advocate聽following the completion of the church stated that "A fine plant has been erected with adequate Sunday school rooms, an auditorium that will seat 900, a gymnasium, and other desired features." The cornerstone was laid on July 19, 1920, and the church was dedicated on April 25, 1921. By 1920, the congregation had outgrown the stone chapel. While the chapel had several additions since its construction in 1835, it only seated 275, and there were over 450 Methodist families in the parish. The decision was made to demolish the original chapel and construct a new church. The present church was designed by George Norbury聽MacKenzie and Wyatt & Nolting, a prominent Baltimore architectural firm. G.N. Mackenzie, III worked for James Bosley Noel Wyatt and William G. Nolting. Both Wyatt and Nolting were Fellows of the AIA.
On December 16, 1954, the Central-Summerfield Methodist Church sold their building to the Rehoboth Church of God in Christ Jesus (Apostolic). The latter congregation was founded twenty years earlier as a house church with five members, meeting in the Presstman Street home of Mother Mayfield. Mother Mayfield and Elder Randolph A. Carr soon began holding tent-meetings twice a summer on Gilmor Street.
Bishop Carr purchased the group's first church on N. Mount Street. The small congregation then left the Church of God in Christ for the doctrine of the Apostolic Doctrine in Jesus Name, and was renamed Rehoboth Church of God in Christ Jesus Apostolic. In 1945, the congregation branched off from the larger Apostolic organization, forming its own denomination. The same year, the congregation moved to another church on N. Fulton and Riggs Streets. In 1954, the congregation purchased the former Summerfield Church at 700 Poplar Grove Street, where they are still located today.
As African Americans in Baltimore sought to redefine themselves in the 1880s -- politically, geographically, socially -- the city鈥檚 black pastorate served as a vital source of leadership. None of this group stood taller or closer to the vanguard the Rev. Dr. Harvey Johnson.
Harvey Johnson was born in Fauquier County, Virginia on August 4, 1843 to Thomas and Harriett Johnson, enslaved persons on a local plantation. When freedom came during the course of the U.S. Civil War (1861 - 1865), the Johnsons, like other freedpeople, migrated to Alexandria, Virginia.
Johnson received his "calling" to preach, and enrolled at Washington, DC's Wayland Theological Seminary in 1868. Four years later he graduated, with honors, and began of brief period of stints working in the rural countryside of Maryland and Virginia under the auspices of the Home Mission Society. During that same year, 1872, Baltimore's Union Baptist Church sought a replacement for its late pastor Rev. William P. Thompson who died unexpectedly at the age of thirty-two. Union Baptist sent for young Rev. Johnson in November 1872. On April 17, 1877, Harvey Johnson married Amelia E. Hall, an Afro-Canadian born in Montreal (1858). Their marriage yielded three children, Harvey, Jr (born?), a daughter, Jessie E. (1878), and a son, Prentiss (1883).
Outside of her responsibility to family, Amelia Johnson made a name for herself in the juvenile and religious literature circles. Beginning in 1887, she began to publish a monthly literary magazine, The Joy, as an outlet for black writers, especially women, and as an inspirational resource for black youth. Filled with short-stories, poetry, and literary items of interest, The Joy was well received and praised. Amelia Johnson also published work in newspapers, both secular and church-affiliated. In fact, during the early 1890s, she penned a regular column, "Children's Corner," in the Baltimore Sower and Reaper. During that same period, Amelia Johnson had a full manuscript published by the American Baptist Publishing Society, one of the largest publishers of the time. According to her son, Harvey Johnson, Jr., Amelia was her husband's, "best friend, and his chief comfort, his guide in all his business matters...I still consider [their] union a perfect one."
In 1885, Reverend Harvey Johnson founded the Mutual United Brotherhood of Liberty of the United States of America (MUBL). The members of the MUBL pledged themselves, "to use all legal means within our power to procure and maintain our rights as citizens of this our common country." In mid-October 1885, the group held a three-day conference on the status of Black civil rights. Frederick Douglass addressed the conference.
Also in 1885, Johnson and the MUBL successfully engineered the admittance of Everett J. Waring to the Maryland Bar, concluding a fight begun by others in the 1870s. With the bar door opened, Johnson, the MUBL, and the small but growing coterie of black lawyers began an attack on inequalities. Black exclusion from jury boxes, the absence of black teachers from the city's public schools, the deteriorated condition of black public schools, and the infamous bastardy codes effecting black women, were the more visible of the fights taken on by the MUBL legal team.
