An early design by Mills. Washington Monument, Elevation of Front by Robert Mills. Washington Monument Competition. From MS 876: Washington Monument Papers, 1810-1843. MdHS, 1991-49-3.

This Independence Day weekend, Baltimore celebrates the rededication of its most recognizable landmark, the Washington Monument. The Mount Vernon Place Conservancy is hosting the Monumental Bicentennial Celebration on Saturday, July 4^th, a festival to honor the reopening of the nation’s first memorial to George Washington. The monument has been closed to visitors since 2010, when it was deemed structurally unsound, and has been undergoing extensive restoration work to repair masonry and cosmetic issues since the fall of 2013.

A similar scene played out 200 years ago when the Washington Monument’s cornerstone was laid on July 4, 1815. Over 25,000 people attended the groundbreaking ceremony which had all of the pomp and circumstance befitting a celebration of the Revolutionary War general and inaugural president. The local Masons turned out in full regalia. Speeches were given in honor of Washington’s legacy. The crowd sang along to renditions of “Yankee Doodle.” A 39-gun salute was fired, a shot for each year of the newly independent country. The night ended with a display of fireworks that illuminated the monument in vibrant color. In his account of the day, John Horace Pratt described the atmosphere: “Divine providence seemed to smile upon the occasion; the air was delightfully cool and the firmament serene. The evening silence and tranquility that closed the joyful turbulence of the day, formed a striking contrast, and seemed to display that sobriety of pleasure which the solemnity of the occasion demanded.”(1)

A time capsule was also buried with the cornerstone. Several glass jars holding artifacts, such as coins and newspaper clippings, were placed inside the cornerstone to commemorate the events of the day. This and another capsule from the 1915 centennial celebration were unearthed during the recent restoration process. The second capsule held similar items, including one of the earliest known photographs of the Declaration of Independence. The items will be on display at the Maryland Historical Society through December 31, 2015.

An example of one of the lottery tickets sold to raise money. Washington Monument ticket, Baltimore City Life Museum Collection, MdHS.

Work on the monument began long before the cornerstone was laid on July 4, 1815 and continued long after. A group of patriotic citizens petitioned the Maryland General Assembly in 1809 to build a monument to George Washington. The courthouse on Calvert Street was slated for demolition, and the neighbors feared an unattractive new building would be constructed in its place. They much preferred a statue of an American hero that would “stimulate the young to emulation, to noble and honorable actions.”(2)  The legislature agreed and appointed twenty three notable Maryland men to a Board of Managers which would supervise the monumental task of raising money to build the structure and approving designs. John Comegys served as president until his death in 1814 and was replaced by James A. Buchanan, who held the post until 1819. Robert Gilmor, Jr. took over the position after Buchanan resigned and served until the committee dissolved.

Godefroy’s triumphal arch, 1810. Baltimore City Life Museum Collection, CB5471, MdHS. (REFERENCE PHOTO)

The Board of Managers’ first task was to raise money for design and construction. The Maryland legislature allowed for a lottery system to raise $100,000. The public could purchase tickets to fund the edifice. They would then be entered into a drawing to win various cash prizes. A series of six lotteries raised more than the desired amount for the project, but final expenditures far exceeded the proposed budget.

French-born architect J. Maximilian Godefroy was initially approached to design the shrine.  Godefroy had recently designed the St. Mary’s Seminary Chapel in Baltimore, which suggested his ability to create a fittingly reverent monument. He submitted five different designs, including one that held true to his French heritage. He presented a triumphal arch, reminiscent of the Parisian L’Arc de Triomphe, bearing military symbols and a statue of George Washington dressed in Greek or Roman garb. His other ideas included a fountain covered by a rotunda, a rotunda with a statute of Washington standing atop the cupola, and a square featuring architectural trophies, or symbolic statues, and a statute of the president. The drawing of the arch appears to be the only surviving proposal.

Despite the variety of ideas, the Board was apparently dissatisfied with the selection. The members decided to solicit designs from other architects. So in 1813, a competition was advertised to find the best design that cost less than $100,000 to build. Fearing a lack of American talent, the Board’s design committee opened the contest to European artists for consideration. The winner would receive $500 for his work and supervise the construction of the monument.

Ramee’s arch, 1813. Baltimore City Life Museum Collection, CB5472, MdHS.

The Board received several entries from distinguished architects from both the United States and Europe, though perhaps not as many as expected or desired. War broke out between America and England which may have distracted would-be applicants from entering the contest. Godefroy resubmitted his triumphal arch rendering for further consideration. Another French architect Joseph-Jacques Ramée entered a strikingly similar design: a triumphal arch featuring a statue of the honoree. Ramée had only recently arrived in the United States but was already a sought after builder. He was commissioned to design an estate in New York state in 1813. When the job fell through, he offered his talents in Philadelphia and Baltimore, where he built fine homes and estates. He later returned to New York to plan new buildings for Union College in Schenectady, for which he is best known.

Rogers’ submission the competition. Architectural drawings, Museum department, MdHS. (REFERENCE PHOTO)

Nicholas Rogers, a Baltimorean and amateur architect, may have also presented a plan. His entry was submitted anonymously but scholars believe the rendering reflects his style. Rogers was not a classically trained architect or builder but an avid dilettante. His main work was his own Baltimore estate, Druid Hill. His vision paid tribute to both Washington’s distinguished career and his Masonic association. The tall, thin obelisk monument prominently featured emblems such as the sun, moon, and Master Mason, as well as numerical symbols incorporated in the design that would be apparent to the indoctrinated. Rogers was perhaps inspired to participate because of his own service in the American Revolution and personal acquaintance with Washington.

The drawing Latrobe submitted for the Richmond Monumental Church design competition. Architectural drawings, Gallery Department, MdHS. (REFERENCE PHOTO)

Benjamin Henry Latrobe, often referred to as the father of American architecture, may have decided to participate in the competition as well. In 1810, the British architect ensured his friend Godefroy that he would not enter a design out of respect for his superior skill. However, an unsigned pyramid concept was received which board member, Robert Gilmor, Jr., believed to be that of Latrobe. By 1813, he had fallen on hard times and needed the prize money. Some scholars have attributed Rogers’ obelisk to Latrobe, but this design seems to stray too far from his aesthetics. Latrobe seemed to be an excellent candidate for the job. He designed the Baltimore Basilica, which began construction in 1806, and he served as Thomas Jefferson’s Architect of the Capitol. His entry may have been hastily considered, because the design he presented did not fit the parameters of the competition. His pyramid was much too big for the allotted space and appears to be a redesign of his submission for the Richmond Monumental Church competition. He also submitted these plans for the Washington, D. C. monument to Washington.

South Carolinian architect Robert Mills won the competition in the end. The judges decided his columnar monument best captured Washington’s legacy. They were also quite pleased that a born and raised American had the talent to design such an important shrine. Mills studied his craft exclusively in the United States unlike almost all other architects who took a European tour. His education built upon the traditional course of study undertaken by “gentlemen-architects,” which primarily relied upon theoretical knowledge, and added such practical knowledge as engineering and fire-proofing methods. His other contemporaries were builders who styled themselves as architects without the design and style education of the gentlemen-architects. Thomas Jefferson, a gentleman-architect himself, took Mills under his wing and encouraged his American tour. He also studied design under Latrobe, but the teacher’s loss of several competitions to his former student caused animosity between the architects.

Mills’ design for the Washington Monument was the most elaborate. His initial submission was accompanied by a long essay written to the board explaining the aims of his project, which may have been more influential than the designs themselves. In his essay, Mills emphasized his Americanness. He argued that, “For the Honor of our country, my sincere wish is that it may not be said; to foreign genius and to foreign hands we are indebted for a Monument to perpetuate the glory of our beloved chief.”(3)

Sketches of different column types from Mills’ notebook from his original submission. Mills, Robert, “Various Designs,” 1813, Vertical File, MdHS.

He provided six different design choices. His conception was vastly different from the monument as it stands today. It was much more symbolic in its use of trophies and statues, while at the same time, the monument was a very literal interpretation of Washington’s life. Mills envisioned an octagonal structure marked by text and graphical panels detailing the events of the American Revolution and Washington’s presidency. He knew his design would surpass the $100,000 budget, but he felt no expense should be spared for such as important relic. He put forth in his essay, “…what sacrifice of wealth, what human effort in skill & labor ought republican America to consider too great in rearing a monument to her Washington?”(4) On January 12, 1814, he presented his final entry. The new rendering carried similar details but took on the appearance of a pagoda rather than a Doric column. The pagoda would be topped with a statue of Washington riding in the Chariot of Victory.

Mills’ victory did not come without controversy. When the neighbors of the now-demolished court house saw the design, they became worried that the tall tower would topple onto their houses; so the monument was moved. John Eager Howard, former governor and Revolutionary War veteran, offered to rent out a section of his farmland for forty dollars per year, land that would later become the Mount Vernon neighborhood. At the time, his property, known as Howard’s Woods, stood relatively far from the heart of the city, but was on a hill high above the harbor. From this new site, Washington could watch over the new city from above. The courthouse square would eventually become the location of the Godefroy designed Battle Monument, a tribute to those who fought in the Battle of Baltimore against the British.

An interior view of the proposed monument. Washington Monument Papers, MS 876, MdHS.

Mills’ peers were also unimpressed with his proposed design and ruthlessly mocked his concept. Godefroy is said to have referred to the pagoda as that of “Bob the Small.” Even his former teacher had few kind words. Latrobe remarked to Godefroy in an 1814 letter that, “Mills is a wretched designer. He came to me too late to acquire principles of taste. He is a copyist, and is fit for nothing else.” Latrobe, later in the letter, acknowledged some of Mills’ talent, mainly his ability to appeal to clients, which would be “the ruin of you and me, and therefore we shall go to the wall, while he will strut in the street.”(5) Mills’ work had been chosen over Latrobe’s for Richmond’s Monumental Church, and later Mills would take the honor of designing the Capitol’s Washington Monument over his mentor.

Mills was not immune to the criticisms. According to an article by Rembrandt Peale, upon the eve of the cornerstone laying ceremony, Mills still did not have a final draft of the monument’s design. He had whittled his choices to three designs and decided to ask his friend, Peale, a renowned portraitist, to pick the best. Perhaps he doubted his own abilities. Peale’s artistic sensibilities led him to choose the simplest of the three, which featured a tall column crowned with a statue of Washington that rose from atop an ornamented base. He shared the architect community’s distaste for the elaborate pagoda with external stairs that snaked around the column to the top of the monument. Peale enlisted theater scene painter Henry Warren to paint a rendering of the edifice for the Independence Day ceremony. Peale’s involvement may have been conflated by the artist himself, but certainly suggests that Mills had at least partly reworked his design in accordance with public opinion.

Construction of the column was not completed until 1825. The project was delayed by irregular funding. Even though Mills had greatly simplified the design, the cost to build greatly surpassed the original budget. In total, the monument would cost over $200,000 to erect. The lotteries enacted to fund the venture could not raise reliable income, and eventually the laws on lotteries changed. The State took over the fundraising, and the necessary amount was raised by a combination of public monies, subscriptions, and lottery funds.

Plans for the trophies that would be placed on each corner of the monument’s base. Washington Monument Papers, MS 876, MdHS.

In 1826, the Board of Managers held another competition to find a sculptor to carve the statue of Washington, which would grace the top of the column. Italian sculptor Enrico Causici won the honor. He had sculpted several pieces for government buildings in Washington, D. C., and his bid of $9,000 appears to have been the lowest. Causici chose to depict Washington from a painting by John Trumbull which captured his resignation as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army at the Maryland State House. His figure was shaped from local marble, stood fourteen-feet tall, and weighed over twenty tons. Hoisting the statue to the top of the monument proved a significant engineering challenge, but a friend of Mills and sea captain, James D. Woodside, was able to devise of system of rigging, and the last piece of the statue was put in place in November 1829.

Even after nearly fifteen years of work, the monument was not yet complete. Mills desperately wanted to add grand architectural trophies to the corners of the base, but limited funds prevented this. As late as 1842, the Board of Managers unsuccessfully petitioned the state legislature for the additional money. The inscription to Washington on the monument was also hotly debated. Board president Gilmor frequently corresponded with former President John Quincy Adams regarding the proper wording, which would adorn the walls in bronze letters. Mills continued to add details over the years, such as the iron fencing around the base.

During this time, another much simpler monument to Washington was built in Maryland. Citizens of the Washington County town of Boonsboro banded together on Independence Day 1827 to begin construction on a dry-laid stone tower near the summit of South Mountain. The thirty-foot monument was finished in September of that year and bears the honor of being the first completed monument to Washington in the country.

Baltimore may have not gotten the lavish monument Mills had originally conceived, but gained a timeless and iconic symbol. The simpler column design was in the end a more fitting tribute to Washington, a man who eschewed ostentation and boastfulness. (Lara Westwood)

Robert Mills in 1808. (Not MDHS collection).

Robert Mills in 1808. (Not MDHS collection).

The monument before the George Washington statue was added to the top. Washington Monument Papers, MS 876, MdHS.

Proposed ornamentation for the column. Washington Monument Papers, MS 876, MdHS.

[MS876, Oversized, Folder 1, No. 1] Studies for the surmounting of the Washington Monument Column, scale 1/2 and inch to 10 feet. Not dated. Work on paper by Robert Mills. 12 x 16 inches Washington Monument Papers Collection Rejected Designs of the Washington Monument Presented April 11, 1881 by John R. Baker of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Oversized, Folder 1 Special Collections Z24.3062

Mills' final study of the monument showing the trophies which were never built. Washington Monument Papers, MS 876, MdHS.

[MS876, Oversized, Folder 1, No. 4] Study for the surmounting of the Washington Monument Column. Not dated. Work on paper by Robert Mills. 11 x 17.25 inches Washington Monument Papers Collection Rejected Designs of the Washington Monument Presented April 11, 1881 by John R. Baker of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Oversized, Folder 1 Special Collections Z24.3060

One of many letters in which former president John Quincy Adams and Board of Managers president Robert Gilmor, Jr. discussed the appropriate wording for the engraving. Letter: John Quincy Adams to Robert Gilmor, Jr, July 6, 1937, Robert Gilmor Correspondence, MS 2688, MdHS.

MS2688 Letter: John Quincy Adams to Robert Gilmore Jr. July 6, 1837 Letter 15.5 x 10 inches Robert Gilmore Correspondence Collection Special Collections Department Maryland Historical Society

One of many letters in which former president John Quincy Adams and Board of Managers president Robert Gilmor, Jr. discussed the appropriate wording for the engraving. Letter: John Quincy Adams to Robert Gilmor, Jr, July 6, 1937, Robert Gilmor Correspondence, MS 2688, MdHS.

MS2688 Letter: John Quincy Adams to Robert Gilmore Jr. verso July 6, 1837 Letter 15.5 x 10 inches Robert Gilmore Correspondence Collection Special Collections Department Maryland Historical Society

Sketch of the engravings to be added to the base. Washington Monument Papers, MS 876, MdHS.

[MS876, Oversized, Folder 3, No. 17] Plan of the description of the Washington Monument. Not dated. Work on paper by Robert Mills. 12.5 x 19.25 inches Washington Monument Papers Collection Rejected Designs of the Washington Monument Presented April 11, 1881 by John R. Baker of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Oversized, Folder 2 Special Collections Z24.3069

A family standing in the crumbled remains of the Boonsboro Washington Monument. The tower has been rebuilt several times. Washington County--Monuments & Memorials--Washington Monument (Boonsboro), August 1927, Subject Vertical File, MdHS.

SVF WaCo Monuments & Memorials Washington Monument (Boonsboro) August 1927 Unknown photographer 2.75 x 4.5 inch photo print Subject Vertical File Maryland Historical Society Special Collections Department

The Washington Monument as it looked in 1835 before the Mount Vernon neighborhood was built around it. Small Prints, MdHS.

Small Prints Washington Monument Baltimore Drawn by T.K. Wharton Engraved by James Smillie Printed by A. King Drawn and engraved for the New York Mirror 1835 10 x 8 inch lithograph Verso reads: “Frame marked ‘For my daughter Mary Ogle Jennings’” “104” Small Prints Collection Maryland Historical Society Special Collections Department

Sources and Further Reading:

(1) Pratt, John Horace. An Authentic Account of All the Proceedings on the Fourth of July, 1815, with Regard to Laying the Corner Stone of the Washington Monument, Now Erecting in the City of Baltimore Accompanied by an Engraving of the Monument … and a Biographical Sketch of. Baltimore: John Horace Pratt, 1815.

(2) Miller, J. Jefferson. “The Designs for the Washington Monument in Baltimore.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians XXIII, no. 1 (1964): 19-28.

(3) Hoyt, Jr., William D. “Robert Mills and the Washington Monument in Baltimore.” Maryland Historical Magazine 32, no. 1-4 (1939).

(4) Ibid.

(5) Latrobe, Benjamin Henry, Jeffrey A. Cohen, and Charles E. Brownell. The Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Vol. 1. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1994.

Alexander, Robert L. “Nicholas Rogers, Gentleman-Architect of Baltimore.” Maryland Historical Magazine 78, no. 2 (1983): 85-105.

Alexander, Robert L. The Architecture of Maximilian Godefroy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.

Bryan, John Morrill. Robert Mills, Architect. Washington, D.C.: American Institute of Architects Press, 1989.

Gallagher, H. M. Pierce. Robert Mills, Architect of the Washington Monument, 1781-1855. New York: Columbia University Press, 1935.

Mount Vernon Place Conservancy.

Peale, Rembrandt. “Reminiscences. Desultory.” The Crayon: 5.

Rusk, William Sener. “Washington Monument.” In Art in Baltimore: Monuments and Memorials …, 101-104. Baltimore: Norman, Remington, 1929.

Scharf, J. Thomas. History of Baltimore City and County. Baltimore: Regional Pub., 1971. 265-267.

Union College. “A plan, a campus, a legacy.”

Washington Monument Papers, MS 876, Maryland Historical Society

Andrew Boyd Cross was a strongly polarizing figure in the divisive public issues confronting the United States, the state of Maryland, and the city of Baltimore in the nineteenth century. Following his death in 1889, his alma mater Princeton Theological Seminary eulogized Cross in its annual alumni report:

“He was a man of decided character, of clear and strong convictions, which he was ever ready to maintain in the face of any opposition. He was scrupulously faithful to every obligation; careful of the welfare of his family; yet ever ready, with a tender heart, at the cost of great self-denial, to help and comfort the poor and distressed; a man of strong faith, high resolves, and abundant toil; a decided friend of Negro education, and many years a Trustee of Lincoln University.”(1)

Unlike their Presbyterian brethren in New Jersey, Catholics in Maryland held a decidedly different view of the character and convictions of Andrew B. Cross. For example, at the height of Cross’s anti-convent petition campaign in 1856, The Metropolitan, the monthly magazine published under the auspices of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, editorialized:

“We knew that there were rancor and bitterness in the minds of a few, quite sufficient to lead them to speak against Catholics, and even to traduce their institutions, but we scarcely believed that there was in our midst a single individual with hardihood and effrontery enough to become the bearer of a petition to the Legislature of our State, invoking that body to violate the sacred rights of its citizens, and invade the home of defenseless females.”(2)

My on-going project for the Lord Baltimore Fellowship investigates the life and writings of the antebellum reformer and anti-Catholic agitator, the Reverend Andrew B. Cross.  This report represents my preliminary efforts to outline the key events of his life, to identify the major signposts in his long reform career, and to formulate relevant research questions to understand this interesting, civically-active, nineteenth-century Marylander.

The Constitution and Address of the Baltimore Temperance Society, cover, 1850, MdHS.

Andrew B. Cross was an ordained Old School Presbyterian minister from Baltimore whose public life comprised many overlapping careers—church pastor, home missionary, journal editor, public lecturer, and pamphleteer. He used his pen to promote numerous antebellum causes, including the temperance, colonization, public school, and nativist movements. Cross became a charter member of the Baltimore Temperance Society in 1829 when he was just an eighteen-year-old college student. From the 1830s through the 1860s, the time period when he was most active and prolific, he railed against various social “sins” that he believed endangered American society, whether those sins were drink, slavery, ignorance, Popery, or secession. During the Civil War, Cross strongly supported the Union cause and served as a member of the Christian Commission which provided medical, social and religious services to Union soldiers. In the Reconstruction era, he became a promoter of higher education for African Americans and for women, connecting the latter concern with his long-standing opposition to the Catholic Church.  Until his death in 1889, Cross remained an active member of both the Presbyterian synod in Maryland and of the Maryland State Temperance Alliance.

Despite the fact that Cross had his finger in many reform pies for most of his long adult life, no biography of him has been published. His multifaceted career permits reassessing the classic interpretations about the roots of reform that are drawn from a focus on evangelicals in the North.  As the “Middle Ground” between the North and South, study of reform in Maryland offers the opportunity to revisit the historiography about antebellum reform by examining a region that is less featured in the literature to see how its example may challenge or complicate standard interpretations.  Some questions this project seeks to answer are: What motivated Cross to become an activist?  How did his religious beliefs shape his reform agenda?

For example, although a Presbyterian clergyman like Rev. Charles G. Finney, Cross was at odds on a number of theological issues with that famous preacher whose revivalism in the “Burned-Over District” of Western New York State spurred his converts to some of the more radical reform movements of the era. In contrast, the reform goals supported by Cross tended to be more conservative in its social purpose, especially on matters of race and gender. What were the connections between Cross’s involvement with temperance, colonization, public education and his anti-Catholicism?  Why was the state of Maryland more receptive to reform activity than most other slave states? In answering such questions, my goal is to examine Cross’s life and career as a case study of a moral and social reformer in the Upper South. Like many, perhaps most, antebellum reformers, Cross usually failed to achieve his ultimate goals.  What interests me about Cross is less his lasting accomplishments as a reformer than his seeming ubiquity in local reform circles. From his base in Maryland, he participated in and commented on many of the most divisive cultural issues confronting Americans in the antebellum and Civil War eras.