Rev. Dr. Harvey Johnson then became involved in the Niagara Movement, the predecessor of the NAACP. In 1906, Johnson successfully challenged Maryland鈥檚 separate car law by filing suit and winning against the B&O Railroad, predating the Freedom Riders by about six decades.
Rev. Dr. Harvey Johnson served Union Baptist Church faithfully for more than fifty years, until his death in January 1923, one year after his wife Amelia. As aptly described in an obituary appearing in the Baltimore Afro American, Johnson's death marked the end of an era in leadership.
Today, the Johnson's former home is covered in formstone but appears to be occupied and in fair to good condition. This property is located within the Old West Baltimore National Register Historic District.聽
Jesse B. Revels Jr. (Lumbee) and his wife, Lucy May Revels, bought the property at 1819 E. Baltimore Street in 1962 and opened a grocery store. They and their children ran the store until 1968, when they moved to Baltimore County. They sold the property to Baltimore City in 1973 during Urban Renewal.
Dedicated in 1901, the Richard Wagner Bust was donated to the city by the United Singers of Baltimore who received the monument as the first prize trophy for the annual S盲ngerfeste choral competition.
The Wagner Bust is as German as any statute could be. Cast in bronze, mounted on a granite base, and situated on the lawn of the Rogers-Buchanan Mansion, the bust of German composer Richard Wagner was created by a German-born sculptor R.P. Golde based on a portrait by German painter Franz van Lenbach. Though the bust may seem out of place for visitors to Druid Hill Park today, the placement made perfect sense when the sculpture was created.
R.P. Golde was commissioned to create the bust as the first prize for S盲ngerfeste, an annual choral competition held that year in Brooklyn, New York, with five thousand performers attending. The United Singers of Baltimore won with their performance of D. Melamet鈥檚 鈥淪cheiden鈥 (鈥淧arting鈥). The Singers, who believed that their victory and prize would add to Baltimore鈥檚 glory and beauty, donated the Wagner Bust to Druid Hill Park. The bust鈥檚 dedication ceremony was a grand affair. Thirty thousand spectators gathered in attendance on October 6, 1901, to watch L.H. Wieman, an agent representing the Baltimore branch of a national, Minneapolis-based flour company, present the bust to the City of Baltimore on behalf of the United Singers. The crowd watched as the Wagner Bust, draped in German and American flags and the singing societies鈥 banners, was unveiled. The ceremony and the bust鈥檚 placement on the mansion lawn served as an expression of Baltimore鈥檚 pride in its singers and the German immigrants pride in their heritage and their talent.
Baltimore was home to over forty thousand German immigrants at the start of the twentieth century. Monuments to German artists, philosophers, politicians, musicians, poets, and composers decorate the landscape of many major American cities. Memorials of composers were particularly popular in the era of immigrant monument-building, partly due to the importance of singing clubs in German-American communities.
The Wagner Bust points to the popularity of singing clubs in Baltimore, as does another sculpture by R.P. Golde, that of the composer Conradin Keutzer, located in Patterson Park and also won by the United Singers of Baltimore at the 1915 S盲ngerfeste.
Today, from the rise within Riverside Park, established in 1875, a visitor can see the rowhouses and churches of South Baltimore densely packed around the park in every direction. During the War of 1812, this rise, long known as Look-Out Hill, instead offered a clear view of Locust Point and the Patapsco River that made it essential for the U.S. Navy in their efforts to prepare Baltimore against the threat of attack by the British. In 1813 Captain Samuel Babcock, with the U.S. Corps of Engineers, designed and built a 180-foot diameter circular battery with earthen ramparts, a ditch with abatis, and an earthen powder magazine that made up Fort Look-Out. In September 1814, the U.S. Navy assigned Lieutenant George Budd, a Maryland native from Harford County, from the U.S. Sloop of War Ontario at Fells Point to command Fort Look-Out. The U.S. Sloop of War Ontario was a sixteen gun rated sloop of war built by Thomas Kemp at a Fells Point shipyard but the ship was trapped in the harbor by the British blockade of the Chesapeake. In the earliest morning hours of September 14, 1814, the anticipated British attack on Baltimore began as twenty naval barges advanced on the Baltimore harbor while 5,000 troops waited just beyond the eastern defensive line that cut through what is today Patterson Park. Though Francis Scott Key provided the most memorable recollection of that evening's fight in the lyrics to the Star-Spangled Banner, one observer on Federal Hill recalled the efforts: 鈥淭he night of Tuesday and the morning of Wednesday (til about 4 o鈥檆lock) presented the whole awful spectacle of shot and shells, and rockets, shooting and bursting through the air. The well directed fire of the little fort, under Lieut. Budd (late of the U.S. Frigate Chesapeake), and the gallant seamen under his command, checked the enemy on his approach, and probably saved the town from destruction in the dark hours of the night. The garrison was chiefly incommoded by the shells, which burst in and about the fort, whilst they had bomb proof shelter. As the darkness increased the awful grandeur of the scene augmented....鈥 The successful defense forced the British to retreat and sail on to New Orleans where they fought in the final battle of the War of 1812. Lieutenant Budd went on the serve aboard the U.S. Frigate Java at Baltimore and continued to serve in the navy up until his death in Boston in 1837.