Presbyterian Pioneers. A Settlement, cover, Andrew Cross, 1886, MdHS.

Although Cross left a large collection of public writings, there is no extant cache of personal papers and correspondence, at least not one that I have discovered.  Neither are there any extant issues of the Maryland Temperance Herald, the monthly organ of the Maryland State Temperance Society, for the years (1845-1849) that Cross served as both the editor of the magazine and the Corresponding Secretary and Agent of the society.  Such gaps in the record not only make examination of the private man problematic but also leave important aspects of his public life sketchy, and may explain why no biographical study of him has yet appeared.

In March 1855, The Washington Star described Cross succinctly as a “somewhat noted controversialist, of Baltimore.”(3) This is an accurate characterization of him on all counts. First, Andrew Cross was a native of Baltimore and lived nearly all of his life in the city and surrounding county. He was born on November 12, 1810, to William Stuart, a prominent lumber merchant of the city, and Jane (Boyd) Cross. After attending school in Nottingham, Maryland, for a year, Cross completed his primary education at Dr. Craig’s Academy in Baltimore.  A key turning point in his life occurred in May 1827, when Cross was sixteen and attended a religious revival held by the Rev. John Breckinridge, which led to Cross becoming a member of the Second Presbyterian Church of Baltimore. That fall, after briefly enrolling at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, he entered the College of New Jersey in Princeton. Following graduation in the spring of 1831, Cross entered the Princeton Theological Seminary in the fall of that year. In fall 1833 a year before graduation, Cross left seminary for unknown reasons. Nevertheless, in January, 1834, he was licensed to preach by the Presbytery of Baltimore, and ordained to the ministry in August, 1837. Cross then accepted a call to Bethel Church, Harford County, where he served as pastor until June 1845. After leaving Bethel, Cross devoted himself to missionary work, preaching widely and establishing new churches in the Baltimore area.

Second, Cross began his career as a “controversialist” at age twenty-four in January 1835, with publication of the first issue of The Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, a monthly journal he co-edited with the Rev. Robert J. Breckinridge for the next seven year.  The title of the periodical is somewhat misleading because its actual purpose was to monitor the progress of “Romanism” in Protestant America in general and to report on “the Papal Controversy in Baltimore” in particular, a cause to which Cross would be dedicated for the rest of his life.(4) In 1853, for example, Cross would be a leader in the “Friends of the Schools,” an ad hoc committee of local Protestant clergymen formed in opposition to the Kerney Bill which sought tax money for Catholic schools in the state. Most notoriously, he would single-handedly galvanize a state-wide grass-roots petition campaign for government inspection and regulation of Roman Catholic convents, or “priests prisons for women,” a crusade he first championed two decades before in the Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine.(5)

Third, it is also fair to call Cross a “somewhat noted” public figure, for it must be admitted that he never became national personality like some of his better-known colleagues in the Presbyterian ministry.  For example, Cross never gained the renown or influence within the church or in the larger society as did John and Robert Breckinridge, his mentors in theology and in journalism, respectively. Nor did Cross attain the national notoriety of two of his former classmates at Princeton Theological Seminary: the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy, an anti-Catholic and anti-slavery editor martyred in Illinois; or the Rev. Nathan L. Rice, an anti-Catholic editor and colonizationist from Kentucky, who was called to the pulpit of the prestigious Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City. 

If Cross was less known nationally, however, that does not mean he lacks historical significance.  He was a ubiquitous figure in church and reform circles in Maryland and the District of Columbia from the 1830s through the 1860s, and he remained active in those fields for two decades thereafter.  The causes he championed at the state and local level reflected and sometimes helped shape developments in the national level.  Rather than a professional reformer, Cross was more an “amateur,” in the best nineteenth-century sense of that term. For Cross his reform activity was more an avocation, an outgrowth of his religious commitment and ministry, rather than a vocation in itself. His reform activities were coupled with but also subordinate to his primary duties as a pastor and a missionary. In this way, Cross’s career as a “part-time” reformer was perhaps more typical of his fellow civic-minded clergymen rather than that of full-time reformers like the radical abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips.

Woman – Man’s Help-Meet, cover, Andrew Cross, 1867, MdHS.

Surprisingly, for one otherwise so prolific Cross never produced a full-length book. Instead, he favored the pamphlet form, expressing his strongly held opinions on public questions in over a dozen, usually lengthy, publications, Cross published his earliest known pamphlet in 1838 when he was twenty-seven years old, and his last one appeared nearly a half century later when he was seventy-five. Most of them began as sermons delivered in various churches or public halls in the Chesapeake region, and copies of all but two of them can be found in the Maryland Historical Society Library.

Ever quick to seize upon some current event—be it publication of Maria Monk’s notorious Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery at Montreal (1836), the 1848 Revolutions in Europe, or the Battle of Gettysburg (1863)—Cross sought to instruct his readers on the larger social, political, historical, and especially, theological, truths it demonstrated.  Many adjectives might justly describe his prose style, especially when he targeted the Roman Catholic Church—erudite and pedantic, self-righteous and humorless; extreme and outrageous, but seldom dull. In his roles as a magazine editor and a pamphleteer, he took full advantage of the new technology of the communications revolution of his own time to spread his message.

Were he were alive today, I have no doubt that Andrew B. Cross would embrace twenty-first-century social media to the same end. He would be an inveterate blogger on the Internet, and probably a frequent contributor to the Maryland Historical Society’s Underbelly. I wish to express my gratitude to the entire staff of the Maryland Historical Society for their assistance during my time on the premises. Special thanks in this regard go to Damon Talbot, Special Collections Archivist, and to Pat Anderson, Director of Publications & Library Services. (Joseph G. Mannard, Lord Baltimore Fellow, 2014)

Dr. Joseph Mannard is a Professor in the History Department at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He is a specialist in 19th-century U.S. social history, with strong interests in the antebellum reform period and in religious history. His research deals with the lives of Roman Catholic nuns in the 19th century, a topic that illuminates the histories of charitable work, education, immigration, and women.

Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, oil on panel by Francois Kinsoen, 1817. MdHS, XX.5.72.

Elizabeth “Betsy” Patterson Bonaparte was just another name to me when I arrived at MdHS in 2012 as a volunteer curatorial assistant.  Since that time I have come to know her intimately—not as the celebrity she was, but as a real-life woman.

I first got to know Elizabeth (she never referred to herself as “Betsy”) through contents of a red trunk in the MdHS collection.  The important things, gowns, lace handkerchiefs, shawls, etc., had been removed, catalogued and stored, but three boxes labeled “scraps of lace” had been wadded up and stuffed away as seemingly insignificant.  I discovered that these were hardly scraps!  There were collars, cuffs, sleeve edgings, and trimmings of all sizes—in total, well over 300 separate pieces—everything from delicate handmade bobbin and needle laces and embroideries to machine-made and “chemical” laces.  Many showed evidence of once having been attached to garments and some had been carefully mended.

After sorting and cataloguing the laces, I moved on to other storage boxes in the Bonaparte collection where, in addition to exquisite gowns and finely-made undergarments and accessories, I found lengths of ribbons, remnants of dress fabrics and pieces of dresses which had been cut apart at their seams.  Who would keep such things, and why?

Uncatalogued remnants of silk gowns. Elizabeth fashioned a workbag (59.92.15) using the fabric on the left for her great-niece, Alice Patterson Harris. The bag is on display in the exhibition, MdHS Museum Collection. (Reference Photo)

Elizabeth kept meticulous records throughout her life, and it was through the examination and transcription of these journals in the Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte Papers, Ms 142, Box 13A that I came to know more about her.  At first, I only paid attention to the entries which were related to clothing.  I was not surprised to find such entries as “4½ yds Pink Ribbon” purchased in Liverpool in 1815 or 2½ meters of black lace in Paris in 1840 or payment of $2.38 to a [Ms] Rogers in Baltimore on 10 October 1848 for “making 6 shifts.”  Then there were the inventories she made whenever she travelled (eight separate trips to Europe over the course of her lifetime—the final one in 1863, at the age of 78!) which allowed me to track specific garments and even match them to items in the collection.

As a long-time student of needlework, textiles and costume history, I had a different perspective from the biographers and historians who have written about Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte over the last 150 years.  I saw her as a woman who truly loved fashion and freely spent to acquire what she wanted.  She was buying the best quality, going so far as to record her “imitation” laces separately from her “valuable Point, Real lace, valencien [valenciennes] laces.”  She kept all of these things for their beauty and their value, whether it was sentimental or monetary.  To me she was a kindred spirit, and I envied her for her “stash!”

Detail of handmade needle lace cuff shows evidence of careful mending, MdHS Museum Collection, xx.5.565. (Reference Photo)

These uncatalogued gold-embroidered fragments with silk posey embellishment came from a costly muslin gown, likely purchased for Elizabeth by then-husband Jérôme Bonaparte. “Gold and Silver Muslin” shows up in numerous inventories, the latest dated 1862, MdHS Museum Collection. (Reference Photograph)

Further investigation of her journals and correspon-dence as an aid to Alexandra Deutsch, author of the forthcoming MdHS publication, Woman of Two Worlds: Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte and Her Quest for an Imperial Legacy, yielded some very interesting and personal facts. Elizabeth used tobacco. As early as 1815 she purchased snuff (as well as mutton, eggs, and bread) in Cheltenham, England, and recorded purchases of “tabac” (1840-1843) in Paris, New York and Baltimore.  She attended plays, went to the circus and kept menus of dinners (1850-1868) in London and Baltimore.  She paid silver manufacturer Samuel Kirk and Sons in Baltimore to have her spectacles exchanged.  Cleanliness was important and she wrote that “To Clean Gloves / Lay the gloves on a clean Board / make a mixture of Fuller’s Earth & Powder of alum very dry and pass them over every side with an indifferent stiff brush.  Then sweep off that & sprinkle them with Bran & whitening a considerable time & then dust them well.” (1814)

Marquis de Lafayette to Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, not dated, MS 142, Box 9, MdHS. (Reference Photo)

As evidenced by her correspondence, Elizabeth knew many of the notable figures of her day, including John Jacob Astor, Dolley Madison, and Thomas Jefferson.  About to embark on her first trip to Europe after the fall of Napoleon in 1815, Elizabeth sought letters of recommendation.  Jefferson replied that he was sorry, but it had been 30 years since he was last in France and everyone he knew was dead.  She had strong opinions about people which, in her later years, she annotated in red ink in the margins of her books, journals, and correspondence.  My favorite is an undated RSVP from the Marquis de Lafayette.  Elizabeth was apparently not too upset by his regrets, because she wrote across the bottom:  “whom I never admired. EP”

Well, I have come to admire Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte.  I will miss our weekly visits when the book is at the publishers, and the contents of her trunks are finally catalogued and carefully put away into archival storage. (Barbara Meger)

Barbara Meger is a volunteer with the Museum Department. She has provided extensive research for the forthcoming MdHS publication, Woman of Two Worlds: Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte and Her Quest for an Imperial Legacy by MdHS Chief Curator Alexandra Deutsch.

An E.J. Gallagher Realty Company bus in front of Ednor Gardens.
E.J. Gallagher Realty Company Bus in front of homes in Ednor Gardens, ca 1927, E.J. Gallagher Collection, BCLM Collection, MdHS. [Reference photo]

While still a youth Gallagher apprenticed himself as a carpenter and in the decades that followed became one of Baltimore’s premier builders. He was also an amateur painter and earned a law degree upon graduating from Baltimore College Law School at the end of the 1890s. Gallagher’s first building venture on his own was in the Canton section of Baltimore in July 1888, when he obtained two lots in exchange for conveying the ground rents to the prior owner of the land, the Canton Company. The “ground rent” law in Baltimore and throughout Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania was an English Freehold carry over. As practiced in Baltimore, a buyer of a new home could not purchase the land on which their home was built, but had to pay the owner of the land a certain annual dollar rent for five years. At the end of that period, an offer would be made to the home owner to buy the land at a predetermined price. If not purchased at that time, the home owner would pay the annual rent as long as they lived in the house.

Gallagher quickly sold the Canton houses, nearly as fast as the four months it took for him to build them. The combined $1,350 sales price for both of the houses netted him $500. At a time when thousands of immigrants were arriving in Baltimore, Gallagher’s entrance into the house building business couldn’t have been better timed.

Gallagher used the ground rents again when he built 19 homes on Fayette Street near Patterson Park. The Patterson family gave Gallagher title to seven lots, allowing him the ability to obtain construction financing—in return they would collect the ground rents on the more expensive homes on the project that were completed in 1891.

In 1895, in his first project working with an architect, Gallagher constructed eight houses on Robert Street, just north of North Avenue. He continued to upscale his work; these buildings, targeted for well-to-do merchants, sold for $7,000, a considerable sum  at that time.

He followed this up with another high-end project in the 2400 block of Eutaw Place. Partnering with Francis Yewell, an established developer, these homes were to be even more elaborate, featuring more expensive materials: brownstone marble, field stone, turrets, and some with balustrade balconies. These ten houses, still standing as beautiful as when they were built in 1895-96, were targeted for Baltimore’s elite. The first sold for $14,000.

Gallagher developed Saint Clair, a development of rowhouses priced specifically for the working class, in the 1920s. It is located on the 2000-2100 blocks of Belair Road opposite Clifton Park.
Saint Clair, brochure, PP302, MdHS. [Reference photo, MdHS]

Housing construction in Baltimore during this period was unique in several respects. Prior to 1799 many of the dwellings built in the city were wood framed, but because of the potential for serious fire, the city passed an ordnance that year prohibiting this type of construction. Only brick construction was allowed.

Patent Sanitary Garbage Receiver, circa 1920s, E.J. Gallagher Collection, BCLM Collection, MdHS. [Reference photo]

In 1916, a two-story house with covered front porch on Robinson Street sold for $1,350.00. It featured a combination reception room/library, hand-decorated ceiling and mantel mirror in the parlor on the first floor, a basement kitchen with enameled wash sink and enameled drain board, three bedrooms and bath on the second floor, and a hot-air furnace.

The sales brochure for the North Robinson homes highlighted a new innovation—a Patent Sanitary Garbage Receiver. A garbage can was place below the ground level in the rear yard which had an iron lid that was raised and lowered by the foot, “always giving the yard a neat appearance.”

Perhaps the E.J. Gallagher Real Estate Company will be best remembered by Gallagher’s idea to build a planned community of different types of rowhouses that suited different needs and pricing. This new development was to be known as Ednor Gardens (Named for his sons—Ed for Edward, Jr. and Nor for A. (Albert) Norman). Bounded by 33^rd Street to the south, Hillen Road to the east, Ellerslie Ave to the west. The northern boundary extends to Argonne Drive on one side, Roundhill Road on the other, with a “V” cut-out for Deepwood Road in between.

Ednor Gardens under construction, circa 1924, E.J. Gallagher Collection, BCLM Collection, MdHS. [Reference photo]

Yolando Road, Ednor Gardens, circa 1927, E.J. Gallagher Collection, BCLM Collection, MdHS. [Reference photo]

This development continued to expand during the 1930s and into the 1950s, eventually becoming Ednor Gardens-Lakeside after merging with Lakeside, an adjacent neighborhood so named because of its proximity to Lake Montebello. Gallagher’s meticulous bookkeeping allows a look into his Realty Company Company’s activities. He kept a ledger of sales, alphabetically listing the buyer’s name “and wife,” if applicable, along with the house and address. By rough count, 3,000 entries are in the one ledger. As of the 2010 Census, there are 5,185 people are living in the Ednor Gardens—Lakeside community.

From 1915 to 1931, the Realty Company sold 2,027 houses with a total value of $10,811,170 ($146,000,000 in 2015 dollars). Sales had dropped to 54 houses in 1930 due to the Depression and down further to 31 in 1931. Gallagher registered “No Sales” in the years 1932–1935.

Initially the Realty Company leased an office in the Munsey Building in downtown Baltimore, but by 1929 they had moved, along with their subsidiaries, the Acreage Land Company and the Montebello Land Company, to their own building at 3501 Ednor Road.

By this time his sons, Edward Joseph Jr. and Norman, were managing the company as well as the Eastern Supply Company, a supplier of coal and building materials, that had been acquired by their father. Edward Jr. became involved in other ventures including serving as Director of the Fidelity Guarantee Fire Corporation and the United States Fidelity and Guarantee Corporation. Ever a supporter of the arts, he established the Edward Joseph Gallagher III Memorial Collection which was housed at the University of Arizona.

E.J. Gallagher, Jr. looking at one of his father’s paintings in his house at 3804 Alameda.
3804 Alameda, Baltimore, interior, circa 1972, PP302.07, MdHS. [Reference Photo]

Villa De Gala, 6700 block of Charles Street Avenue, Towson (Villa Madrid,Guilford Manor, not dated, PP307.91, MdHS. [Reference photo]

Edward Gallagher died in 1933 leaving the business to Edward Jr. and Norman. The Acreage Land Company was dissolved in 1938, and the Montebello Land Company and their Eastern Supply Company dissolved in 1952. By this time Norman Gallagher’s sons established their own company, the Gallagher Construction Company.

Edward Joseph Gallagher’s legacy lives on in the communities he developed, in the collection of his memorabilia donated to the Maryland Historical Society, in his art collection at the University of Arizona, and his Villa Madrid that has now been placed on the registry of Historical Buildings. (Sidney Levy)

Sidney Levy is a volunteer in the Special Collections Department at the Maryland Historical Society.

Ednor Gardens, brochure, circa 1930s, PP302, MdHS. [Reference photo]

Ednor Gardens being built, ca 1924, E.J. Gallagher Collection, BCLM Collection, MdHS. [Reference photo]

Living Room, sample home, Ednor Gardens, ca 1927, E.J. Gallagher Collection, BCLM Collection, MdHS. [Reference photo]

Kitchen, Ednor Gardens, ca 1927, E.J. Gallagher Collection, BCLM Collection, MdHS. [Reference photo]

Garage, Ednor Road, Ednor Gardens, ca 1927, E.J. Gallagher Collection, BCLM Collection, MdHS. [Reference photo]

(1) Hayward, Mary Ellen and Charles Belfoure, The Baltimore Rowhouse (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 146-150

This appears to be Larry Zybysko (on top) and Sgt. Slaughter, though the ref remains a mystery man. Wrestlers on the ropes, date unknown. Joseph Kohl Collection, PP284, MdHS.

Long-time fans of professional wrestling will remember the sport’s golden age—the ’80s—when stars such as Dusty Rhodes, Bruno Sammartino, Ric Flair, Ivan and Nikita Koloff, Jake “The Snake” Roberts, and many more entertained cities up and down the East Coast. The non-televised “house shows” were the big money earners in those days, and the Baltimore Civic Center (now the Royal Farms Arena) hosted many of these, along with pay-per-view events such as several installments of the Great American Bash series. The house shows, with their lack of TV cameras and generally looser atmosphere, were a great opportunity for still photographers to get up close and personal with stars big and little.

High five! It’s Michael Seitz aka Michael P.S. Hayes. P.S. stands for “Purely Sexy,” obviously. Wrestler high fives fans, date unknown. Joseph Kohl Collection, PP284, MdHS.

Can you name this mulleted masher? Unidentified wrestler being escorted to the ring, date unknown. Joseph Kohl Collection, PP284, MdHS.

Joe Kohl was, as usual, right on the front lines of any Baltimore action. In this case, he seemed to be constantly ringside, getting shots of the wrestlers and the fans alike. In fact, the riled-up Baltimore fans spent a lot of time in front of Kohl’s lens—and among Kohl’s many wrestling pictures are several classic shots of the Baltimore “superfans” who became known around the city and beyond.

For those about to rock, we salute you. And you too, sir. Wrestling fan gives the finger, date unknown. Joseph Kohl Collection, PP284, MdHS.

Dr. X is definitely the most recognizable of the Baltimore superfans. Not to be confused with the Mexican wrestler of the same name, Baltimore’s Dr. X was a mystery masked fan, who attended many shows at the Civic Center in his signature getup—mask and T-shirt emblazoned with the same mask and his moniker.

Never mind the Whack Pack. Here’s the Superfans. Doctor X (wrestling fan) at the Civic Center, date unknown. Joseph Kohl Collection, PP284, MdHS.

Like many masked men, Dr. X’s secret identity was eventually revealed—here, an older, unmasked Dr. X reminisces about the old days with WNST host Nestor Aparicio.

Dr. X smiles for Kohl’s camera. Doctor X (wrestling fan) at the Civic Center, date unknown. Joseph Kohl Collection, PP284, MdHS.

A native Baltimorean fan who garnered attention beyond the Civic Center was Georgette Krieger, known as “The Little Old Lady at Ringside”, an elderly fan who always sat front-row and was notorious for heckling the ‘bad guys’ and even rushing the ring on occasion. Georgette traveled up and down the East Coast circuit, becoming a familiar face in New York and DC as well as Baltimore. Her antics won her several on-stage appearances; she was brought up on air to meet fellow Frenchman Andre the Giant, and the Civic Center hosted a “Mrs. Krieger Day” on which the elderly woman received a plaque and a kiss on the cheek from champ Bob Backlund.

We believe this is a photo of Georgette Krieger (standing with her hand on a man’s shoulder.) Professional wrestling fans, date unknown. Joseph Kohl Collection, PP284, MdHS.

One last Baltimore fan was known not by name or official nickname, but only by his actions—a crowd regular who made his mark by dancing in the aisles and waving pom-poms. Legend tells of another man who did a similar routine with a rubber chicken, but the Pom-Pom Man danced his way into several of Kohl’s ringside photographs. (Lane Walbert)

Wrestling fan known as the Pom-pom Man, date unknown. Joseph Kohl Collection, PP284, MdHS.