Just around the corner from the busy shops and restaurants of Thames Street is the Robert Long House at 812 South Ann Street, the very image of a handsome eighteenth century colonial residence and one of the oldest homes in Baltimore. However, this is only the most recent chapter in a long and varied history for this architectural treasure. In 1765, Robert Long built his 28 square foot home on three plots of land purchased from Edward Fell, who first established Fell鈥檚 Point in 1731. The first two plots would hold the home and garden. The third, housed a warehouse which Long eventually sold in 1771. Two centuries later, in 1975, the Society for the Preservation of Federal Hill, Montgomery Street and Fells Point (now known simply as the Preservation Society) started planning the restoration of the Robert Long House. The Robert Long House exemplifies the life of an ordinary merchant in the eighteenth century. Many of the historic houses in Baltimore belonged to wealthy landowners or public figures showing the high class culture of the time. Conversely, the Robert Long House speaks to the daily life of an ordinary merchant. The Maryland State Society Daughters of the American Revolution made the furnishing of the first floor parlor their U.S. Bicentennial project. Inside, historic objects like the beaded baseboard, molded chair rail, baluster staircase and plaster walls made with deer or cow hair reflect the period construction and design. By 1984, the Preservation Society completed most of the interior and the Perennial Garden Club finished roughly half of the garden. The club populated the grounds with 鈥渙f the era鈥 plants and herbs and ran a crushed Oyster shell walkway from the back door to the back gate. To the tune of $125,000, the renovations included an upstairs office for the Preservation Society. Unfortunately, a building fire in December 1999 caused major damage to the offices and the building鈥檚 roof. Neighbors quickly helped remove a 200-year-old grandfather clock before the ceiling collapsed. Firefighters had to destroy much of the roof to contain the blaze and left the first floor parlor with severe water damage. At the time, the society had been raising money for a maritime museum and visitors鈥 center. With the cost of the damage, those hopes had to be postponed. Celebrating the 250th anniversary of its completion in 2015, the house tells the stories of the rise of Fell's Point as a major East Coast port, the growth then decline of American industrial technologies, the diverse and multiple waves of immigration for over 180 years and now the rise of a modern, vibrant historic seaport neighborhood.
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The Roger Brooke Taney Monument is not explicitly a Confederate monument. However, Taney is most famous for his decision in the Dred Scott case, which advanced slavery in America and is tied to the Confederate cause. Taney served as the chief justice of the Supreme Court for nearly 30 years beginning in 1836. During that time Taney oversaw the ruling of the Dred Scott decision that stated that African Americans could not be considered as citizens, and by extension could still be considered as property even if they were in a free state.
This sculpture is an 1887 copy of an 1872 original that was made by William Henry Rinehart. Rinehart was one of the first well-renown sculptors in Baltimore, and the Rinehart School of Sculpture was established after his death.
The original sculpture was commissioned by William T. Walters for the Maryland State House in Annapolis, where it is still located. Fifteen years later, Walters had this copy made and gave it to the City of Baltimore. Baltimore's Taney Monument resides in Mount Vernon Place because of Taney鈥檚 close relationship to Francis Scott Key, who frequently visited and eventually died there.
In 2016, the Special Commission to Review Baltimore's Public Confederate Monuments recommended removing the Taney Monument along with the Lee-Jackson Statue at Wyman Park Dell. After the murder of a counter-protestor during a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12, 2017, Baltimore City responded to renewed calls to take down Confederate monuments by removing the Taney Monument, the Lee-Jackson Monument, the Confederate Soldiers & Sailors Monument, and the Confederate Women's Monument and placing all four statues in storage. By January 2018, the city had not yet announced any plans for the permanent disposition of the statues.