Lane Walbert is a senior at Towson University, studying photography, film, and history. She appreciates the rare chance to geek out about professional wrestling and analog photography at the same time.

Sources and Further Reading

http://www.keepingkayfabe.com/georgette-krieger-little-old-lady-ringside/

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/sports/wrestling/blog/2009/09/baltimores_dr_x_unmasked.html

Station North before there was such a thing. Street scene. Intersection of Charles Street and North Avenue, ca.1920-1930. 1994-42-083, MdHS.

In order to raise awareness of our amazing photograph collections, the H. Furlong Baldwin Library at the Maryland Historical Society has entered into a partnership with our neighbors at Digital Maryland, a collaborative, statewide digitization program headquartered at the Enoch Pratt Free Library. The first project of the new partnership was to digitize an entire MdHS photograph collection. The Julius Anderson Photograph Collection was chosen in part because of its manageable size, but also because of its obvious appeal to researchers and lovers of all things Baltimore.

Pre-”Carmageddon” Fells Point. Although we’re willing to bet that residents complained about the streets back then as well. Street scene. Broadway Market, Broadway and Eastern Avenue, ca.1920-1930. 1995-62-102, MdHS.

The Julius Anderson collection consists of over two hundred 8×10 photo prints of historic Baltimore buildings and places photographed between the 1920s and ’40s. Many of the buildings have since been demolished but some remain standing and have been repurposed. The photographer’s identity in this collection is unknown as is the purpose of the photographs.  Anderson acquired the collection and subsequently donated it to the Baltimore City Life Museum in 1994 and 1995, before it found its way to the Maryland Historical Society in 1998 when the BCLM folded.

In the latter half of the 19th century, this land belonged to the Dulin Family before they sold it to the Maryland Casualty Company. The firm moved into the building in 1922 and vacated in the late 1960s. After MCC vacated, architect Donald Lee Sickler was hired to turn it into a shopping mall, adding an extra 40,000 square feet. Named the Rotunda, the building opened in 1973 with a grocery, drugstore, cafeteria, and a movie theater. Street scene. Maryland Casualty Company (701 West 40th Street, ca.1920-1930. 1995-62-071, MdHS.

These 17 images are just the tip of the iceberg. The collection in its entirety can be viewed here at Digital Maryland as well as here on MdHS’s web site. Our hope is that it will be easier for people to find our images and then want to use them in books, documentaries, web sites, and any number of mediums. The modest permission fees that MdHS charges for usage helps us to preserve this collection and others like it. You can help. Please enjoy and share widely. (Joe Tropea)

This view of the Inner Harbor features automobiles, horse-drawn wagons, an auction, the Keystone Electric Company, the New Fountain Hotel (122 East Pratt Street), the Neudecker Tobacco Company, and the American Oil Company. Elevated street and harbor view looking north-northeast along Light Street, ca.1920. 1995-62-038, MdHS.

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Old Lexington Market. Looking west on Lexington Street, at the corner of Eutaw Street. Street Scene (elevated view). Lexington Market, ca.1920-1930. 1995.062.060, MdHS.

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Maryland Penitentiary (Fallsway at Madison Street), ca.1920. 1995-62-035, MdHS.

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This building no longer exists. BCPD HQ was razed to connect the JFX to President Street. This was the northwest corner of Fallsway and Fayette Street. Baltimore City Police Department Headquarters. 100 Fallsway, ca.1920-1930. 1995-062-054, MdHS.

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Charles Village before it was a bustling “College Town” with pizza by the slice and dedicated bike lanes. Street scene. Charles Street and West 32nd Street, c.1920. 1995-62-016-A, MdHS.

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We know… remember when is the lowest form of conversation. But still, remember when you could drive a car around Druid Lake? Street scene. Automobiles along Druid Hill Park Reservoir, ca.1925. 1994.42.100, MdHS.

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Street scene. Corner of Pennsylvania and North Avenues, ca.1922-1947. 1995-62-003, MdHS.

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Street scene. The Palace Theatre (311-317 West Fayette Street), ca. 1920-1930. 1995-62-005, MdHS.

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This shot shows the Hearst Tower—a.k.a. the Tower Building (originally built by Maryland Casualty Company which housed the Baltimore News-American), theNational Central Bank, Frank and Company Clothes, and more proof that street car lines were everywhere. Street scene. 400 block, East Baltimore Street, ca.1920-1930. 1995-62-006, MdHS.

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Once a bustling shopping district featuring Hochschild-Kohn, Stewart and Company, Berheimer-Leader Stores (later became the May Company), Read’s Drug Store, and the Century Theatre. Street scene. Looking east on Lexington Street, corner of Howard Street, ca.1920-1930. 1995-62-067, MdHS.

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Street scene (elevated view). Bernheimer-Leader Stores, ca.1920-1930. 1995-62-059, MdHS.

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The northeast corner of Howard and Lexington Streets. Stewart and Company, ca.1926. 1994.42.036, MdHS.

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The northwest corner of Howard and Lexington Streets. Hochschild Kohn and Company department store, ca.1925. 1994-42-039, MdHS.

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Howard Street at Lombard Street. The Washington, Baltimore, and Annapolis Electric Railroad Company (WB&A) terminal station, ca.1925. 1994-42-050, MdHS.

Choo! We think our birds have the flu. Neither the O’s nor the Ravens can catch a break lately, so why not spend Saturday watching free movies, eating free popcorn, perusing a massive book sale, and pretending sports don’t exist?

Here’s a small but timely sample of what you can expect:

In 2013, the National Film Preservation Foundation awarded the Maryland Historical Society a grant to preserve our film, “Ocean City Hurricane, 1933,” which captured the incredible destruction of the Maryland vacation hot spot. S. Watts Smyth of St. Louis, Missouri captured this harrowing footage of the 1933 hurricane while on vacation with his family. The Smyths had driven fifteen hours—as they did every summer—in their brand new Cadillac LaSalle to visit the beach for their annual vacation only to be caught in one of the worst weather events in Maryland history.

Ocean City flood, 1933. 4×5 inch glass negative by A. Aubrey Bodine. Reference image MC8230-E, MdHS.

On August 22, after four days of saturating rain, the hurricane made landfall. Heavy winds picked up and battered the boardwalk, pummeled the city with large waves, and destroyed the town’s railroad bridge and fishing camps. The storm’s greatest and most lasting impact was a 50-foot wide, 8-foot deep inlet that was carved through the barrier island by a continuous four-day ebb tide, flowing from the bay out to the ocean. Three entire streets were submerged at the south end of the town.

In the end, the destruction proved a boon for the town. The inlet made Ocean City the state’s only Atlantic port. The resulting commercial and sport fishing boom greatly shaped the character of the Ocean City we know today, as vacationers flocked to the seaside town in large numbers to crab and fish, and dozens of hotels and restaurants sprang up to meet their needs.

Colorlab, in Rockville, Maryland, cleaned, duplicated, rehoused, and digitized the film to ensure that this fantastic footage will be available to future generations. The NFPF grant also required a public showing of the amazing film, which inspired “Maryland on Film II.” The MdHS Library will also showcase the following films and videos from our A/V collection on October 3, 2015:

“Beatles 1964″ – A man sneaks a small movie camera into the Baltimore Civic Center. Fifty years later a video editor reimagines the experience.
“Snookered + Behind the Scenes at Hutzler’s” (1938+2009) – A Dan Deacon song is paired with a historic industrial film.
“Blueprint for Tomorrow” (c.1996) – If you enjoyed HBO’s Show Me a Hero, you don’t want to miss this BCLM-produced gem.
“Mining the Museum Lobby Tape” (1991) – Revisiting Fred Wilson introducing his amazing 1992 exhibition.
“Mayor Kurt Schmoke Flu PSA” (1998) – Baltimore! Listen to Kurt Schmoke!
“The Last TV Commercials” (1985) The last TV spots for the dearly departed News American.

The approximately hour-long program will screen at the top of each hour,  starting at 10am. The last screening starts at 4pm.

There’s also a massive USED BOOK SALE featuring 6,000 titles along with reproductions of photographs, maps and prints from MdHS’s collection this weekend so plan to spend some time.

Ocean City flood, 1933. 4×5 inch glass negative by A. Aubrey Bodine. Reference image MC8230-D, MdHS.

Detail of Charles Mason’s and Jeremiah Dixon’s A Plan of the Boundary Lines between the Province of Maryland and the Three Lower Counties on Delaware… Engraved by Henry Dawkins and James Smither. Printed by Robert Kennedy, Philadelphia. Signed and sealed by the Commisioners. 1768, Calvert Papers, MS 174, #1051, MdHS (reference photo).

It takes a shrewd fellow indeed to persuade the King of England to grant him a charter to all the land in the New World between the colonies of Maryland and New York. When Quaker William Penn II did so, he became the founder of the colony of Pennsylvania in March 1681—thereby securing repayment of his father’s loan to King Charles II of 16,000 pounds sterling (worth about $2.1 million today). But Penn’s acquisition did not go smoothly, for a boundary dispute erupted with the Calverts of Maryland, to the south, that would drag on for 82 years.

Resolution, so long in coming, gave the nation the Mason-Dixon Line, today the unofficial boundary between north and south. References to the Line permeate our culture—witness Thomas Pynchon’s 2004 novel of that name; a character in the 2006 film, “Rocky Balboa”; a shout-out in Johnny Cash’s song, “Hey Porter”; and the duet by Mark Knopfler and James Taylor (the former of the band Dire Straits), “Sailing to Philadelphia,” with lyrics recounting the journey of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon from England to resolve the dispute.

Calvert’s charter was bounded by the Potomac River to the south and the 40^th parallel of latitude to the north. Penn’s went from the 42^nd parallel south to the 40^th, with his southern boundary intersecting a circle having a radius of twelve miles from the center of New Castle. The 40^th parallel was to be the boundary between the two colonies—and because it lay five miles north of Philadelphia, Maryland could lay claim to that city.

Here problems arose: Maps of that period were based on maps done in the early seventeenth century by Capt. John Smith; on those the 40^th parallel did not intersect a circle having a twelve-mile radius from New Castle (one can easily imagine the difficulty of sorting out boundaries over a wide geographic area with no natural line of division, such as a river). Penn understandably worried about the danger of losing the city and port of Philadelphia, since it lay below that crucial 40^th parallel.

Map of the disputed area from the Articles of Agreement between Thomas and Richard Penn, Frederick, Lord Baltimore, and Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon for surveying the Maryland-Pennsylvania boundary. With map in margin [Signed by all parties (Cecilius Calvert on behalf of Frederick, Lord Baltimore).] August 4, 1763, (detail) Calvert Papers, MS 174, #166, MdHS (reference photo).

After conferences between Penn and Calvert in 1682 and 1683 went nowhere, the King’s Board of Trade and plantations issued an edict in 1685 endorsing Calvert’s claim to the boundary nineteen miles to the north, putatively giving Calvert Philadelphia.  But Calvert inexplicably failed to conduct a proper survey to authenticate the claim; the eventual border would be established 19 miles further south, with his descendants (who include this writer) deprived of land now irretrievably in Pennsylvania.

Charles Calvert, the fifth Lord Baltimore, petitioned King George II in 1731 for help in demarcating the final boundary. Again a commission was created to study the matter but was unable even to agree on how to properly instruct surveyors. The next twenty years saw more talk peppered by disputes over arcane surveying details such as whether measurements should be made by chaining up and down valleys or by straight horizontal chaining. Resolution remained elusive, for the precise location of the 40^th parallel remained an intractable issue.  Levels of cross-border violence were rising. The Astronomer Royal was asked to recommend scientific surveyors who could tackle the complex task of surveying and establishing an acceptable boundary between the two colonies, men whose experience and gravitas would definitively settle the issue.

Image from “Leading Facts of American History,” by D.H. Montgomery, 1920, E178.1.M785, MdHS )reference photo).

Enter Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. Both had long records of distinguished service at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. They signed a contract in 1763 and arrived in North America in November of that year. They would spend the next 58 months establishing enduring boundaries of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and Virginia (now West Virginia), earning enduring fame as the creators of the Mason-Dixon Line, the de facto border between northern and southern America and a disquieting reminder of our nation’s ugly legacy of slavery.

Mason and Dixon began their work at the southernmost point of Philadelphia, at the north wall of a house on Cedar Street (now South Street; the house’s location is  under I-95 north). Employing sophisticated principles of astronomy, land surveying, plane and spherical trigonometry, geometry and ground measurements—and accounting for the earth’s curvature—their expedition moved slowly and surely west (earlier surveys had marked the boundary from Fenwick Island west, to a spot equidistant between the Atlantic Ocean and Chesapeake Bay called the Middle Point, then north to Philadelphia).

Iroquois guides led the way, followed by axmen felling trees and brush and the survey party itself. Mason oversaw the astronomers; Dixon the land surveyors. The party camped some nights and spent others either under the stars or the roofs of local farmers, who happily seized the downed trees while keeping eyes on their daughters who flirted with the younger members of the surveying party. Work halted during inclement weather and when Mason and Dixon galloped off to apprise the boundary commissioners of their progress.

Charles Mason’s journal, in the National Archives, names many of the landowners the party encountered, and is replete with cryptic references that characterized their work: “At 49 miles 7 chains crossed the lower Road leading from York to Joppa and Baltimore,” reads an entry on July 24, 1765, as the surveying party passed through Baltimore County. Entries five days later: “at 57 miles 66 chains a Branch of Gunpowder” and “at 58 miles 58 chains Mr. Valentine Vant’s House 50 links North.” (A chain measured a distance of 22 yards, while links marked inches.) Wooden posts pounded into the ground served as mile markers.

Mason-Dixon Line, Milestone No. 0 (N.E. Cornerstone, North line 87), 1931.
Harwood Mason-Dixon Line Marker Collection, PP37.2.3, MdHS (reference photo).

Mason-Dixon Line, Milestone No. 30, Crownstone in fence line ina avalley a mile west of Cardiff, Maryland, 1931.
Harwood Mason-Dixon Line Marker Collection, PP37.5.4, MdHS (reference photo).

Stone markers, arriving by barge from England and hauled overland to replace the wooden stakes, were set every mile. The stones were engraved with “P” on the north side and “M” on the south; “crownstones” were set every five miles. Mason and Dixon completed their work in October 1767, having surveyed 233 miles, 17 chains and 48 links, ending just northwest of Oakland, Maryland. Worry over the bellicose intentions of the Lenape Indians, who were being pushed from their lands by settlers, brought an end to their remarkably enduring task.

Several events in October will mark the 250^th anniversary of Mason and Dixon’s passage through Baltimore County in the summer of 1765. The Mason and Dixon Preservation Society, the Preservation Alliance of Maryland and Baltimore County will erect a replica stone at Larry Malone’s Mason-Dixon Farm, which has 75 acres in Pennsylvania and 25 in Maryland (the original stone marker number 49 is in the farm’s wheat field, 200 feet west of Interstate 83, accessible for public viewing). The Maryland Historical Trust will erect a sign that describes the meticulous and complex work these two English surveyors and their men performed that summer.

The Bird Transit.
From the collection of the Friends of Independence National Historic Park, Philadelphia, PA.

A joint conference of the Maryland Society of Professional Engineers and the Maryland Society of Surveyors will include a reception at the Maryland Historical Society on October 8—among the objects on display will be  the Bird Transit, a sophisticated surveying instrument Mason and Dixon used to determine the direction of the meridian, or true north. The Transit, borrowed from Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, likely witnessed the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence, on July 8, 1776, on the steps of Independence Hall, where in 1912 it was discovered under the floorboards. David Thaler, a Baltimore engineer who in the course of extensive research on Jeremiah Dixon’s work in England found a dozen surveys Dixon had conducted (two of which had not been seen for 200 years) and took tea with a Dixon descendant, will moderate a panel on the Transit. English surveyor Edwin Danson, the only person to have divined the details of how Mason and Dixon conducted the survey, will lecture and sign copies of his book, Drawing the Line: How Mason and Dixon Surveyed the Most Famous Border in America. (This event at the Maryland Historical Society is open only to conference registrants.) The Bird Transit will be on display until October 18.

Mason and Dixon’s receipt for services rendered for Lord Baltimore and the Penn Brothers.
Frederick, Lord Baltimore and Thomas and Richard Penn in account with Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, with receipt in full of Lord Baltimore’s moiety.(detail) February 24, 1769, MS 174, #1027, MdHS (reference photo).

The Maryland Historical Society is a rich source of original documents related to this most famous survey in American history. In its collection are two of three extant maps of the Mason-Dixon Survey, signed and sealed by the twelve boundary commissioners; the original contract signed by William Penn, Frederick Calvert and Messrs. Mason and Dixon; and the surveyors’ actual invoice for services rendered. Approximately 300 of the 1,300 documents in the organization’s Calvert Papers relate to the boundary dispute between the Calverts and William Penn.

The U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has endorsed the quality of Mason and Dixon’s work, which resolved a quarrel that lasted more than four score years and whose resolution long eluded kings and earlier surveyors and scientists. While the resolution of this dispute was no doubt a great relief to all parties, Maryland lost 4,300 square miles, and Virginia 1,100 square miles, to Pennsylvania—the outcome of, in the words of Edwin Danson, the “most ambitious geodetic survey ever conducted.” (Charles W. Mitchell)

Charles W. Mitchell is an independent historian. He is the author of “Maryland Voices of the Civil War” and “Travels Through American History in the Mid-Atlantic.”

The completed survey by Mason and Dixon.
Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. A Plan of the Boundary Lines between the Province of Maryland and the Three Lower Counties on Delaware… Engraved by Henry Dawkins and James Smither. Printed by Robert Kennedy, Philadelphia. Signed and sealed by the Commisioners. 1768, Calvert Papers, MS 174, #1051, MdHS.

A slightly ghoulish image. A girl and her dog with Poe’s remains. Poe’s Memorial Grave, October 21, 1956, A. Audrey Bodine, B209-4, Baltimore City Life Museum Collection, MdHS.

“There are some secrets that do not permit themselves to be told.”

–Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd,” 1840

The mysterious death of writer Edgar Allan Poe still haunts and fascinates his fans and biographers. The facts of his untimely passing in 1849 have been obscured and confused since he was found barely conscious in a Baltimore tavern. Even the events and location of Poe’s burial have been shrouded in enigma.

On September 27, 1849, Poe left Richmond, Virginia for New York via Baltimore and Philadelphia. He was slated to edit the work of fellow poet, Marguerite St. Leon Loud, while in Philadelphia. After he completed this work, he would travel to New York to pick up his aunt and former mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, and bring her back to Richmond to attend Poe’s wedding to Elmira Shelton. Poe never made it to New York. He was instead waylaid in Baltimore, where he met his end.

The events of the days following his departure remain tantalizingly elusive. On his way to the train to Philadelphia in Baltimore, it appears he ran into some old friends and was convinced to have a drink with them, even though he had recently joined the Sons of Temperance. That was the last anyone heard of Poe until he was found on October 3 at Gunner’s Hall, a Fourth Ward polling place, located at what is now the 900 block of East Lombard Street, in a state of stupor and disarray. Poe’s friend Joseph Evan Snodgrass and his uncle Henry Herring were summoned to fetch the near comatose bard. Snodgrass was completely shocked at the condition of his friend, later recalling, “…I instantly recognized the face of one whom I had often seen and knew well, although it wore an aspect of vacant stupidity which made me shudder. The intellectual flash of his eye had vanished….”(1) He also noted that the clothing Poe wore could not possibly be his own. Not only were they filthy, but they were cheaply made and ill fitting, which was very uncharacteristic for a man known for his smart dressing. He was taken to Washington College Hospital (later the Church Home and Hospital), where he died four days later. His illness was marked by fits of delirium and nonsensical ramblings. He repeatedly called out the name “Reynolds.” “Lord, help my poor Soul,” were his last words before he expired on October 7th.

The mystery man, himself. Edgar Allan Poe, no date, Cased Photograph Collection, CSPH 277, MdHS.

Theories abound as to what caused his death: an alcohol or drug overdose, untreated diabetes, rabies, and even murder. The official cause of death at the time was “congestion of the brain.” The common conception that Poe was a hardened alcoholic or opium addict has been disputed by scholars. He attempted suicide in 1848 by an intentional laudanum overdose, but there is little indication he used such drugs recreationally. Some biographers also claim his drinking was only sporadic or social. He would occasionally overindulge and repent with long periods of sobriety. Friends and family also reported that small amounts of alcohol would make him violently ill. His cousin, Nielson Poe claimed that Poe only had one drink and went from, “a condition of perfect sobriety to one bordering upon the madness usually occasioned only by long continued intoxication.” (2)

Statements such as this gave rise to the theory that Poe was diabetic and that he may have died in a related coma. Other medical causes such as heart failure and carbon monoxide poisoning have also been postulated. The most unusual of these being the suggestion that Poe may have died of rabies. In 1996, Dr. R. Michael Benitez, a cardiologist at University of Maryland Medical Center, studied Poe’s case at his weekly meeting of the Clinical Pathologic Conference in which the doctors would study an unsolved medical case. The patient’s case was presented anonymously, and Benitez decided Poe’s symptoms, such as hydrophobia and agitation, matched that of rabies. In a far more sinister twist,  biographer, John Evangelist Walsh, in his 1998 book, Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, claims Poe was murdered by his fiancée’s brothers, who did not feel Poe was a suitable match for their sister.

Washington Medical College, where Poe spent his final days. It later became Church Home and Hospital, and the building is currently part of the Johns Hopkins Hospital complex. Washington Medical College, ca. 1838, Works on Paper, MB3089, Baltimore City Life Museum Collection, MdHS

Poe was buried the next day in the Westminster Hall and Burying Ground. The funeral was a simple, somber affair. Less than ten people attended the graveside service, including the men who had taken to the hospital, Snodgrass and Herring, and a few family members. His mother-in-law and fiancée were not in attendance. In fact, Clemm only heard of Poe’s passing through the newspapers.

His body was placed in an unmarked grave in the Poe family plot alongside his grandfather, General David Poe. In 1860, his cousin Nielson commissioned a headstone from Hugh Sisson & Sons, but it was destroyed in a freak accident. The tombstone would be inscribed with the dates of Poe’s life and death and “Hic tandem felice condintur Reliquiae,” or “Here, at last, he is happy.” The marble yard where the grave marker was carved was situated next to train tracks to facilitate easier movement and shipping of the marble. One week before the marker was due for installation, a freight train jumped the tracks and plowed through the yard, destroying everything in its path, including Poe’s headstone. His family could not afford to have a replacement made. His plot remained unidentified; only a small sandstone block bearing the number “8” was placed at the corner of his plot to signify the location of the grave for the arrival of the headstone. But for 15 years, the little block was the only evidence of the poet’s resting place.

As the years went on, Poe’s modest burial site became overgrown with weeds and ill-tended. The public undertook a campaign to raise funds for a more fitting memorial to the great author to place at his grave. Baltimore public school teacher Sara Sigourney Rice championed the cause. She enlisted her elocution students to put on literary performances to raise money. On November 17, 1875, a grand celebration was held to mark the installation of the new monument and more prominent resting place for Poe. The statue was placed in the front of the graveyard and Poe was supposedly reburied beneath it.

However, rumors ran rampant that Poe’s remains were never placed in the new grave. Instead, the body of Philip Mosher Jr., a War of 1812 private who died of scarlet fever during the Battle of North Point, may have been accidentally dug up in October 1875 after some confusion about the location of the plots. Colonel John C. Legg Sr., former police commissioner for Baltimore City, released a report that claimed that George W. Spence, Westminster Hall’s sexton, who had attended the funeral of Poe, told him the writer’s coffin was one made of oak and lead-lined and bore a brass plate with his birth and death dates. Spence also supposedly told Legg that all of the headstones had been turned when a new entrance to the cemetery was built during the Civil War. The exhumed coffin was made of mahogany not oak. This combined with the revelation regarding the moved tombstones convinced Legg that the wrong person was buried under the 1875 stone.

The sketch of the Westminster Church’s plot book. Adding to the mystery, the church’s burial records are incomplete, and this may be the only copy of the page that indicates Poe’s burial location. MS1016 First Church Records (copy) 1872. Plot book Page 27. (reference image)

A document in the William Matthew Marine Collection (MS 1016) in the library of the Maryland Historical Society seems to support this allegation. An undated letter from James Tucker to Marine includes a sketch of Poe family gravesite from Westminster First Presbyterian Church’s (the church associated with the burying ground) plot books. The sketch suggests that if the headstones had been indeed turned, the exhumation team dug in the wrong direction, thus bringing up the body of Mosher. He also claimed Spence told the monument committee that French grave robbers had stolen Poe’s body in 1867.

However, these claims are not without controversy. The main evidence against this theory is that Poe’s grandfather David’s plot never bore a tombstone, so it could have never been turned. Poe’s uncle, Herring, claimed that he indeed procured a mahogany coffin not oak. It is also unclear why Legg would know this anecdote.

The story becomes less and less plausible as each claim is investigated, but adds another titillating layer to such a baffling and fascinating tale. So many wild claims have been made about the writer’s death and burial by his detractors and those seeking to associate themselves with his fame that it is nearly impossible to tease out the truth. The macabre nature of many of Poe’s stories certainly encouraged the public to believe the most sinister and bizarre scenarios. The mysteries of his death and burial remains unsolved, but perhaps it is a fitting tribute to an author whose tales were filled with suspense and riddles. (Lara Westwood)

In the spirit of Halloween and to honor the legacy of this great literary figure, the Maryland Historical Society will be hosting two Poe-themed events this October and November. “The Mesmeric Revelations! Of Edgar Allan Poe” is an immersive theater experience in a realm where dead, living, fact, and fiction commingle hosted in the historic home of Enoch Pratt at MdHS. The show will run from October 12 through November 22, 2015. For ticket information and show times, visit the event website. The society is also searching for a worthy Poe fanatic to take over the Baltimore tradition of the “Poe Toaster.” An American Idol-style competition will be held on November 7, 2015, complete with celebrity judges and crowd participation. Entries to audition must be received by October 23, 2015. More information about competing and attending the event can be found here.

Sources and Further Reading:

(1) Thomas, Dwight, and David Kelly Jackson. “‘For Annie’ and the Final Journey.” In The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849, 844. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1987.

(2) Ibid, 844.

“Edgar Allan Poe Museum: Poe’s Life, Legacy, and Works : Richmond, Virginia.” EdgarAllanPoeMuseum : Poe’s Life, Legacy, and Works : Richmond, Virginia.

“Edgar Allan Poe Mystery.” University of Maryland Medical Center. 1996.

Gaylin, David F. Edgar Allan Poe’s Baltimore. Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2015.

Geiling, Natasha. “The (Still) Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe.” Smithsonian.

Phillips, Mary Elizabeth. Edgar Allan Poe, the Man,. Chicago: John C. Winston, 1926.

Poe Baltimore.

Scarlett, Charles. “A Tale of Ratiocination: The Death and Burial of Edgar Allan Poe.” Maryland Historical Magazine 73, no. 4 (1978): 360-74.

“The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore.” Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore.

Walsh, John Evangelist. Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998.

Evergreen House at 4545 N. Charles Street was designed by Baltimore architect John Niernsee and his partner John Crawford Neilson in the 1850s. In 1878 the mansion was purchased by John Work Garret, President of the B&O Railroad. It remained in the Garrett family until 1942, when it was donated to Johns Hopkins University – today it serves as a museum and library.
Evergreen House, front exterior view, circa 1910, BCLM Collection, MC 7580, MdHS.

John Rudolph Niernsee (1814-1885) was one of Baltimore’s most prolific and successful architects. Over the course of his nearly 50 year career he contributed to the designs of more than 150 homes, churches, commercial and public buildings and railroad stations including Camden Station, the Greenmount Cemetery Chapel, the Carrollton Hotel, Maryland Jockey Club Clubhouse, and Grace and St. Peter’s Church. Neirnsee & Neilson, the architectural firm founded by Niernsee and his partner John Crawford Neilson in 1847 became Baltimore’s “pioneering architectural firm which set the standard for professional and design for generations to come.”(1)

Born in Vienna, Austria, Niernsee came to America in 1836, a young man educated in engineering and  architecture at the University of Prague. He joined the staff at the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad serving under its chief engineer Benjamin H. Latrobe II, son of nationally famous architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764-1820). America’s first railroad, the B&O came into being primarily as a way to compete with the newly constructed Erie Canal serving New York City. The railroad grew rapidly, extending westward over the Potomac River through Virginia to Harpers Ferry where it circled back into Cumberland, Maryland.

John Rudolph Niernsee, circa 1865-1870, PP15.5, MdHS.

James Crawford Neilson with his son Albert, circa 1860, Portrait Vertical File, MdHS.

Niernsee’s work at the B&O later became his stepping stone to a long and successful architectural career in Baltimore. When first offered a position at the B&O, Niernsee inquired what was to be the term of that position, and was told that he would be assured of at least three years of work starting at $3.00 per day with the prospect of a raise. He was to become the official draftsman of the Baltimore office.

While at the B&O Niernsee met James Crawford Neilson (1816-1900), another fledgling architect. In 1847 they opened an architectural practice together, that essentially served the B&O Railroad. This office became the first professional architectural practice in Baltimore where interns and apprentices trained and draftsmen were employed. Niernsee was a founding member of the American Institute of Architects in 1854 and he and Neilson, who joined A.I.A. one year later, became charter members of the Baltimore Chapter of the A.I.A when it was organized in 1870.

The Niernsee-Neilson partnership thrived in the years 1848-1856 creating such notable structures as the Chapel of Green Mount Cemetery, Camden Station, Evergreen House, Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church, and Church of the Holy Trinity in Augusta, Georgia. Many of their works are on the National Register of Historic Places.

In 1855, Niernsee and Neilson submitted designs to the B&O for a new centrally located railroad station in Baltimore. Completed in 1867, Camden Station, remained one of the longest serving passenger terminals in the U.S. until the 1980s.
Camden Station, not dated, BCLM Collection, MC1260, MdHS.

In 1854, Niernsee’s work at the B&O attracted the attention of South Carolina Governor John L. Manning who sent for him to investigate ongoing construction problems in the South Carolina State House. He was offered a fee of $600.00 and was awarded the project then in its’ second year of design and construction. Moving to Columbia with his family to work on the project, Niernsee remained there until 1865 during which time he earned a commission of Major in the Confederate Army. Meanwhile, his partner James Neilson remained in Baltimore where he designed a number of buildings, including the Mt. Zion Episcopal Church, additions to the Maryland Club, the American Colonization Society Building, and Aigburth Vale, a Second Empire style mansion in Towson.

In 1858, merchant and philanthropist Johns Hopkins hired Niernsee and Neilson to renovate his summer estate located in what is today Clifton Park. Their design, an Italianate villa complete with an 80 foot tall tower, was finished in the late 1850s. The estate, originally intended as the site of the Johns Hopkins University, was eventually sold to Baltimore City in 1895 for use as a public park.
Mansion House, Clifton Park, ca 1906, BCLM Collection, MC2485-1, MdHS.

Niernsee’s work as chief architect of the State House project was interrupted by the Civil War. In February 1865, Union General William Sherman and his forces invaded Columbia. The State House, still under construction, presented a very tempting target for the Yankee soldiers. Sherman’s troops wreaked havoc on the building, bombing it, shattering the ornamental sills and balustrades on the principal corridor on the first floor, and destroying Niernsee’s papers. In April 1865, occupying soldiers defaced the walls of the building, and the bronze statue of George Washington in front of the structure was pelted with rocks and hit by sharp shooters. Washington’s cane was broken during the melee and remains so today, a reminder of those terrible times. The work on the  state house project was eventually halted because of the war and the unsettling times that followed. Niernsee returned to Baltimore late in 1865 and his partnership with Neilson picked up again. They took in a number of interns who developed into prominent architects; R. Snowden Andrews, Eben Faxon, Bruice Price and for a short time, E. Francis Baldwin, who in 1872 followed in Niernsee’s footsteps as the chief architect for the B&O.

The next ten years were productive ones for the firm having received commissions to design banks, hotels, schools, and residential products, but in 1874 the partnership with Neilson dissolved and Neirnsee brought his son Frank in to the practice.

New State House, Columbia, South Carolina, not dated, PP15.4, MdHS.

Working with Johns Hopkins’ Dr. John Shaw Billings (1838-1913) the senior Neirnsee collaborated on the design of the new Johns Hopkins Hospital along with the Boston Firm of Cabot and Chandler. This, the original building at the Hospital, opened in 1889.

In 1882 Niernsee moved his family back to South Carolina so he could resume work on the State House; this time with the assistance of his son Frank. Senior developed severe stomach problems and died shortly thereafter in 1885. He is buried at  St.Peter’s Catholic Church in Columbia. After his father’s death, Frank was appointed along with some other architects to complete the structure; he remained in South Carolina until his death in 1899. In all it took 53 years (from 1854 to 1907) and a total of six architects to complete the state house project that both father and son worked on. (Sidney Levy)

Sidney Levy is a volunteer in the Special Collections Department at the Maryland Historical Society.

The Niernsee and Neilson designed Academy of Music, located in the heart of Baltimore’s theater district on Howard Street, was completed in the early 1870s. In the 1920s the building was torn down and replaced by the Stanley Theatre. The Stanley was itself demolished in 1965; today the site is a parking lot.
Academy of Music, 516 N. Howard Street, not dated (taken before 1930), BCLM Collection, CC2982, MdHS.

Greenmount Cemetery Chapel, designed by Niernsee and Neilson in the early 1850s.
Photograph, 2008, from Wikipedia.

Villa Anneslie, designed by Niernsee in 1855, was built on the grounds of the former estate of Govane Howard. It is located on Dunkirk Road in Towson. Like many of Niernsee’s creations, it can be found on the National Register of Historic Places.
Photograph, 2009, from Wikipedia.

John Rudolph Niernsee, not dated, Portrait Vertical File, MdHS.

Footnotes:

Chalfant, Randolph W. & Charles Belfoure, Niernsee and Neilson, Architects of Baltimore (Baltimore Architecture Foundation, Baltimore: 2006), viii.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s first book of poems had been considered lost to history for well over one hundred years. U-Mass graduate student Johanna Ortner shares the tale of recovering this incredibly valuable text–reblogged from Common-Place.org

Portrait, “Mrs. Frances E.W. Harper,” engraving taken from The Underground Railroad…, by William Still. (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872). [Photo taken from the web.]

My home is where eternal snow

Round threat’ning craters sleep,
Where streamlets murmur soft and low
And playful cascades leap.
Tis where glad scenes shall meet
My weary, longing eye;
Where rocks and Alpine forests greet
The bright cerulean sky.

(While Forest Leaves was published under Harper’s maiden name, Watkins, I refer to her throughout the article as Frances Harper, because she is more commonly known by her married name; further, it will avoid any confusion with her uncle William Watkins.)

In her poem titled “Yearnings for Home,” Frances Ellen Watkins Harper describes how she longs to be back home in her mother’s cot in order to pass away peacefully in the familiar surroundings of home. Harper beautifully depicts the rural landscape that surrounds her mother’s little house as a heavenly, blissful place. Those who know Frances Harper and her literary works might feel taken aback by the above-mentioned poem, because it was not printed in any of her known literary publications before or after the Civil War. Indeed, “Yearnings for Home” is only included in Harper’s first pamphlet, titled Forest Leaves, which was deemed lost to history for more than 150 years. This article introduces that long-lost publication to readers, scholars, and archivists.

A Lost Text Found

Forest Leaves by Frances Ellen (Watkins) Harper, c. 1849. Rare Books Collection, MdHS. (MP3.H294F)

As I began to research my dissertation, “’Whatever concerns them, as a race, concerns me:’ The Life and Activism of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper,” which chronicles Harper as a seminal figure in black women’s protest tradition and aims to highlight her political activism, I started in Maryland, the state of her birth. To be honest, I had no clear concept of how to go about conducting archival research on a figure like Harper, who did not leave behind, as far as we know, any personal papers, other than letters and speeches, some of which were published in newspapers, such as The Christian Recorder andThe National Anti-Slavery Standard.

I decided to begin with the H. Furlong Baldwin Library at the Maryland Historical Society, which is located in Harper’s hometown of Baltimore. Having done my secondary source reading on her, I knew that Forest Leaves was deemed lost. Call it my naiveté as a young graduate student, but I figured I might as well type in the title in the society’s catalog. Voilà, it came up, together with a collection number. Even as I stared at the number on my screen, I thought that it could not be the “real deal,” but instead was maybe a copy of the cover, or a newspaper clipping discussing the pamphlet (my naiveté knew no bounds). Fast forward to when the MdHS special collections archivist placed an envelope with the call number in front of me. I opened it up, peeked inside and wanted to let out a high-pitched squeal that I had enough sense to repress at the last second. The pamphlet slid right out of the envelope into my hands and there it was, staring me in the face. The term surreal is appropriate for how I felt when I first perused the pages of Forest Leaves. As I am writing this essay, I still catch myself looking at my copy, double-checking the cover of the pamphlet, making sure that I am not imagining the title. I have to reassure myself that I am not hallucinating: finally, scholars and students will be able to read Harper’s first published work and include it in their teachings and studies alike. Forest Leaves does not include a publication year, but the found copy of the pamphlet is likely not from the year 1845, which initially was proposed as the publishing date by other scholars, since James Young’s shop was located on Gay Street during that year, and not at Baltimore and Holliday as stated in the pamphlet. This could either mean that Forest Leaves was not originally published in 1845, or that a different printer printed it that year and no record survived. In the following year, 1846, Young printed an almanac, published by J. Moore, still citing his Gay Street address. In 1853, he printed a lecture by Harry Young on the rise in crime, and the printing location is the same as in Forest Leaves. This indicates that James Young moved his business from No. 3 Gay Street to the corner of Baltimore and Holliday Streets sometime between 1846 and 1853, and that he printed this copy of Forest Leaves during that time period. Keeping in mind that Harper moved to Ohio to teach at Union Seminary in 1851, it is safe to state that her first pamphlet was published sometime in the latter half of the 1840s, when she was in her early twenties.

A Key to Harper’s Early Life

The retrieval of Forest Leaves not only gives us an earlier starting point for Harper’s writings, but it is also the only primary source we have from her young life in Baltimore, before she joined the abolition movement in 1854 and began her decades-long career as a committed writer and activist for major social reform movements during the nineteenth century. Harper was raised by her uncle William Watkins, who took her in after she became an orphan at the age of three in 1828. Watkins was a renowned minister, educator, and avid abolitionist in Baltimore. He taught in his own school, the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth, which, according to Frances Smith Foster “was well known for its emphasis upon biblical studies, the classics, and elocution.” Harper was one of his students until she was about thirteen years old and began to work as a domestic servant for a couple who owned a bookstore in the city.

Very little is known about Harper’s childhood and young adulthood in antebellum Baltimore, where she lived with her uncle William Watkins’ family in the city’s eleventh ward. Being born in a city with the largest free black population in the nation in the decades leading up to the Civil War, Harper grew up in an environment that displayed an intimate geographic proximity to slavery, since Maryland was a slave state. While we do not have autobiographic sources by Harper describing the first—roughly—twenty-five years of her life in Maryland, it is safe to state that her uncle had a great influence in shaping the young Harper’s mind and writing development. Due to Watkins’ position as the founder of his own academy, Harper had the advantage of receiving a formal education at a time when access to schools was either greatly restricted or impossible to obtain for African American children. Leroy Graham lists the subjects taught at Watkins’ academy as “History, Geography, Mathematics, English, Natural Philosophy, Greek, Latin, Music, and Rhetoric” and describes Watkins as “a grammarian of such precision in the way of etymology, syntax, prosody, and so on, that one of his former pupils wrote humorously of the old leather strap Watkins used to correct grammar misuses.” This account of the teacher’s strict expectations allows us to safely assume that Harper not only learned basic literacy in her uncle’s school, but was also taught the composition and style that is needed to write well-developed poems. The rediscovered pamphlet testifies to Harper’s access to a strong formal education, which made her stand out from the majority of the nation’s black population, who were denied such access.

She was not the first one in her family to use the medium of print in order to have her voice heard. Her uncle William Watkins had his letters published in newspapers like Freedom’s Journal and The Liberator, discussing the need for abolition and expressing his strong dislike for colonization—the plan to repatriate all free black people to Africa. One could argue that Harper must have been familiar with Watkins’ activism and publications and perhaps this was the inspiration for her to seek to have her own work read outside of her family’s household. While the pamphlet was written by Harper herself, one has to acknowledge how her familial surroundings helped her develop and nurture her growing desire to write for public consumption.

Forest Leaves gives us insight into Harper’s desire to publish her works for a public readership while she was still living in Baltimore and had not, as yet, joined the abolition movement.

Insights into Nineteenth-century Black Print Culture and Harper’s Body of Work

The pamphlet functions as our “new” starting point for Harper’s introduction into African American literary history and allows us the opportunity to discuss how she was able to distribute her first poems within the nation’s burgeoning print culture. Forest Leaves was published by printer James Young, who founded and lead temperance organizations in Baltimore. As Patricia Dockman Anderson has shown, Young owned a printing business, but was also a leader in the Maryland temperance movement, helping to found Maryland’s branch of the Sons of Temperance organization in Harper’s hometown. According to the title page of Forest Leaves, Young’s printing business was at the corner of Baltimore and Holliday streets. An advertisement in the Baltimore Wholesale Business Directory for 1845 lists Young’s printing press at No. 3 South Gay Street and states that he would “execute every description of printing as cheap and well as any other establishment in the city.” It’s likely that the prospect of an affordable print run influenced Harper’s choice of Young’s business for her first collection of poems. Having books and pamphlet printed was not a low-cost venture for writers during that time, and Harper certainly could not have paid high prices on her domestic servant’s salary.

The publication of Forest Leaves provides a prehistory for the other literary works Harper wrote when she became one of the most well-known black women activists of the nineteenth century. After Harper left Baltimore to eventually work as a traveling lecturer for the Maine Anti-Slavery Society and later the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society during the mid to late 1850s, she published her second pamphlet, titled Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, in 1854. After the Civil War ended and slavery was officially abolished, Harper became active in the women’s rights and temperance movements and continued to publish (serialized) novels, such as Minnie’s Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph, and Iola Leroy, as well as collections of poems. Harper died in Philadelphia in 1911. Frances Smith Foster points out that “Harper’s literary aesthetics were formed during the first half of the nineteenth century, and her commitment to a literature of purpose and of wide appeal remained constant.” This constancy is evidenced by a writing style, which, we can now see, did not change much after her first pamphlet. However, while her later publications, including her novels, were certainly more political and focused on black life, her first pamphlet centers heavily on Christianity. Importantly, Forest Leaves marked the first stepping-stone of a literary career that would earn her a spot as one of the most influential and celebrated African American women writers.

A Case Study in the Politics of Authentication

Forest Leaves provides a new site to discuss the practice of authenticating black writers’ literary productions during the antebellum period. Black writers like Phillis Wheatley, Ann Plato, and Harriet Jacobs, who published their works during the 1770s, the 1840s, and the 1860s respectively, relied on well-respected community leaders/activists to write prefaces that would vouch for their intellectual writing capabilities. Harper’s own 1854 pamphlet Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects includes such a preface by none other than abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, most likely because of her emerging public persona as an abolitionist lecturer and the use of the pamphlet as a piece of literature that spoke out against the enslavement of millions of African Americans in the South. Yet Forest Leaves has no such authenticating material. Does the lack of a preface in Forest Leaves suggest that Harper did not mean for it to be published for public consumption? Or, we might ask, did she actively opt not to have an authority like her well-known uncle vouch for her authenticity as an author?