Rogers Buchanan Cemetery is hardly famous. Few visitors to the park even know where the cemetery is. Fewer still know the surprising stories of the men and women interred behind the wrought iron fence. But for those who know the history, the cemetery is at the heart of the history of Druid Hill Park as the final home to the family that built Auchentrolie as a country estate and sold it to the city in 1860 establishing in park. The earliest burial in the small plot belongs to the man who first created Auchentrolie鈥擥eorge Buchanan. George Buchanan immigrated from Scotland in 1723 and became one of the city鈥檚 founding Commissioners in 1729. Through his marriage to Eleanor Rogers, George acquired 250 acres of the whimsically named 鈥淗ab Nab at a Venture鈥 that his father-in-law Nicholas Rogers II purchased in 1716. Still not content, George Buchanan expanded to property to 625 acres and named it 鈥淎uchentrolie鈥 After his death in 1750, he was buried in the small family plot and left the estate to his son Lloyd Buchanan. Lloyd, his children, and his grandchildren all lived on the estate and were buried in the cemetery, among them a Revolutionary War veteran who served at Valley Forge with George Washington, a Confederate spy and saboteur, and a cantankerous slave-owner who created the 鈥淒ruid Hill Peach.鈥 When Druid Hill Park was sold to Baltimore for a park in 1860, Lloyd Rogers made only one stipulation鈥攖hat any living members of his family could be buried at their cemetery in Druid Hill and that the city would maintain the cemetery in perpetuity.
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The Mansion House, built by Revolutionary War Colonel Nicholas Rogers, has stood in what is now Druid Hill Park since 1801. The house is the third to stand in this location. Originally a castle known as 鈥淎uchentorolie,鈥 built by Rogers鈥 ancestors, occupied the hill but had burned sometime during the war. Rogers studied architecture in Scotland and most likely became familiar with Druids鈥 love of nature and hilltops and selected the name 鈥淒ruid Hill鈥 for his estate.
The house was initially planned to be a summer home but during its construction the family home at Baltimore and Light Streets burned and it was decided to use the Druid Hill house year-round. The Mansion remained in the Rogers family until the mid-1800s, when Rogers鈥 grandson sold the house and lot to Baltimore City for $121,000 in cash and $363,000 in City of Baltimore stock. One stipulation of the sale was that the family burial plot remain property of the family, and the plot is still in place today in the park.
The Mansion House has seen many rebirths. In 1863, during the park movement in Baltimore City, the house was greatly modified. Under the direction of John H. B. Latrobe, it was turned into a pavilion and updated in the Victorian style. By 1935, the porches were enclosed and the house became a restaurant. In the 1940s, the building was used as a day school for the Young Men and Women鈥檚 Hebrew Association.
The Zoo, which had begun developing around the mansion beginning in 1867, used the building as its bird house from the 1950s until its restoration in 1978. The restoration efforts took the house back to its 1860s design. Just last year, the Mansion underwent its most recent restoration and repair work, including much needed wood restoration and structural shoring. The building today houses the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore鈥檚 administrative offices and event rental space.
Designed by architect Edward L. Palmer, Jr. in 1925, the handsome Roland Park Apartments, now known as the Roland Park Condominium, is a significant example of Beaux Arts architecture in North Baltimore. The building was erected by the M.A. Long Company, owned by the same M.A. Long who served as President of the Roland Park Apartments Company. The garage, originally known as the "Roland Park Stables," was designed by architects Wyatt & Nolting in 1903.
Baltimore native Edward Livingston Palmer, Jr. was born in 1877, graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a Bachelor of Arts in 1899 and went on to receive a degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania in 1903. Palmer returned to Baltimore and by June 1907, he had become an architect for The Roland Park Company. In this position he contributed to the design and development of Homeland, Roland Park, and Guilford. Roland Park Apartments was converted to condominiums in 1980.
The Roland Water Tower was built in 1905 as a 211,000-gallon water tank to supply residents in Hampden and nearby neighborhoods. It was part of a complicated water supply system that included the Western Pumping Station at Druid Lake. The design by William J. Fizone is similar to the slightly larger West Arlington water tower built in the northwest section of the city.
The tower only served that purpose for a few years, however, and by 1930 the tower was taken out of service leaving a curious local landmark empty. Still the tower has endured as an icon for the nearby Roland Park community and local preservationists have organized the Friends of the Roland Water Tower to advocate for the restoration and reuse of the structure.