In The Underground Railroad, William Still wrote that “the ability [Harper] exhibited in some of her productions was so remarkable that some doubted and others denied their originality.” With this in mind, Harper’s omission of a preface for Forest Leaves can be read as a conscious effort to distance herself, as a young black woman in her early twenties, from white America’s desire and need to have (predominately) white men function as creditors for black intellectual publications. She could very well have viewed her pamphlet as her first foray into the literary world and was content with publishing her creative expression without someone else’s written stamp of approval.

Portrait of Frances E.W. Harper by Leroy Forney commissioned by First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia.

New Poems, and New Origins for Known Work

The content of Forest Leaves itself provides a rich new site of study for scholars of African American literature and history, and for researchers of book history and print culture. To begin with, we now have earlier versions of poems scholars are familiar with through her already known literary productions. Forest Leaves’ poem “The Soul” was republished in the Christian Recorder in 1853, according to Foster’s citation of Daniel Payne in A Brighter Coming Day. “Bible Defence of Slavery,” “Ethiopia,” “That Blessed Hope,” and “The Dying Christian” were republished in Harper’s 1854 pamphlet,Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects. Two poems from Forest Leaves, namely “He Knoweth Not That The Dead Are There” and “For She Said If I May But Touch Of His Clothes I Shall Be Whole,” were also included in her second pamphlet, but with different titles, “The Revel” and “Saved By Faith,” respectively.

Page 1 of Forest Leaves by Frances Ellen (Watkins) Harper, c. 1849. Rare Books Collection, MdHS. (MP3.H294F)

According to an advertisement in the newspaper the National Anti-Slavery Standard from June 6, 1857, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects was for sale at the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Office for 37 cents and could “be had at short notice and at the current price, by applying at this office.” Her poem “Ruth and Naomi” was included in the pamphlet’s 1866 edition. Also, “I Thirst” resurfaces, with minimal corrections from the original version in Forest Leaves, in the National Anti-Slavery Standard on October 9, 1858, and is reprinted in Harper’s 1873 edition of her publication Sketches of Southern Life. The poem “A Dialogue” was republished in the Christian Recorder on July 3, 1873, as stated in A Brighter Coming Day. While Harper republished “I Thirst” in an anti-slavery newspaper a few years after the publication of Forest Leaves, it is interesting to note that she held on to “A Dialogue” for more than twenty years before republishing it again in a newspaper. Further, the content of “A Dialogue” shares clear commonalities with her short story “Shalmanezer, Prince of Cosman,” which, according to Melba Boyd, “is concerned with the pitfalls of man’s materialism,” and is published in the 1887 edition of Sketches of Southern Life. Thus, one can see how her earliest work continued to influence and inspire her later literary productions.

Because of the pamphlet’s discovery, we know now that none of these already known poems were reproduced in their original form, but were revised in various ways for the 1854 publication. Further, most of these poems were at least one verse longer in Forest Leaves, and Harper altered punctuations as well as various words in her revisions. This discovery alters our understanding of these previously studied poems, as they now must be understood as revisions of earlier works. Harper’s choice to reprint these early works allows for the conclusion that she was, despite some alterations, satisfied with her literary productions before she formally joined the abolition movement and became one of the most well-known nineteenth-century black women writers. The fact that “Bible Defence of Slavery” was originally written for Forest Leaves testifies to the young writer’s growing activist mindset, exemplifying her critique of slavery while she was still living in Baltimore. Further, it shows her uncle’s influence on Harper’s evolving thoughts on slavery, as Watkins himself published various letters in Frederick Douglass’ Paper in which he voiced his contempt for Christians and ministers who used the Bible to justify the enslavement of millions of African Americans.

The ten new poems are, of course, exciting additions to Harper’s body of work. Half of the newly recovered poems in Forest Leaves focus on religion and Christianity, which function as dominant themes throughout her career as a writer. Harper’s focus on Christianity as a central topic in her first pamphlet emphasizes the fact that religion played—as it still does to this day—a key component in the lives of African Americans. According to Frances Smith Foster, biblical studies were part of the Watkins Academy’s school curriculum.

William Watkins was also a minister at Baltimore’s Sharp Street Methodist Episcopal Church and thus religion was probably a central part of his family’s life, which is reflected in the Christian themes of most of the poems in Forest Leaves. Further, Harper stays within the limits of female respectability by writing about religion, which is not surprising for a young, free black woman who was consciously defying societal norms by publishing her literary works for a potentially broad audience. This fact is further underlined by her use of romanticism and sentimentalism in the poems “Let Me Love Thee” and “Farewell, My Heart Is Beating.” These works could be expressions of a young Harper’s awakening sense of love and romance, something she did not address again in her subsequent poems; by exploring these topics in her writing, she again remains within the boundaries of proper femininity, while expressing herself through the public medium of print culture.

In sum, Forest Leaves represents a new vista for scholarship on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper by not only expanding the cannon of her literary work, but by also adding to a broader genealogy of antebellum black women’s literature. Writing in the decades leading up to the Civil War, African American men and women affirmed and fought for their right to be seen as full citizens in a country that continuously portrayed them as inferior and lacking in intellectual capabilities. Education became one of the crucial pillars of the black freedom struggle. Due to people like Harper’s Uncle Watkins, the succeeding generation of black activists, which included Harper, were able to put their demands, thoughts, and ideas into writing, defying stereotypes. Forest Leaves is illustrative of the success of the antebellum black fight for literacy and education, while adding to the field of early African American literature. (Johanna Ortner)

Pages 6 & 7 of Forest Leaves by Frances Ellen (Watkins) Harper, c. 1849. Rare Books Collection, MdHS. (MP3.H294F)

Johanna Ortner is a doctoral candidate in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Originally from Scheibbs, Austria, her dissertation project is titled “‘Whatever concerns them, as a race, concerns me:’ The Life and Activism of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.”

Further Reading

Melba Boyd’s Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E.W. Harper 1825-1911 (Detroit, 1994), Frances Smith Foster’s A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader (New York, 1990), and Maryemma Graham’s Complete Poems of Frances E.W. Harper (New York, 1988) are essential to learning more about Harper’s life and literary works. In regard to Harper’s recovered serialized novels Minnie’s Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels by Frances E.W. Harper (Boston, 1994), edited by Frances Smith Foster, as well as Eric Gardner’s article “Sowing and Reaping: A ‘New’ Chapter from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Second Novel” (Common-place 13:1, October 2012) are crucial reads. Hilary J. Moss’s book Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America (Chicago, 2009) includes a detailed section on black educational activism in Baltimore, focusing on Harper’s uncle, the minister and educator William Watkins. Also, in Baltimore: The Nineteenth Century Black Capital (Washington, 1982), Leroy Graham dedicates one chapter to a biographical study of William Watkins and his influence on Baltimore’s black community. Patricia Dockman Anderson’s dissertation and forthcoming book “By Legal or Moral Suasion Let Us Put it Away:” Temperance in Baltimore, 1829-1870 (University of Delaware, 2008) discusses the printer James Young’s leadership role in the movement. Barbara Jeanne Fields’ Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, Conn., 1985) and Christopher Phillips’ Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790-1860 (Chicago, 1997) analyze the complexities of the black community’s lived experiences in Harper’s city of birth.

Acknowledgments:

Ms. Ortner would like to thank Dr. Manisha Sinha, Dr. Britt Rusert, Dr. Anna Mae Duane, and Dr. Paul Erickson for their invaluable expertise and for their help with the digitization process of the pamphlet. I am also grateful to the Maryland Historical Society—especially Mark Letzer, Joe Tropea, Damon Talbot and James Singewald—for their assistance in retrieving and processing Forest Leaves for this publication. Lastly, I would like to thank the University of Connecticut, and in particular, the Department of English, the Department of History, and the University of Connecticut Hartford campus, for providing the necessary funds to present Forest Leaves online to the public.

This Plan of the City of Baltimore as enlarged and laid out under the direction of the Commissioners appointed by the General Assembly of Maryland in February 1818, Thomas Poppleton, 1823 (1852), Large Map Collection, MdHS.

Between 1776 and 1820 Baltimore grew like kudzu on a riverbank.  Geographically three settlements, the original town, Old town and Fell’s Point were legally merged into one and the official boundaries of the resulting BaltimoreCity (incorporated in 1797) were expanded to encompass 14.71 square miles by legislative fiat in 1817.  In that period the resident population grew from about 6,000 to 63,000, of whom over 14,000 were slave and free blacks.  In that period, as historian Sherry Olson points out, commerce was the mainspring of the city’s economy, fed by the constant stream of shipping in and out of the port, most of it legal, but some of it the product of piracy and, as the last decade ended, in its most adventuresome, dependent upon illegally feeding the revolutions in central and south America.  Baltimore was a haven for risk taking merchants and sea captains, who with other townsfolk, also speculated in bank stock, precipitating a deep depression that lasted from 1817 to about 1820 ruining many of the commercial high rollers in Baltimore and elsewhere.

To land surveyors the decades between the American Revolution and the end of the War of 1812 were a profitable nightmare of sorting out who actually owned what property in town,  including where the wharves, streets and alleys should run amidst the building boom prior to the financial collapse.   In 1784 the legislature tried to impose some order on the chaos by requiring that a correct survey of the city be made.  As an 1812 city ordinance pointed out, it was never carried into execution. A fragment of surveyors notes has survived, indicating that a valiant attempt was undertaken to conduct an accurate survey, but no detailed large scale map emerged until after the city began to tackle the task on the eve of the Second American War of Independence, better known as the War of 1812.

Until then two general views of the city were published by two French trained engineers, Charles Varle and A.P. Folie. Varle’s map, the more popular of the two, became the standard map accompanying the early city directories.

Plan of the City and Environs of Baltimore. Warner & Hanna, (Charles Varle), 1801.
Image from http://1814baltimore.blogspot.com/

Plan of the Town of Baltimore and It’s Environs, A.P. Folie, 1792, BCLM Collection, CD836, MdHS.

The Plan of the City and Environs of Baltimore by Varle, a French refugee by way of Haiti, is a pretty map, especially when colored, and does accurately show the approximate location of the streets as well as the urban sprawl at about 1801 when its last edition was issued. But the map could not be used to plot the expanding street bed and made no effort to delineate the administrative boundaries of the city.

By 1811, matters had gotten so bad with regard to where the streets were meant to go and what limits they placed on how far builders could intrude on their path, that the town leaders, including the legally constituted commissioners for opening streets, desperately needed a map and plan to follow.  Hence the City Ordinance of March 25, 1812 “for making a correct survey of the city of Baltimore”, came to pass and announcements were placed in the local newspapers soliciting proposals.  Under the city charter of 1797, as the most recent definitive political and administrative history of the city by Matthew Crenson points out,

“Five City Commissioners were appointed [by the Mayor and City Council] to take over the responsibilities of the five special commissioners for street paving. In addition to the commissioners’ existing responsibilities for paving streets and installing pumps, the new municipal commissioners also had to handle the contentious business of establishing the boundaries of city lots.”

It would take a decade until 1822 before the accurate mapping of the city was complete, after considerable wrangling, including a not so pleasant competition between a solitary scientific surveyor, and the well-established compass and chain land surveyors of Baltimore City. In the end science won out, but not without an acrimonious struggle.

The Bird Transit.
From the collection of the Friends of Independence National Historic Park, Philadelphia, PA.

When Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon were hired by the Calverts and the Penns in the 1760s to survey their mutual boundary, no one challenged their methods and praise was heaped upon the results.  The accuracy with which they established a degree of latitude and worked from there to run their line westward was a marvel.

The instruments they used are illustrated and explained in Edwin Danson’s book, Drawing the Line: How Mason and Dixon Surveyed the Most Famous Border in America, and the wonderfully restored Bird transit that Mason and Dixon used is now owned by the National Park Service at Independence Hall in Philadelphia.

In 1798 when the engineers surveying and laying out Fort McHenry utilized what was probably a Ramsden theodolite, a great improvement on the transit, and trigonometry to perfect their work, no one complained, or even commented in the local papers.

It undoubtedly came as a surprise to  a 47 year old English surveyor by the name of Thomas Holdsworth Poppleton, newly arrived in Baltimore, that his answer to an advertisement  soliciting  proposals to survey the city, would meet with such intense opposition from the local surveying community.

Anglican Church of St. George in the East, London, where Thomas Poppleton was baptized.
Image from http://1814baltimore.blogspot.com/

Thomas Holdsworth Poppleton was baptized on July 14, 1765 at the Anglican Church of Saint George in the East in London, still in existence at 14 Cannon St Rd London E1 0BH (+44 20 7481 1345).   In 1780, at the age of 15, he was apprenticed to a member of the Honorable Company of Vintners whose motto is Vinum Exhilarat Animum, Latin for Wine Cheers the Spirit.  How he got to surveying is not known.  Perhaps he enjoyed himself along the way, although by the time he died in Baltimore in 1837, he was apparently a teetotalling Protestant Methodist.

By January 1799 Poppleton was married to an Ann Firth, perhaps the same Ann who was forced to open a confectionery shop in Baltimore in the 1830s  to supplement her husband’s then meager earnings.  Apparently they had only one child who probably died as an infant after his baptism in 1805, Thomas Holdsworth junior, although there remains some confusion over the mother’s name.

Kings Bench Prison, London, ca 1808.
Image from http://1814baltimore.blogspot.com/

By 1805 Thomas Holdsworth Poppleton also took on his own apprentice (apprentices had to pay for the privilege the munificent sum of £200 pounds-or about $22,000 in 2014 terms), set himself up in business as a house, land, and timber surveyor at the somewhat prestigious address of number 1, Bloomsbury Square, London.  About the same time he took on architect Henry Ashley Keeble as a partner which proved to be an unmitigated disaster.  In 1807 the partnership was dissolved and Poppleton ended up in King’s Bench Prison as a debtor.

Fortunately for him, he arrived in prison just before debtors in Ireland and England were granted a reprieve by the King and released if they owed less than a thousand pounds.

He remained in the city for  brief time, but was pursued by another apprentice who claimed that he had not fulfilled his obligation to train him in the trade.  The apprentice describes his problems with his masters in a petition to have his apprenticeship annulled.  The court granted his release from Poppleton and Keeble on the basis that both partners were in hiding (actually both ended up in debtors prison).

Keeble, would emerge from debtors prison to go on to a modest career as a London Architect (a few of his townhouses are still extant) and even did some work from London for the wealthiest man in America at the time, Philadelphian William Bingham.

Thomas Holdsworth Poppleton instead chose America to revive his fortunes, arriving in Baltimore by April of 1812 where he opened an office on North Howard Street, and offered to survey the City in response to a notice soliciting proposals that he had read in the newspapers.

Detail, The Plan of the City of Baltimore as enlarged and laid out under the direction of the Commissioners/Thomas Poppleton, Baltimore, 1822.
Image from http://1814baltimore.blogspot.com/

How he came to choose Baltimore to revive his fortunes is not yet known, but it is possible that he was aware of John Eager Howard’s need for a surveyor of his extensive urban properties, and the city’s desperate need for an accurate survey of its boundaries, streets, and alley ways.  The mystery figures in Poppleton’s attraction to Baltimore are the Quaker Assurance broker and friend of the Howards, Joseph Townsend, and Cornelius Howard, Jr., Governor John Eager Howard’s brother. Joseph Townsend, initially a bookbinder and teacher by trade and an early opponent of slavery, established the most successful building insurance company in the city  (Baltimore Equitable Insurance Society), running it to his and his family’s benefit for over fifty years from the same location on Baltimore Street.  He would prove to be Poppleton’s strongest defender and would oversee the completion of Poppleton’s map, paying the bills and lending his young, nearly blind, son, Richard H. Townsend to assist in the task of laying the permanent boundary stones of the city.  Cornelius Howard, Jr., was the brother of Governor John Eager Howard, revolutionary war hero and friend of Washington’s, who owned significant areas of the city and the surrounding countryside including what was to become Mount Vernon Square and the site of the elegant Robert Mills monument to George Washington. Cornelius was a respected land surveyor of the old school of compass and chain who is probably best remembered as a gentleman farmer and breeder of horses who lived to the ripe old age of 91. In the years before Poppleton, he had been called upon to sort out the ancient surveys of the land that encompassed the city and may even have participated in the abortive 1785 attempt to map the town.  The surviving survey notes are among his papers.

By 1812, Cornelius Howard, a few years older than Poppleton, was involved in surveying land in the Illinois country and was apparently well regarded as a surveyor by the powers that be in Albany, New York, if only by reputation. He too would come to Poppleton’s defense, and when Poppleton was in effect ridden out of town by a dissenting commissioner and a prominent local land surveyors, recommended him for a prestigious, well-paying  assignment in New York City.

On April 10, 1812, from his office on North Howard street, Thomas Holdsworth Poppleton answered the call of the City Commissioners:

“In pursuance of a notice date 3rd April which has appeared in the newspapers of this City, inviting proposals for “making a survey and correct plat of the City of Baltimore agreeably to an Ordinance passed 25th March last.” I offer myself to your notice as being disposed to exert my utmost abilities in performing all the duties imposed upon the artist by the above named ordinance….I beg further to submit that having had much experience in that particular branch of Surveying, I feel myself amply possess’d with the requisite portion of skill.”

The requirement of an ‘artist’ surveyor to do the job has puzzled some historians who do not realize that surveying is an art as much as it is a skill, especially when it comes to depicting the product on paper. It is likely that Joseph Townsend and the Howards were aware of the ‘art’ of the surveyor in the most important of the survey maps of London published by Richard Horwood between 1792 and 1799.  As the British Library explains:

“Horwood intended originally to show every house and its number but this was to prove impossible. Although every house is included the numbering was never completed.”

Horwood dedicated this map to the Trustees and Directors of the Phoenix Fire Office, reflecting that the protection of London from fire was at this time the reserve of numerous independent company brigades. The map is coloured, describing parks in green and the London Wall in red. The Tower of London is shown only by outline; Horwood records that: ‘The Internal Parts not distinguished being refused permission to take the Survey’, evidence that a surveyor was not always welcome.

All but one of the Baltimore City commissioners supported the adoption of Poppleton’s plan for surveying Baltimore City.  From the beginning commissioner Henry Stouffer and his ally Jehu Bouldin, a well-known local compass and chain surveyor set out to undermine Poppleton’s plan.  Why is not clear, except that Bouldin wanted the job, and Stouffer appears to have been an adamant Jeffersonian Democrat/Republican, politically opposed to the Federalist party supported by the Howards.

Poppleton was clearly taken aback by his critics. Hired by the City commissioners, he began his work and soon found himself tricked into stopping to locate stones marking property lines on streets already laid.  Although he complained that it was not a part of his contract and that his job was to say where the boundaries of the city lay on the ground and how the streets should run on the ground in the future according to the laws and ordinances that called for them, he agreed to try and find the boundary between James Carey and former mayor James Calhoun’s property on Light Street.  It proved a disaster for Poppleton. As his enemies put it “Mr. Poppleton not being able to find any point by course and distance for his compass & chain both appearing to be incorrect. …”

Poppleton was livid and wrote a detailed rebuttal to the Commissioners in which he laid out in an eight page memorandum his ardent belief in the reliability of triangulation and the use of a theodolite (possibly a Ramsden) to produce an accurate survey of the town, all the while debunking the old method of compass and chain.

He begins by asserting that,

“If I understand aright, the order for [my] survey [of Baltimore] originated in an idea that I possessed a talent for such an undertaking founded on an improved & scientific method now in general use in civil & military surveying in Europe… [I was] decoyed out, to perform operations with an instrument I condemn [i.e. the compass]– in a way that is in principal & contrary to my practice… [That] this pitiful underhand mode of proceeding was to be the test of my abilities–to narrow minds it may be apparently correct–from all such I appeal.”

He then proceeded to lambaste the practice of the compass and chain surveyors, particularly the method used by Jehu Bouldin, although not identifying him by name, and outlining in detail with examples his own.

Thomas Jefferson’s Theolodite.
Image from http://1814baltimore.blogspot.com/

After explicitly laying out the inadequacies of compass and chain surveying, especially  the inability to close a survey and the vagaries of the compass, particularly in an urban setting with its magnetic variations, he detailed his method of triangulation using an instrument of which he was justly proud.

What Poppleton describes as his principal instrument for accurate surveying is ironically very close, if not an example, of one favored by Thomas Jefferson and possibly purchased in London in the late 1780s when Poppleton was an apprentice.

That the politics of surveying meant that supporters of the Party of Jefferson  in Baltimore City in 1812 had little use for Jefferson’s or Poppleton’s theodolite, is understandable.  Jefferson was not hailed for his skills as a surveyor but as the retired president and adamant opponent of the Federal party of Hamilton, Adams, and the Howards, Poppleton’s employers.  Besides Jehu Bouldin knew where the boundary stones of the streets were buried and felt no need to survey with anything other than a telescope to site a place,  a compass to plot direction, and a chain to calculate distance.

Thomas Poppleton, Sketch of Methodist Meeting House at Apple Alley, Baltimore.
Image from http://1814baltimore.blogspot.com/

In closing his assessment of the accuracy of his methods, Poppleton provides a specific example of how his survey of the streets will be more accurate than that of any compass and chain surveyor Commissioner Stouffer puts forth. He begins with the incident that led to his discontent, explaining why he could not find the existing boundary stones on light street, and concludes with a sketch of his triangulate location of a street corner in Fells Point, across from the  African-American church on Apple Alley, perhaps a place chosen in deference to Joseph Townsend, a strong supporter of slavery’s abolition. It would be a church that would feature prominently on his map when it was at last published for the world to admire, and the City to utilize in its expansion outward.

The City Commissioners, influenced by Commissioner Henry Stouffer’s skulduggery, back tracked. The mayor, Edward Johnson, who first supported Poppleton, reacted as politicians often do to Poppleton’s memorandum by suggesting that the City could not afford him (the City commissioners had agreed to give him $3,000 for his map).  In Johnson’s words:

“This Gentleman has addressed a long letter to me, explanatory of his intended mode of procedure, which not embracing  the provisions of the law [relating to resolving property line disputes], occasions a special reference to the wisdom & decision of the City Council [to hire Jehu Bouldin as the City Surveyor over Poppleton to carry out those functions]. Observing at the same time, that the expenditure  of the sum of three thousand dollars (however anxious we may be to encourage artists of superior talent and abilities) unless it can be made to answer a useful & valuable purpose, is not expedient in the present state of the resources of funds of the city.”

In his efforts to unseat Poppleton, Commissioner Henry Stouffer even appealed to Cornelius Howard with regard to evaluating Poppleton’s condemnation of the use of compass and chain surveying.  Howard in turn, tactfully as he could, given the political climate,  agreed with Poppleton’s assessment of the use of the compass and chain, but the tide had turned against the scientific surveyor. Poppleton quit in disgust in  the summer of 1812, as the city became consumed by the advent of war with Great Britain and postponed surveying its streets.

Plan of the city of New-York : the greater part from actual survey made expressly for the purpose (the rest from authentic documents), 1817, Thomas H. Poppleton (Surveyor), Peter Maverick (Engraver). From The New York Public Library.

On the strong recommendation of Cornelius Howard, Poppleton, still a British citizen, left for a prestigious surveying assignment in New York City, announcing that if the city fathers wanted all that he had already done, and wished him to  complete the survey, all they had to do was modify his contract, leaving him in peace to do his work, and call him back.

It will never be known for certain how the New York legislature came to pick Cornelius Howard to partner with two famous inventors, Eli Whitney and Robert Fulton, in an attempt to contain the open sewer that was known as Canal Street in lower Manhattan. What survives is a copy of a letter of Poppleton’s dated August 13, 1812, from his office on North Howard Street to William Coleman in New York.   He informs the fiery anti-war Federalist editor that he will pursue the recommendation of Cornelius Howard, and a wealthy New York quaker, Thomas Eddy, to replace Howard on the commission to address the problem of Canal Street.  Eddy was a strong advocate of a canal through Western  New York eventually known as Clinton’s ditch or the Erie Canal. Poppleton told Coleman that he could be in New York in two weeks time, once he finished another legislatively mandated project to survey Pratt Street, the plats for which have survived.  William Coleman was the first editor of the The New York Evening Post (today known as the New York Post), chosen by founder Alexander Hamilton, and was outspoken in his opposition to the war against Great Britain.  It is possible that Joseph Townsend, Poppleton’s quaker patron and insurance broker knew Thomas Eddy and instigated his recommendation. Both were successful insurance brokers as well as nationally known Quaker businessmen.

It took longer for Poppleton to reach New York than he planned. His principal contact for the project, Alexander Bleecker, another wealthy N. Y. Federalist whose properties would be affected by the study of options for Canal Street, became anxious, but eventually Poppleton arrived and set up an office in his accommodations. It also took longer for his precious theodolite to arrive, but he did get down to business at once, meeting with his co-commissioners, Robert Fulton and Eli Whitney.  While most of Poppleton’s Baltimore papers have long since disappeared, his journal for his first New York project has survived, purchased by the New York Public Library in 1905. In it he details his work with the other two commissioners over the period from October 7, 1812, until all three signed off on their plans and recommendations, submitting them to the city and to Governor Clinton in Albany. Poppleton did the survey and the accompanying plats. Robert Fulton prepared the perspective drawings. Whitney attended all the decision meetings and was consulted on the engineering aspects of the proposed solution to the open sewer that was Canal Street. They began with the idea that they would be proposing a canal with sewers underneath, but concluded that the best treatment was to abandon the canal and concentrate on an elaborate covered sewer. The city fathers found their proposal too expensive and over time all of the drawings and plats have disappeared from the City Surveyor’s office, although their advice was eventually taken. Poppleton’s work was exemplary, however, and landed him the post of one of the City Surveyors, and a partnership with another surveyor that brought him significant business including surveying and mapping parts of Brooklyn as well as the opportunity to produce the best survey map of Lower Manhattan published in 1817, that continued to be used in defining streets and property lines well into the 19th century. By the time his map was published he had an office in the New York City Library and to all appearances was there to stay.

Back in Baltimore, the political opponents of the city in the 1816/1817 General Assembly convinced their brethren to expand the city’s boundaries to encompass the outlying precincts containing the majority voters who were democrats, eliminating  their impact on Baltimore County politics. The first act of enlargement left the job to the City commissioners to lay out the new boundaries and they turned to Elihu Bouldin to place the boundary stones.

Joseph Townsend and his friends in Baltimore were not pleased. They approached the Federalist controlled legislature the very next session (1817/1818) and secured a new state commission to revive Poppleton’s survey plan and dumping Bouldin. Not only were they commissioned to re-lay the boundary stones, but also they were empowered to  mark the corners of the principal streets and to delineate their paths outward on the ground, renaming streets in the process. The city was required to pay for the survey and map, but had no control over who did the survey and what methods were used to produce it. The commission was headed by John Eager Howard, with Joseph Townsend and [5] others. Townsend supervised  Poppleton’s work and advanced the money to pay for it out of Baltimore Equitable Society funds, expecting to be reimbursed by the City upon completion.

The chronology of Poppleton’s progress on his survey and map survives among the papers of the Baltimore Equitable Society that were purchased at auction by the Maryland State Archives. He re-commenced his survey and the laying of the perimeter boundary stones in June of 1818, apparently uprooting those previously planted by Jehu Bouldin.  Four years and several hundred stones later the survey was complete and his wall map was ready for publication.

Manuscript charting Poppleton’s progress.
Papers of the Baltimore Equitable Society, MSA SC 4645-3-16, Maryland State Archives.

The map proved to be a  work of art as well as an accurate depiction of Baltimore’s streets and blocks as they were in 1822,  and as they were meant to be developed all the way to the new perimeter of the city.  He had to contend with the chaos of existing streets, but straightened and laid their extensions out as best he could with his trusty theodolite and reliance upon triangulation.  What he accomplished lays well upon google earth and reflects an accuracy that he promised.  The commission had the power to rename streets as the survey progressed and the map reflected at least two private jokes of the surveyor.

Detail, The Plan of the City of Baltimore as enlarged and laid out under the direction of the Commissioners/Thomas Poppleton, Baltimore, 1822.
Image from http://1814baltimore.blogspot.com/

The first was to list the Apple Alley Methodist church as the first among Baltimore Churches listed on the map proper, the church location and street that Poppleton had included as his example of the accuracy of his surveying method.  The second was to obliterate the street name, Still-House street, just east of Jones Falls, on which his rival, Jehu Bouldin had long maintained his offices, renaming it a continuation of “Front Street.”

Instead of the original $3,000 that Poppleton proposed as the fee for his services and the resulting map, the project cost nearly $6,500 with interest, much of the cost being advanced by Joseph Townsend and Baltimore Equitable. When the bills were submitted to the Mayor and City council for reimbursement, another firestorm erupted over the cost and the quality of the work which emanated from the Stouffer/Bouldin faction on the council.

The reaction of the council was too much for Townsend and Poppleton. The milder response came from Poppleton who published his observations in the local press with a letter to the editor that omitted names found in the original manuscript:

“Sir: by the Morning Chronicle of the Tuesday last [March 18, 1822], I learned for the first time at a doubt existed in your Branch of the City Council relative to the correctness of the Plat returned by the Commissioners, and made by me under their direction.”

He went on to explain that the issue was the scale used in the map, and that the accompanying plats filed with the city provided both accurate scale and explicit detail.

Joseph Townsend was not as gentle in his scathing letter to the council.  The First Branch of the City Council was so taken aback that it recorded in its journal that they returned Townsend’s letter to the second Branch (Where Henry Stouffer’s relative served) with the comment,

“We beg leave to suggest the propriety of returning it to Mr. Townsend as being a paper unfit to be recorded in the journals of the City Council.”

Townsend had a right to be angry. Poppleton did what he said he would and produced a map that the City came to adopt as its own, with an expanded edition in the 1850s that was used for Baltimore’s unique system of land transfer and recordation, the block book system, whereby Poppleton’s city blocks were numbered on his map and all recorded land transaction from 1851 forward were recorded geographically by block.

Unfortunately over time the block book system broke down through poor administration by the court of record and the city, but for the rest of the nineteenth century until well into the twentieth it served surveyors and the public admirably.  Recently it was supplanted altogether by an automated on-line automation of land recordation created by the Maryland State Archives that placed the surviving block books and the related recordations on line making title searches for lot descriptions infinitely easier for developers and their surveyors, although the nightmare of ownership and title entangled in ground rents has not been effectively addressed and remains a thorn in the side of re-development of the streetscapes of the city. Baltimore like Birmingham in England used the leasing of property at interest (ground rents) to free capital for building on the property. As long as the ground rent was paid the buildings could be separately bought and sold. If it wasn’t, technically anything on the property reverted to the property owner. Over the years the ownership of the ground rents and the above ground property owners became a quagmire of who owned what. In some instances ground rents were being double charged because of overlooking property divisions within estates to the point that some property owners in a block, instead of being charged with half the ground rent for the block, were each charged the ground rent for the whole block. The Legislature once again tried to act in what it perceived the best interest of the city and tried to abolish ground rents altogether by legislative fiat. The case is still before the courts.

In the aftermath of the publication of his map, Poppleton did not have to worry about ground rents. Instead he helped create them, particularly with the work he did in surveying the John Eager Howard estate. When Howard’s daughter contested the division of her father’s estate, by another act of the Legislature intended to resolve the differences, Thomas Poppleton was hired to survey and lay out a fair distribution with clearly defined streets such as what he did with the Mount Vernon Square district that is today the home of Robert Mill’s monument to George Washington.

Poppleton went on to work for the B&O railroad and its efforts to construct a main line on Pratt Street, but not before toying with bankruptcy in 1830, when to do so he also had to apply for citizenship, sponsored by none other than Joseph Townsend.

Poppleton’s plat of the Howard Estate made for Sophia Howard Read.
Image from http://1814baltimore.blogspot.com/

Little of Poppleton’s post map survey work has survived, save the exquisite plats he drew for Sophia Howard Read’s efforts to get a more equitable share of her father’s estate.  While his efforts to survey for the B&O are praised in the press, the plans he produced from his surveys have disappeared, although the street that runs by the B&O roundhouse still bears his name today as he plotted it on his map.  It is not often if ever that a surveyor is able to name a street after himself,  but why not? Surely he deserved it.

Poppleton did participate in the enthusiasm for canals to improve the city’s prospects for trade.   He surveyed the elevations and path for a proposed canal from the Susquehanna to Baltimore for which Fielding Lucas, a local printer of fine maps ultimately drew upon for the copies now located in the Maryland and Pennsylvania Archives.

In all, Poppleton’s last years were spent in apparent near poverty. When he died of ‘old age’ at 72  in 1837, only brief notice was made of his passing. By then his wife Ann had opened a confectionery shop as a means of support, and at his death there was not enough property for an inventory of anything worth distributing. What happened to his treasured theodolite and the bulk of his papers is unknown, although it appears that the Bouldin family acquired some, including the original of his plat of Pratt Street that he completed just before leaving for New York in 1812. Indeed by 1912 Jehu Bouldin’s granddaughters suggested they owned Poppleton’s theodolite, a picture of which was published in The Baltimore Sun.  It wasn’t. Instead it was a later model probably used by their father, Alexander Bouldin, who came to adopt Poppleton’s approach to surveying. The irony remains that the family would appear to think so highly of the memory of Poppleton by 1912, but his instrument remains at large, if not lost altogether.

Baltimore’s first Custom House located at S. Gay Street.
Detail, This Plan of the City of Baltimore as enlarged and laid out under the direction of the Commissioners appointed by the General Assembly of Maryland in February 1818, Thomas Poppleton, 1823 (1852), Large Map Collection, MdHS.

Anyone interested in plotting the history, growth and development of Baltimore from 1822 to the present cannot escape admiring and utilizing Thomas Poppleton’s survey map of the City. It places well on the existing streets of Google Earth and can be used to aid in the geo-referencing of the physical change of the city over time as well as the history of the homes, institutions, and businesses it locates and identifies.  Around its border are inset illustrations of public monuments, fountains, churches, banks and businesses as of 1822, with historical images at its base of the first images and layout of the the town, and the bombardment of Fort McHenry whose battlements had been placed with aid of another theodolite a decade and half before Thomas Holdsworth Poppleton came to town to battle his land surveyor peers over how best to measure and delineate the city streets. May his tarnished memory regain some of the lustre it deserves in the grand tradition of such scientific surveyors as Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, pushing back on those who believe Poppleton’s blocks were too large and his streets unaccommodating to the contours of the land. Those issues were more a matter of the city permitting development of the alleys within the blocks with inferior housing for the black and immigrant labor families, and the lack of a comprehensive sewer and water infrastructure, something the city did not accomplish until after the disastrous fire of 1904, and then only with massive State financing paid for by all Maryland taxpayers.

As a tribute to Thomas Holdsworth Poppleton, it is hoped that funding can be found to restore one of his maps in very bad condition that the Maryland State Archives has acquired. It has a remarkable ownership history of its own, as well as being a first edition, if not the first.  If anyone is interested in helping with its resurrection, I can supply a treatment report and costs. (Edward C. Papenfuse)

Dr. Edward C. Papenfuse is the retired Maryland State Archivist and Commissioner of Land Patents. This piece originally appeared  on Thomas Poppleton’s Baltimore, 1812-1837, Dr. Papenfuse’s personal blog devoted to telling Poppleton’s story and the stories of those who lived and worked in and from Baltimore.

Nash Motors Company Dealer – Martin Brothers, 2300 N. Monroe Street, Ca. 1949,Hughes Company Studio Photograph Collection, PP30-1083-48-03, MdHS.

In early 1900s Baltimore, Mt. Royal Avenue looked quite different from the land originally developed in 1881 carved from portions of Oliver and Johns Streets. The advent of the automobile began to change the face of America and Baltimore. Beginning in 1899 automobile showrooms began to sprout up on Mt.Royal Avenue. Brands like Locomobile, Peerless, Lozier, and Packard, along with the more familiar Ford and Chevrolet brands and many more long gone, lined both sides of the street, east and west for several blocks.

Decades later these dealerships began moving north as the demographics of Baltimore changed and the North Avenue corridor became the next stepping stone. The post-WWII years saw another shift as dealerships began to migrate to more spacious areas in Baltimore County.

In those early days, from 1300 W. Mt.Royal to McMechen Street auto dealers proliferated. Male customers attired in suits, ties, and hats accompanied by women wearing fashionable dresses shopped for their first car. The automobile became a status symbol as the Studebaker, Chandler, Lozier, Pope Hartford, Reo, Pierce Arrow, Thomas Flyer, Steven-Duryea came on the market. And they were expensive—the Lozier cost as much as $5,000 in 1912 (steel workers, in 1912, were making $630 a year and public school teachers $507). Today the Lozier is a highly prized antique automobile. In 2013 a 1911 Lozier, Model 51, sold at a Sotheby Auction for $1,100,000.

Carl Spoerer’s Sons Company Automobile Repairing, South Carey Street, July 1929, Baltimore City Life Museum Photograph Collection, MC7410, MdHS.

Baltimore had its own home-grown automobile industry. In 1890,Carl Spoerer made wagons and carriages at 400-402 South Fremont Avenue. His sons, Charles and Jacob, seeing a declining market for carriages and recognizing the automobile as the future, decided to expand their factory on Fremont Ave and get into the car business. The Carl Spoerer’s Sons Company was formed after Carl died in 1899.

Needing more space, the brothers moved to a larger building at 901-909 South Carey Street in 1907, and they took on two partners, John F. and B.J. Reus. From 1907 to 1914, they built the Spoerer automobile which was available in several different styles; a roadster, a five and seven passenger touring car, a limousine and a landaulet (similar to a limo but with the passenger seat covered by a convertible top). The Spoerer Model B sold for about $3,000 in 1912.

The Motor Car Company of Baltimore’s Advertisement for the Stevens-Duryea Touring Car, ca 1908, MS 1060, MdHS (Reference photo).

In their new South Carey Street factory, they branched out and started making light commercial vehicles. Their  delivery wagon weighed 1500 pounds, had a 30-horsepower engine and a four-speed transmission with one reverse gear. As competition grew stronger, the company decided to get out of the vehicle manufacturing business and began selling tires and other automotive accessories. Carl Spoerer’s Sons went out of business in 1934.

In 1905, H.W. Gill and A.S. Zell opened the Motor Car Company at 18-24 W. Mt. Royal Avenue where they built a garage and showroom selling Overland and Maxwell automobiles. After the demise of these two auto manufacturers in the mid-1920s, the company switched to Studebaker. The Motor Car Company survived until 1960. In turn it became Pat Hays Buick, and in 1970 the University of Baltimore bought the site and demolished the building.

The site where Gill and Zell opened their car company at the corner of Mt. Royal and Maryland Avenue has a colorful history. In 1889 a circular framed structure, clad with metal was erected to house a Cyclorama of the Battle of Gettysburg and for the following 12 years hosted a variety of spectacles including a roller rink and a bike riding school. Frank Bostock, an internationally renowned animal trainer opened a zoo at the location in 1900 but on January 30,1901 the building burned down trapping all of the animals in it.

Later stories abounded that Bostock hanged an unruly elephant, on the way to Baltimore from New York in May 1900. But the situation surrounding that story was more complicated. In one boxcar, two elephants named Sport and Jolly were rough-housing and Sport, hit the side door of the box car door so hard he fell out, screaming. The railcar was stopped, but Sport was unable to get up on his own—a crane lifted him back on the railcar and the train continued on to Baltimore. Sport was so severely injured he had to be put out of his misery, and according to the local Humane Society, the most humane way to do so was to hang him. Strangely enough, Sport’s partner Jolly died of heart failure the day before the hanging, apparently depressed over her partner’s tragedy (You can read an in-depth account, The Death of Sport, in a previous underbelly post).

Nash Motors Company Dealer, Unidentified dealership, interior, Ca. 1949, Hughes Company Studio Photograph Collection, PP30-1083-48-08, MdHS.

Another site on Mt.Royal, one at the corner of McMechen Street, also has a long and varied history. The Frick family, a big name in street railways controlled the land at this corner from 1880 to 1890. It was used  by Park Railway, Baltimore-Peabody Heights and Waverly Railroad. In 1892 Frick sold the land to North Baltimore Railway and to the Baltimore Tractor Company. Shortly thereafter a fire leveled their wooden stable. In 1897 the property was sold to Baltimore Consolidated Railway which merged with Baltimore Tractor, which, in turn merged with United Railway & Electric Company. These premises were vacated in 1924 and Howe & Jones, a Chevrolet dealer remained there from 1926-1930. The building served as a drill  hall for the 5th Regiment National Guard from 1933-34, when it became an auto dealer once again—Bob Fleigh Studebaker. MICA now occupies two corners and an apartment house is built on the third.

At 16-18 W. Mt. Royal, site of the former United States Truck Agency, Union Motor Car moved into this location, according to the January 1919 edition of Motor World. At 26 W. Mt. Royal, Overland cars were sold from 1919 to 1928. Today this site is the University of Baltimore’s Gordon Plaza.

Kissell Goldbug.
(Not from MdHS Collection)

Monumental Motor Car Company did business at 21 W.Mt.Royal. When they built their showroom in 1916, it was a two-story affair with post and beam construction and a Tudor Revival exterior. The interior design was influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement with modern and historical details throughout. Monumental sold the Kissell known as the “KissellKar” and a sportier model called the Kissell Goldbug a favorite of celebrities such as Jack Dempsey, Douglas Fairbanks, Al Jolson, Greta Garbo and Eddie Duchin. Production of the Kissell lasted from 1907 to 1931. The building was later occupied by the Odorite Company. The Monumental Motor Car showroom site persevered until 2004 when University of Baltimore demolished the building in spite of strong objections from local and state preservationists and built a new student center on the site.

Another auto show room of historic significance is still located at 1370 North Avenue: the Brooks-Price Buick dealer, built in 1939. The U.S. Department of Interior describes the building as “a deceptively large structure that stretches in a pie shaped mass filling the entire block from north to south…representing the classic style of Albert Kahn.” Architect Kahn had built a prototype Art Deco building for General Motors at the 1933 Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago in 1933. The Brooks-Price showroom  represented that Art Deco style of the period and the post depression era.

The property at 107-113 W.Mt. Royal changed hands several times. In 1908 Baltimore Buggy Top built on this site. In 1921 Neill Buick opened shop and vacated it ten years later where it remained vacant until 1934 when the building was demolished. City Chevrolet used the vacant lot for storage until their business closed in 1960. The property added six more lots (101-106) and W. Bell, a merchandise distributor conducted business there until  the property was sold and the building demolished. The site’s current building is occupied by the Associated Jewish Charities.

Buicks were sold at Kelly Buick at the corner of Mt.Royal and Charles Street in 1937. Customers looking for something classier went to Zell Motors across the street at 11-19 E. Mt Royal where they had been selling Packards for many years.

Zell Motor Car Company, 11-19 E. Mt. Royal Avenue, ca 1940s.
Image from Baltimore Heritage.org

Mr. Arthur Stanley Zell (1880-1935) built a beautiful three story Hispano-Gothic showroom in 1920 at this location and, fortunately, his building survived over the years and is now called the Towne Building. This building has gone through several owners since it was the Packard automobile showroom and was being offered for sale in 2015 for $3.5 million. The exterior of this unique structure is much like it was as the Packard showroom, except that the large glass showroom windows on each side of the stone columns now have stone panel infills. Zell’s sister, Gertude Carroll Zell (1888-1968), was married to Baltimore architect Theodore Wells Pietsch (1869-1930)and was reported to be the first woman to drive a car in Maryland, most likely a Packard.

Many of the automobile dealers sold brands that no longer exist. The Poehlmann Automobile Company located at 106 West Mt.Royal Avenue sold Chandlers. The “Light Weight Six” sold for $1785 in 1919. The Chandler Motor Car Company had a high of  20,000 cars sold nationwide before ending production. In 1927,sales tapered off, a large debt incurred and the company was sold to the Hupp Motor Co., in 1929.

Reus Brothers Company storefront, 150 West Mount Royal Avenue, July 1929, Baltimore City Life Museum Photograph Collection, MC7409, MdHS.

Southern Auto, located at 1300 Mt.Royal Avenue from 1900 to 1915, sold the Lozier and Pope Hartford luxury cars. And the list could go on and on: Reus Brothers Company, 150 W. Mt. Royal; Everett Auto, 1200 W.Mt.Royal; Nash Motor Car (1919), 124-126 W.Mt.Royal; Lambert Motor Car (1920), Mt.Royal and Maryland; Peerless, Thomas Flyer, Stanley, Stevens, Duryea (1908) and Overland (1919-1928), 26 Mt. Royal; White Motor Company (1913), Mt.Royal and Guilford Avenue; Fidelity Motors-Chrysler (1920), Mt. Royal & Cathedral Street.

Today, automobiles are more or less commodities, and are available to nearly all. Changing technologies and demographics have altered Baltimore in any number of ways. In the early days of the 20^th Century,  buying an automobile was a very special experience available to the few who could afford and enjoy that experience. (Sidney Levy)

Sidney Levy is a volunteer in the Special Collections Department at the Maryland Historical Society.

Nash Motors Company Dealer, Unidentified dealership, Ca. 1949,
Hughes Company Studio Photograph Collection, PP30-1083-48-04, MdHS.

PP30-1083-48-02
Nash Motors Company Dealer, Jester’s, Ca. 1949, Hughes Company Studio Photograph Collection, PP30-1083-48-02 , MdHS.

Neely & Ensor Auto Company, 1523-1533 W. Mt. Royal Avenue, ca 1920s, Baltimore City Life Museum Collection, MC7275, MdHS.

Excerpt from William Still’s 1872 book, The Underground Railroad: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, & c., Narrating the Hardships Hair-breadth Escapes and Death Struggles of the Slaves in their Efforts for Freedom, as Related by Themselves and Others, or Witnessed by the Author; Together with Sketches of Some of the Largest Stockholders, and Most Liberal Aiders and Advisors, of the Road, E450 .S85, MdHS. (reference photo)

“John Wesley Gibson represented himself to be not only the slave, but also the son of William Y. Day, of Taylor’s Mount, Maryland…” This is the opening statement of a slave narrative that tells the story of a man who chose freedom in a place and time that allowed slavery — Maryland in the 1850s. The short narrative offers details of his appearance (looks like his father); job description (farm foreman); his age (28); how he escaped (passed as a white man) and how he detested bondage (severe restrictions). Little else is known of John Wesley Gibson other than one paragraph of information in a 780-page history of the Underground Railroad published in 1872. After Gibson escaped, where did he go? What was his life like at Taylor’s Mount? Is there a way to verify the information in the narrative? His mother Harriet and sister Frances were mentioned in the story.  What happened to them? How do we find out more info? Or are they lost to history?

Uncovering the stories of individual slaves is a difficult task. Sources, in general, are limited. Most are written or created from the perspective of the slaveholder, for example, manumission papers, inventories, and runaway slave ads. Sources written from the perspective of the slave are rare. For the most part, men and women who were enslaved had limited opportunities to become educated. While not impossible, African-Americans living in the 1800s faced many restrictions, including some states prohibiting education for slaves. Slave narratives allowed former slaves to tell their stories in their own words.

Many people are familiar with Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) written by himself or Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet Jacobs. The award-winning movie Twelve Years a Slave (2013) was based on a slave narrative of the same title written in by Solomon Northrup in 1853. Ante-bellum slave narratives became extremely popular in the mid-nineteenth century as people throughout the country became more interested in the discussion and debate over slavery, both pro-slavery propaganda and abolitionist rhetoric.

William Still
From “The Underground Railroad: A Record of Facts…,” published in 1872, E450 .S85, MdHS. (reference photo)

William Still, chairman of the Vigilance Committee in Philadelphia, also wrote a book about fugitive slaves, but his work differs from the classic slave narrative. He was commissioned by the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society “. . . to compile and publish his personal reminiscences and experiences relating to the ‘Underground Railroad.’”(1) Still included the stories of hundreds of fugitive slaves, as well transcripts of letters, newspaper articles, runaway ads, laws and legal cases regarding fugitive slaves, engravings, and biographies of abolitionists. This compilation is as impressive as the title: The Underground Railroad: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, & c., Narrating the Hardships Hair-breadth Escapes and Death Struggles of the Slaves in their Efforts for Freedom, as Related by Themselves and Others, or Witnessed by the Author; Together with Sketches of Some of the Largest Stockholders, and Most Liberal Aiders and Advisors, of the Road.

Still had access to fugitives as they either ended their journey in Philadelphia or passed through the city of brotherly love.(2) Prior to 1852, both freedom seekers and members of the Underground Railroad system kept all information secret; members, routes, stories – all details were closely guarded. Still was inspired to keep a journal in 1852 after he met a previously unknown brother, Peter Still — they were separated forty years earlier and did not know each other existed. After this chance encounter, Still interviewed and kept notes for the next five years and then waited almost twenty years before publishing the 780-page book in 1872. Still’s hand-written notes and newspaper clippings, known as “Journal C,” are part of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society Papers which are held at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP). HSP has recently digitized the journal which is part of a large research project regarding the Underground Railroad.*

John Wesley Gibson’s brief story, is recounted on page 301 of Still’s 1872 book. It is also featured on page 79 in “Journal C” – the digitized journal. The pages are legible and relatively easy to read. The journal entry provides a few more details that are not included in the published version: John Wesley Gibson arrived in Philadelphia on November 27, 1854 after travelling for six weeks. Still described him as “intelligent and good-looking.”

Journal C, p.79.
Historical Society of Pennsylvania

William Y. Day, the master and father of John Wesley Gibson, owned Taylor’s Mount in Baltimore County, Maryland. The Maryland Historical Society Library holds the Day Family Papers (MS 1255) which contain wills, land records, slave inventories, manumissions papers, as well as some business and personal papers. Some of these documents reveal what life was like at Taylor’s Mount. Slavery was an integral part of life at the estate for multiple generations. Some of the documents that confirm this include a bill of sale for Nelly Duckett, a receipt for Spencer and Harry for partial payment, and a slave inventory. Multiple wills illustrate how slaves passed to the younger generations – just like land, furnishings, and other property. Names, ages, and descriptions of them are provided in many of the documents, but there is no clear picture of who they were as people – - their likes, dislikes, etc. – no intimate knowledge of them as people.

Deed of Manumission and Release of Service, MS 1255, MdHS.(reference photo)

Deed of Manumission and Release of Service, verso, MS 1255, MdHS.(reference photo)

The most intriguing document was an undated list of slaves, entitled “Deed of Manumission and Release of Service,” The document is a form letter that was not filled out for the year 186_. The words “list of slaves” is handwritten at the bottom of the page, upside down.  On the verso, in cursive, it states “List of Slaves belonging to William Y. Day all of them for life but John Bacon”. It lists the names and ages of the slaves, plus a few interesting details. The first two names on the list are Harriott Pearce age 50 and Fanny Pearce age 16. There is also a John Gibson age 33 on the list. Could the women be John Wesley Gibson’s mother and sister? Is John Gibson somehow related? I am hopeful that they are the same people, but there is no absolute certainty – yet.  These documents give more details to the incredible work of William Still, members of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, as well as our friends and colleagues at HSP and other institutions who continue the mission of giving voices to those who did not have it so long ago.** (Debbie Harner)

Debbie Harner works in the Special Collections Department of the Maryland Historical Society and is Associate Editor of the Maryland Historical Magazine.

Footnotes:

(1) William Still referred to the Pennsylvania Abolition Society as the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society in the Preface of his book.

(2) After the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, many fugitives did not end their journey in Philadelphia, a free state, but continued their journey to safety in Canada.

*To learn more about the digitization project of “Journal  C” kept by William Still, click on this link: https://hsp.org/history-online/digital-history-projects/uncovering-william-stills-underground-railroad)

**Another great resource is the Legacy of Slavery project at the Maryland State Archives.

Sources and further reading:

The Underground Railroad: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, & c., Narrating the Hardships Hair-breadth Escapes and Death Struggles of the Slaves in their Efforts for Freedom, as Related by Themselves and Others, or Witnessed by the Author; Together with Sketches of Some of the Largest Stockholders, and Most Liberal Aiders and Advisors, of the Road.  Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872.

Day Family of Harford County, Papers, MS 1255, Maryland Historical Society

“An Introduction to the Slave Narrative” by William Andrews, E. Maynard Adams Professor of English, Series Editor. 

Uncovering William Stills Underground Railroad, Digital History Project, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Program cover. The Chocolate Dandies, Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, ca. 1924, MS 2800, 080-02-003, MdHS.

On April 28 of this year, Baltimore born ragtime and jazz pianist and composer Eubie Blake and his partner Noble Sissles’ most famous work, Shuffle Along, will open on Broadway, nearly 100 years after its initial run. In 1921, Shuffle Along transformed Broadway and left a far reaching cultural and social legacy. But the pair also produced another Broadway musical that is largely forgotten.

Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, ca. 1924, Eubie Blake Photograph Collection, PP301.321, MdHS.

Born on February 7, 1887 at 419 Forrest Street in Baltimore to former slaves, Eubie Blake exhibited a prodigious musical talent at an early age. By age 12, he had joined a band and within a few years he was living the life of a professional musician, joining up with travelling music shows along the east coast, playing at various clubs, bars, and bordellos in his hometown, and composing. From 1907 to 1910 he played piano at the Goldfield Hotel on Lexington Avenue, owned by Lightweight Boxing Champion Joe Gans, Blake’s childhood hero.

In 1915 Blake met Indiana native Noble Sissle in Baltimore. Sensing a musical kinship, he almost immediately asked Sissle to write lyrics for his piano compositions, and a partnership was born. They wrote and performed together until World War I broke out. Sissle joined James Reese Europe and his 369th Infantry Army Band in Europe, while Blake remained in Baltimore. After Sissle returned from service, they put together a Vaudeville Act, the “Dixie Duo,” touring up and down the east coat. In 1920, Blake and Sissle met the comedy duo of Fluornoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles at an NAACP event in Philadelphia. The four men decided to embark together on the creation of a musical, based on a Miller and Lyles comedy sketch, which would eventually become Shuffle Along.

When Shuffle Along premiered on May 23, 1921 at the 63rd Street Music Hall in New York City, it was a landmark event.  The first African-American produced musical to appear on Broadway in over ten years, it introduced jazz to Broadway, profoundly altering the American theatrical landscape. More importantly it led to the desegregation of Broadway theatres. Traditionally African-Americans were largely relegated to the balcony seats. With Shuffle Along, theater owners began to relax the restrictions, allowing African-American patrons to see the show from the orchestra seats. In the wake of the tremendous success of Shuffle Along with both white and black audiences, there was a resurgence of African-American produced musicals appearing on Broadway. Many of the cast members of the show went on to long and successful careers including Paul Robeson, Florence Mills, and Josephine Baker, then a sixteen year old member of the chorus line. The show ran in New York for 504 performances, an enormous success for the time. It then went on an equally successful two year national tour playing to mixed audiences in what had previously been segregated theaters.

Race Track scene from “Chocolate Dandies,” a musical comedy with Harold Browning, owner of Texas Trainer and jockey Charlie Davis. Ca. 1924, Eubie Blake Photograph Collection, PP301.318, MdHS.

Essentially forgotten is Blake and Sissle’s follow-up to their huge hit. Written while Shuffle Along was still on tour, The Chocolate Dandies was the pair’s attempt to capitalize on the success of Shuffle Along and produce a musical stage show that would rival the productions of contemporary white produced musicals, like the Ziegfeld Follies and Scandals with huge casts, lavish costumes, and elaborate stage designs.

Initially titled In Bamville, the musical is a comedy-fantasy set in the fictional southern plantation town of Bamville (an African-American folk expression akin to ‘podunk town’) At the center of the town’s activity is a racetrack. The main character, Mose Washington, owner of a horse named “Dumb Luck” falls asleep before a race, and dreams that he has become wealthy after winning a horse-racing bet. When he wakes, he discovers it was all a dream – a rival race horse owner had actually won. The play ends with the marriage of the rival to the daughter of prominent citizen who live happily ever after.

In Bamville went on a 24 week tour before it opened at the New Colonial Theatre on Broadway on September 1, 1924 as The Chocolate Dandies. It also brought back some of the cast of Shuffle Along, including Josephine Baker in a more prominent role as a clown in the chorus line.

Full cast of “Chocolate Dandies” on stage with orchestra in foreground,
Ca. 1924, Eubie Blake Photograph Collection, PP301.320, MdHS.

Critical reaction to The Chocolate Dandies was mixed. One critic felt it surpassed Shuffle Along: “It is at least 50 percent better than “Shuffle Along.” That’s high enough praise for any show.”(1) The principal contention by many of the white critics was that it was not “black” enough. With their second musical, Blake and Sissle’s ambition was to create a musical with the production values of white shows, while leaving some of the racial stereotypes behind and appealing to both black and white audiences. For this the production was both praised and denounced. Ashton Stevens, the renowned drama critic for the Chicago Herald and Examiner felt that white influence had watered down the performance: “There is too much so-called politeness, too much platitudinous refinement and not enough of the racy and the razor-edged. There is in a word, too much “art” and not enough “Africa.” (2)

Hubert Harrison, one of the leading African-American political activists and radical intellectuals of the day considered the musical to be a success for the very reason that it moved beyond the stereotype of the black musical:

“’In Bamville’ is, so far, the one outstanding specimen of the genus musical comedy that our people have yet produced. I mean no offence to the others; they are many of them splendid things. But they are in the manner of that circumscribed tradition which has established fixed conventions for “Negro” musical comedy productions. But this work of your joint genius (yours and Mr. Sissle’s) meets the white man on his own ground and challenges expert critical comparison…Besides the skill in which you manage to serve two masters; pursuing the pure artistic intent while you offer your sops to the racial Cerberus – that is your greatest achievement, which the dull newspaper critics will, perhaps fortunately, fail to fathom.” (3)

The Chocolate Dandies, Statement of Business showing losses of $58,075.01 for the week ending May 16, 1925.
Statement of Business, Chocolate Dandies, 1925, MS 2800, MdHS.

In financial terms the production was a disaster. With a cast of 125, an initial $7,500 weekly salary budget (salary cuts were made periodically over the run of the performance), and a lavish stage production including three horses that ran a race onstage, the show would have to have sold out every performance to break even. In contrast, Shuffle Along had a cast of 60, with $3700 in weekly salaries, with sold out shows for the duration of its run. After only 96 performances, The Chocolate Dandies closed in May of 1925 with nearly $60,000 in losses.

Despite the mixed critical reactions and financial failure of their follow up to the landmark Shuffle Along, Sissle and Blake were unequivocal about the merits of the musical – they both felt it was their greatest collaboration. Blake considered it his masterpiece. In an interview later in his life, Blake explained,

“I know the world thinks Shuffle Along was the best, but that is more because it was such a novelty when it came out. It was the first, and it left an indelible mark on people’s minds. But I have never written a score to compare with the Chocolate Dandies. I know there is nothing in Shuffle Along anywhere near the melodies of ‘Dixie Moon’ and ‘Jassamine Lane.’ I know what people say, but I still fight the world on it. You know, you have to have a lot of nerve to tell the whole world off, but that’s how I feel.” (4)

The Maryland Historical Society received Eubie Blake’s vast personal collection of correspondence, photographs, memorabilia and sheet music in 1982 just a year prior to his passing on February 12, 1983. Reference Librarian Francis O’Neill, just beginning his 35 year tenure at MdHS, was among the staff members that made the trek to Blake’s home in Brooklyn, New York to bring the collection to Baltimore. He can still recall Blake, spry at 96, walking around in his bathrobe while his life’s work and memorabilia were taken away for future generations.

A full inventory of Blake’s sheet music is available through the Maryland Historical Society website. Over the past year the Special Collections staff, with the help of volunteer and current Goucher student Micah Connor, has been working on a full inventory of the photograph and manuscript collections, which should be available online later this year. (Damon Talbot)

Scene from the “Chocolate Dandies.” Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake with a young female performer, ca. 1924, Eubie Blake Photograph Collection,. PP301.317, MdHS.

Scene from “Chocolate Dandies,” song “Manda,” sung by Valada Snow, ca. 1924, Eubie Blake Photograph Collection, PP301.319, MdHS.

Program interior. The Chocolate Dandies, Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, ca. 1924, MS 2800, 080-02-003, MdHS.

Sources and Further Reading:

(1) Kimball, Robert and William Bolcom, Reminiscing with Sissle and Blake (The Viking Press: New York, 1973), p. 174.

(2) Ibid., 180.

(3) Hubert Harrison to Eubie Blake, June 18, 1924, Eubie Blake Manuscript Collection, MS 2800, MdHS.

(4) Kimball, 181.

Aberjhani and Sandra L. West, Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (Checkmark Books, 2003)

Gates, Henry Louis and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds., African American Lives (Oxford University Press, 2004)

Kimball, Robert and William Bolcom, Reminiscing with Sissle and Blake (The Viking Press: New York, 1973)

Osteen Mark and Frank J. Graziano, eds., Music at the Crossroads: Lives and Legacies of Baltimore Jazz (Apprentice House: Baltimore, 2010)

Rose, Al, Eubie Blake (Schirmer Books: New York, 1979)

Musical of the Month: Shuffle Along, New York Public Library Blog, February 10, 2012

Nationa Bohemian kegs, National Brewing Company, O’Donnell and Conkling Street, 1946, A. Aubrey Bodine Collection, B815 G, MdHS.

Back in the days when Baltimore was a manufacturing center, neighborhood bars were gathering places for the blue collar workers that worked in the industries. Their thirsts were quenched by the local breweries that produced beer for working men and women and even some high quality brews.

Many of these neighborhood taverns were destroyed in the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 with many more going out of business during Prohibition. A large number of the local breweries also felt the impact of the prohibition era and closed their doors. The impact of the loss of the manufacturing industry in Baltimore changed the nature of neighborhood bars and the course of urban redevelopment in the mid-20^th century contributed to more bar closings.

In 1783, settlers from Germany formed the German Society of Maryland to promote their language and culture in Baltimore. They also built breweries and beer gardens to quench their thirst for beer styled after their home brews. By 1850, Baltimore’s population was just over 169,000, with over 20,000 immigrants from Germany, representing slightly less than a 12 percent of the population. By 1865 this percentage increased to 25 percent and in 1890 the population of German-born Baltimoreans increased to 41,930, but because of a surge in the overall city population to 365,862, they comprised about 11 percent of all residents. Breweries, beer gardens, and taverns spread through Baltimore.

There were corner taverns in most working class neighborhoods—gathering places where workers might stop in on the way home to have a quick beer and exchange local news and gossip. On weekends, they might send their grade-school son “up the corner” with a small tin pail to bring home some draft beer for lunch or dinner. Taverns were plentiful along Wilkens Avenue, a German-American enclave, with countless others on Paca Street, in Southwest Baltimore and down by the waterfront docks.

The Wartime Prohibition Act of November 18, 1918, passed following the signing of the World War I Armistice ten days earlier, banned the manufacture of beer and wine if the alcohol content exceeded 2.75 percent—a major hurdle for the local bars and breweries. It differed from the 18^th Amendment that created national prohibition which banned the manufacture, importation, sale and transport of alcoholic beverages. The 18^th Amendment was ratified on October 28, 1919 by every state, except Connecticut and Rhode Island. The following year, Congress passed the Volstead Act to enforce the Amendment which took effect January 16, 1920.

Bootlegging and crossing the border into Canada for whiskey became ways of circumventing Prohibition. A popular ditty at the time was:

            Four and twenty Yankees, feeling very dry

            Went across the border to get a drink of rye

            When the rye was opened, the Yankees began to sing

           “God bless America, but God save the King” (1)

Whiskey had been widely prescribed by physicians at the time and it was reported that from 1921 to 1930, doctors earned about $40 million from issuing these kinds of prescriptions.(2)

Al and Ann’s Tavern, former and future site of the Horse You Came in On, 1963.
1626-1628 Thames Street, 1963, Baltimore Heritage Inc. Collection, 1963.1.847, MdHS.

Although prohibition led to the closing of a number of Baltimore’s historic bars, a few 18^th century taverns have managed to survive into the present day, most notably in Fells Point. With its proximity to the waterfront community in the 1700s, Fells Point served sailors and seafarers plenty of alcohol from the bars proliferating there. Located within the Fells Point Historic District at 1626 Thames Street is what is presently called The Horse You Came in On Saloon,  Opened in 1775 and operated continuously ever since, even through Prohibition, it is the only bar in Maryland  that can lay claim to that title. It is also known locally as the last bar Edgar Allen Poe visited before his mysterious death in October 1849. When purchased by Howard Gerber 1972, the tavern was named Al and Ann’s but Mr. Gerber thought the “Horse” appellation more appropriate. Current owners, Eric Mathias and Loannis and Spiros Korolgos have continued the Western theme.

Site of the Waterfront Hotel.
1710 Thames Street, 1963, Baltimore Heritage Inc. Collection, 1963.1.855, MdHS.

Just down the street, at 1701 Thames Street is the Waterfront Hotel, built in 1771 as a residence for a Thomas Long. Ten years later it was converted to a hotel by Cumberland Dugan (1747–1836), an Irish immigrant from Londonderry, who welcomed his guests by placing an open clam on their pillow. Edgar Allen Poe was a frequent guest and had a few drinks at the hotel’s bar. Later, detective story writer Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961), imbibed at the bar. Born in St. Mary’s county, Hammett gained the reputation as one of America’s greatest mystery writers, having written The Maltese Falcon and created The Thin Man “Nick and Nora Charles” series—both went on to become smash Hollywood movies. The Waterfront continues to serve food and drink, although today it’s a hotel in name only.

Along with most of the taverns, the big breweries also disappeared, replaced by national/international brands and industry consolidations.  Old timers will recall the American Brewery, Gunther Brewery, National Bohemian, The John F. Wiessner & Sons Brewery, and Globe Brewery. In all, over 100 breweries have come and gone in Baltimore.

Lost Taverns

Kaminsky’s Inn, corner of Mercer and Grant Street, ca. 1875, Baltimore City Life Museum Collection, CC2821, MdHS.

Although the Horse You Came in On may have the title of the longest continuously operated tavern in Baltimore, Kaminsky’s Inn, built in 1750 at the northwest corner of Mercer and Grant Streets, may have been the oldest tavern in the city. A 1752 sketch by John Moale (1731-1798)—a prominent landowner and amateur artist—shows a two-story building. A later sketch shows a third story added, according to records at that time, to adjust to alterations in the street level. The Inn was constructed

“of wood, two stories and an attic, with dormer windows. The first story was plastered outside and the upper part weather-boarded. A lone flight of stairs from the outside led up to the second story. The building presented the appearance of an old-fashioned German hostelry. It was the grand hotel of the city. Washington, Lafayette and other revolutionary heroes stopped there.”(3)

In 1775, Acadians, descendants of French colonists who had settled in Canada’s East Coast Maritime Provinces, were being forced out by the British after the French and Indian War (1754-1763). Several boatloads were sent to Maryland in 1775 and many came to Baltimore, settling in “French Town” on South Charles Street. Many lodged at Kaminsky’s Inn, before continuing on to Louisiana, their initial destination, where the term “Acadian” eventually morphed into “Cajun.”

Kaminsky’s Inn “met its demise in the early 1870s when it was razed to make way for three iron-front buildings at 101-105 East Redwood Street. These buildings were in turn destroyed some 30 years later when the Great Fire of 1904 swept through downtown Baltimore. A dozen years passed before another edifice, the Sun Life Insurance Company Building, was erected.”(4)

Bull’s Head Tavern, N. Front Street.
E. Sachse & Co.’s Bird’s Eye View of Baltimore(Detail), 1869, Baltimore City Life Museum Collection, CB 5457, MdHS (reference photo)

A tract of property located on North Front Street in “Old Town” Baltimore in 1732 was owned by Captain John Boring in an area known, at that time, as Jones Town. It was a bustling neighborhood of residences, industry and commerce. In 1812, Elizabeth Edwards inherited this parcel of land and building from the Boring family and, with improvements, opened the Tavern House in 1836. By 1880, it became known as the Bull’s Head Tavern and operated under that name until the building was purchased in 1900 by a Russian tailor named Simon Friedman. No records remain to indicate it remained a tavern—the building was later converted to an auto repair shop and by the 1950s replaced by a parking garage.

In 1998, sixteen youth, many from the Juvenile Justice System, helped archaeologists uncover relics from Baltimore’s past during excavation for the future Juvenile Justice Center on Gay Street. Among the curiosities unearthed were spittoons, utensils, food bones, hundreds of sugar molds from an early 19th century sugar refinery, and the foundation of the Bull’s Head Tavern.(5)

Fountain Inn, Light Street and German Street, 1871?, Baltimore City Life Museum Collection, MC5915, MdHS.

The Fountain Inn opened in 1773 at the southwest corner of what is now Baltimore and Hanover Street. It was built in what was then termed the Old London Style with balconies around a tree shaded courtyard. In 1775 the Inn played host to General George Washington on his way to the Continental Congress and again in 1781 when we was en route to Yorktown. Washington stayed at the Inn again in 1783 when he traveled to Annapolis to resign his commission as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army. His wife Martha also lodged at the Inn on her frequent trips to visit her husband at his various encampments. The Fountain Inn became the headquarters for the Patriots of the Whig Society—American Whigs were those colonists of the Thirteen Colonies who rebelled against British authority during the Revolution. The Inn weathered the storm of the War of 1812 and the Marquis de Lafayette, during this visit to the United States in 1824-1825, had a suite reserved for him there.

The Fountain Inn was razed in 1871 to make room for the Carrolton Hotel, which occupied the site until it was destroyed by the 1904 fire. Lavish for its time, the Southern Hotel opened its doors on this site in 1918 and remained there until 1964. Today the site is a parking lot.

Miller’s Hotel, formerly the Maypole Tavern, 16-18 S. Paca Street (note the livery stables)
E. Sachse & Co.’s Bird’s Eye View of Baltimore(Detail), 1869, Baltimore City Life Museum Collection, CB 5457, MdHS (reference photo)

The Maypole Tavern, in existence at least as early as 1824, was located at 16-18 S. Paca Street at the corner of German (now Redwood) Street. The Maypole was a favorite stopping point for waggoners passing through Baltimore. The first known owner was Henry Clark who operated it until his death in 1836. James Adams took over from Clark—his successor was Isaac Wilson who had been an agent for the B&O Railroad. The National Road, the first major highway in the United States was signed into law by Thomas Jefferson in 1806. Also known as the Cumberland Road, its’ purpose was to open up the West when construction started in 1811. The National Road connected Baltimore with the “Old National Pike” in 1824 and it brought business to the May Pole Tavern, along with others. According to the B&O Employees Magazine, some emigrants staying at the Maypole Hotel started their journey west ward from that point.

In 1849, brothers Horatio and William Miller purchased the Maypole and renamed it “Miller’s Hotel.” They may have been more interested in the livery stables that were attached, which could accommodate  up to 250 horses. The site, with a number of subsequent owners, remained a tavern until 1897, when it was converted into a warehouse. The livery stables continued to operate until around 1920. In the 1940s the building was torn down. Today the University of Maryland’s School of Social Work occupies the site.(6)

General Wayne Inn, northwest corner Paca Street and Baltimore Street, not dated, Baltimore City Life Museum Collection, CC84, MdHS.

The Complete View of Baltimore published by Samuel Young in 1883 listed many of the taverns that were in business at the time, but have since gone by the wayside:

Three Tuns Tavern (aka Three Tons Tavern) - Pratt & Paca Street

General Wayne Inn - Baltimore and Paca Streets

Hand Tavern - Paca Street near John Street

Indian Queen - Baltimore and Hanover Streets

Franklin Inn - Franklin and Paca Streets

Golden Horse Tavern - Howard and Franklin Streets

Cross Keys Tavern & Philadelphia Stage Office – 116 High Street

Rising Sun Tavern - High Street

Old Hays Scales Tavern- Forrest and Hillen Streets

Hand in Hand Tavern - Paca Street between Lexington and Saratoga Streets

Lost Breweries

There were well over 100 breweries in Baltimore’s history. The four most Baltimoreans remember are: the National Brewing Company, home of Natty Boh; the Globe Brewing Company with their Arrow Beer Hits the Spot commercials; the George Gunther Brewing Company and its “Dry-Beery Beer”; and the American Brewery whose iconic building at 1701 North Gay Street was recently restored.

National Brewing Company, Conkling at O’Donnell Street, June 1949, BGE-20897, Baltimore Museum of Industry.

The National Brewing Company, founded in 1872 at the corner of Conkling and O’Donnell Streets was a small brewery producing a high quality beer, National Premium. The brewery expanded its product line in 1885 when they began brewing barrels of National Bohemian beer. They delivered the barrels with horse drawn wagons and maintained stables on the brewery’s premises. The company shut down at the onset of Prohibition because, unlike their two local competitors, Gunther and Globe, they decide not to produce “near beer”—beer with less than half of 1 percent alcohol content by volume.

When the 18^th Amendment was repealed on April 7, 1933, local businessman Samuel Hoffberger bought the company, modernized it, and began producing beer. When his son Jerold was discharged from the armed services in 1945, he joined the company and the following year became president. For the next 28 years, under his guidance, the company thrived producing up to 230,000 barrels of beer a year.

Jerold also ushered in the era of “Mr.Boh,” a character with slicked down hair, with a curl on each side, one eye and a handle bar mustache. Advertised as the brew “From the Land of Pleasant Living,” it continued to grow and innovate—on the way introducing the six-pack. In 1953, the Colts joined the National Football League and Hoffberger produced a malt liquor called Colt 45. The can showed a kicking horse and horseshoe.

Natty Boh became the company’s symbol in 1954 after Jerold bought the Oriole baseball team and the beer was sold at Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium. In 1975 National Brewery merged with Canada’s Carling Brewery and together they had a brewing capacity of 1.9 million 31 gallon barrels of beer a year. But the merger proved unsuccessful and Carling-National was sold to the G. Heileman Company shortly thereafter.(7)

Globe Brewing Company, Hanover ans Conway Streets, 1932, Subject Vertical File, MdHS.

In 1748 brothers John and Daniel Barnitz established the Globe Brewery at 327 S. Hanover Street. It later achieved notoriety for its’ Arrow Beer, a mainstay in 20^th Century Baltimore. Like so many of the early breweries, this one changed hands several times over its 200 year life span. The brewery started making ale, but when Peter Gloninger, of German descent, took over the company in 1820, lager beer was added to the product line.

Samuel Lucas bought the firm after it had passed through several hands and under his direction it became the second largest brewery in Baltimore, producing about 7,000 barrels per year of porter and ale. Lucas died in 1856 and ownership passed to a Frenchman, Francis Dandelet and then on to John Butterfield in 1876, although Dandelet remained with the company until his death in 1878.

Butterfield’s addition of Frederick H. Gottlieb, his son-in-law, set the company on a new course and in 1888 the Globe Brewing Company was formed. Gottlieb joined a company that became Wehr-Hobelam-Gottlieb & Company which made barley and rye malt. The old  brewery was torn down and a new seven story malt plant built, which produced malt from 1881-1888, when the company returned to making beer. In 1889 Globe joined with 16 other breweries to form the Maryland Brewing Group with Globe as the central office, but this conglomerate broke apart as with Prohibition on the horizon.

Boston Iron and Metal Company was in the scrap metal business and bought the brewery for scrap in November 1919 but the new owners decided to try their luck producing beer instead. A  contest to name their beer ran which produced the well known “Arrow Special-It Hits the Spot.”  Producing “near beer” got them through prohibition. John Fitzgerald, brewmaster at the time, became the first brewer to produce legal beer when Prohibition ended. The Globe Brewing Company went on to become one of Baltimore’s best known brands, making Arrow Beer as well as Shamrock Ale, Arrow Ale and Arrow Bock, until it ceased operations in 1963.(8)

J.F. Wiessner and Sons Brewery Company building, 1700 N. Gay Street, ca. 1915, Baltimore City Life Museum Collection, MC7104, MdHS.

The American Brewery located at 1701 North Gay Street was first established as the John F. Weissner & Sons Brewing Company. Built in 1877, it was a complex of five buildings. The brewery occupied 1700-1702 North Gay and the Bottling Plant was located at 1704-1710 North Gay. Just down the street was another brewery owned by George Bauernschmidt.  Both of these breweries had the first ice making machinery in Baltimore. Wiessner plant production reached 110,000 barrels per year by 1919. The Wiessner family lived across the street and their residence was large enough to house some of the workers coming from Germany.

Prohibition took its toll and the Weissner Brewery shut its doors in 1920. The property was sold to the American Malt Company who started making American Beer in 1950. The plant shut down in 1973, but their magnificent building remains today, restored and occupied by the Baltimore Headquarters for Humanities, non-profit providing mental health and vocational services for the disabled and the disadvantaged.

One of the brewery’s most famous symbols, the statue of King Gambrinus , the patron saint of beer was restored and now resides at the Maryland Historical Society.(9)

Gunther Brewing Company, Conkling and Toone Street, ca 1955, Subject Vertical File, MdHS.

Established in 1900, Gunther Brewery, located at Conkling and Toone Streets, was officially named the George Guenther Jr. Brewing Company (note the dropped “e”). Twenty years earlier George Guenther Sr. took over the Gehl Brewery and after a fire damaged the building he built a new one in 1887. He operated the brewery until 1899 when he sold the business to the Maryland Brewery, and as part of their agreement he could not open another brewery in his name—so he started a new concern in 1900 using his son’s name, George Guenther Jr. Brewing Company. They had the foresight to anticipate Prohibition and began brewing “near beer” in 1919. After Prohibition ended Gunther proceeded to expand its business and was so successful, Hamm’s Brewing Company bought them out in 1960. As consolidation in the industry continued, the F&M Shaefer Company bought out Hamm’s three years later. The Shaefer Company continued to produce both Hamm’s and Gunther until 1978.(10) Today the Gunther Apartments, at 1211 South Conkling Street, keep the name of that old brewery alive. (Sidney Levy)

Sidney Levy is a volunteer in the Special Collections Department at the Maryland Historical Society.

King Gambrinus, 1879.
This statue of the icon of the brewing industry, the earliest surviving zinc sculpture of its kind, originally stood in a niche above a door at the J.F. Wiessner & Sons Brewery at 1701 N. Gay Street.
King Gambrinus, 1879, Museum Collection, 2000.23, MdHS.

Some Lesser Known Baltimore Breweries That Have Vanished:

George Bauernschmidt Brewery, established 1900 – Gay and Oliver Streets

Darley Park Brewery, established 1900, Harford Road

Bayview Brewery - O’Donnell Street at Conkling Street

Eigenbrot Brewery - Wilkens Avenue

Eurich’s Beer - Mt.Vernon Brewery Company, foot of Ridgely Street

Brehm’s Brewery – N.E. corner of Belair Road and Erdman Avenue

Bernhard Berger’s Lager Beer Brewery -Belvidere Street near Greenmount Avenue

Chesapeake Beer Bottling Company - 424 West Baltimore Street

J.H.Von ded Horst & Sons-Eagle Brewery – Belair Road Extended

Jackson & Tucker “Iron Beer” - 6 South Howard Street

Thos. B. Cooke - 1426-28 Eastern Avenue

Oriental Brewery - Third and Lancaster Streets in Canton

In the 1940 Baltimore City Directory the following breweries were listed but no longer exist:

American Brewing Company Inc. – 1700 N. Gay Street

Bismarck Brewing Company - 1808 N. Patterson Park Avenue

Bruton Brewing Company - 3501 Brehms Lane

Free State Brewing Company - 1108 Hillen Road

Globe Brewing Company (Arrow beer) – 327 S.Hanover  Street

Gunther Brewing Company - 1211 S. Conkling Street

Imperial Brewing Company - 1838 N. Patterson Park Avenue

National Brewing Company - Conkling & O’Donnell Streets

Sources and Further Reading:

(1) Prohibition in the United States, Wikipedia

(2) Ibid.

(3) “A Leaf from the Past,” The Baltimore Sun, December 5, 1885.

(4) Lost City: Baltimore Town, underbelly: from the deepest corners of the Maryland Historical Society Library, June 20, 2013.

(5) Roylance, Frank D., “Program lets youths dig into city’s past Archaeology: A group of young men, some in the custody of Juvenile Justice, spent two weeks at the future site of a new detention center” The Baltimore Sun, August 31, 1998.

(6) Paca Street (16-18 South), Passano-O’Neill File, MdHS.

(7) National Brewing Company, Wikipedia; Kilduff’s Old Baltimore Breweries

(8) Globe Brewing Company, RustyCans.com; Kilduff’s Old Baltimore Breweries

(9) The History of Breweries in Baltimore; Baltimore Brew, Kilduffs Old Baltimore Breweries

(10) Gunther Brewery-George Gunther Brewing Co., of Baltimore-Peared Creation

Circus Maximus, possibly The Alcazar Theatre, 1977, Paint and Powder Club Photograph Collection, PP195-165, MdHS.

The Paint and Powder Club, established in 1893 as a philanthropic and social club, is dedicated both to camaraderie among its members and assistance to local charities from monies raised with theater productions.  Social events are held throughout the year as the members prepare the coming theatrical presentations. It was founded as a men’s club with its membership drawn from Baltimore’s blue blood community, with members performing both male and female parts in its annual productions.  A later member described the creation of the theatrical organization:

“In the “Gay 90’s”, before Baltimore was acknowledged as “Charm City”, it was at its most charming, at least for those of the pampered, well defined Social Set. While the rest of the population worked diligently, the “Playboys” of Mt. Vernon Square, Broadway and Eutaw Place found time to be ingenious, imaginative and creative. From this incubator in 1893, a group of Baltimore’s more influential and affluent young men, with an interest in theatrics and necessary means and leisure gave birth to an extravaganza…” (1)

Harry Lehr in Mustapha, 1894, Paint and Powder Club Photograph Collection, PP195-3, MdHS.

Alfred Baldwin Sloane in Mustapha, February 1894, Paint and Powder Club Photograph Collection, PP195-5, MdHS.

These early “playboys” included members of prominent Maryland families with surnames including Hiss, Worthington, Gambrills, Cassard, McComas, Rennard, Gilpin, Stieff, and Ridgely. One-later infamous-member was socialite Henry Symes “Harry” Lehr, son of the German Consul to Baltimore. Lehr would gain renown as a high society hanger on known for bizarre antics, including impersonating Tsar Nicholas II at a party, and hosting the “dog’s dinner,” an elaborate soiree in which “100 pets of wealthy friends dined at foot-high tables while dressed in formal attire.” (2)

Paint and Powder’s first show, “Mustapha,” was presented in 1894 at Baltimore’s Fords Grand Opera House on W. Fayette Street. Written by member Alfred Baldwin Sloane, later Broadway’s most prolific composer of musical comedies, the play was “ALL original—script, songs, cast, costumes and sets…and ALL proceeds to charity. The venture was a smash hit…socially, dramatically and aesthetically…it was fun, wildly popular and apparently indestructible.” (3) It went on to play other theaters in Baltimore including Albaugh’s Lyceum Theatre on North Charles Street, before heading off to Washington, D.C. and Richmond, Virginia. The Baltimore performances raised $5,800 (approximately $100,000 in 2016 dollars) for the also recently established Children’s Country Home in Orange Grove, Baltimore County, a charitable agency which gave “poor children the benefit of two weeks in the country during the heated season.” (4)

Reese Cassard in Joan of Arc, 1895, Paint and Powder Club Photograph Collection, PP195-35, MdHS.

Rowland C. West in Joan of Arc, 1895, Paint and Powder Club Photograph Collectio, PP195-8, MdHS.

The following year the club was incorporated and it’s roster listed 64 members. Their second production, “Joan of Arc,” also debuted at Ford’s Theatre. The play was written by Guy Wetmore Carryl of Columbia College, after the club had failed to find a play of acceptable quality from a submission contest held in Baltimore.

Plays were also staged at the Maryland Theater, Lehman’s and the Lyric (today the Lyric Opera House). Over the years, the repertoire expanded to include plays written by club members and other shows already familiar to audiences. By 1936, Paint and Powder had produced 17 plays, mostly vaudeville and musical comedies in nature. The 1941 show was the Broadway Musical comedy hit “Oh! Kay,” and in 1947, it was Gershwin’s “Girl Crazy.” The 1977 show was “Away We Go”; “Show Business” was the 59^th production.

A variety of charities have benefited from Paint and Powder productions over the years. The 1936 charity was the Hospital for Women in Maryland. The 1941 show benefited the British Work Relief Society. In 1951 it was Franklin Square Hospital. The 1952 recipient was the Fund for Mentally Retarded and Handicapped Children. Church Home and Hospital was the 1961 recipient. Other charities that have benefitted  through the years are the Hilgenberg Children’s Center for Speech Disorders, William S. Baer School, the Children’s Scholarship Fund, the Maryland Conservatory of Music, Students Sharing Coalition, the Y of Central Maryland in Harford County, Linwood Center, the Women’s Industrial Exchange (which remains a Baltimore icon), and the Mental Health Association of Maryland Baltimore, which included a message of appreciation from Rosalynn Carter in the printed program for its good work.

In the 1930s female performers joined their male counterparts on stage for the first time. In 1994, the board of directors approved membership for women, and four years later, a woman was elected president. She was also the first person to serve for three presidential terms.

In addition to its plays, Paint and Powder has a men’s Singing Chorus, “a women’s Singing Chorus, a mixed chorus called “The Counterpoints,” a music group called “The Keystone Kops,” and another called the “Uptown Society Band.” Its Paint and Powder Club theme song,“Have Another,“ refers to its annual stage presentations.

Scene from Judge Judy, the Musical, 2015.
Image from paintandpowderclub.org

The Paint and Powder Club is thought to be the oldest of its type in the United States. Similar clubs exist in Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities, but Baltimore’s Paint and Powder Club considers itself the oldest. Paint and Powder is incorporated in Timonium, Maryland. Aside from a few years during World War II and at a few other times, the organization has held its annual theatrical production every year. Last year the club put on “Judge Judy, The Musical”:

“A musical takeoff of the T.V. Show. It takes place in a court room with Judge Judy presiding over cases brought to her by Bill, the bailiff and a court reporter sitting near the judge’s bench, wisecracking throughout the trials. Outlandish people sing and dance away their excuses for their mostly stupid crimes & Judge Judy fantasizes her way to stardom.” (5)

In May of this year, a revue of highlights from performances over the past 40 years will be held to commemorate the organizations 123^rd year of existence. (Michael Mark)

Michael Mark is retired Professor Emeritus of Music at Towson University and a volunteer in the Special Collections Department of the Maryland Historical Society.

The Maryland Historical Society holds a large collection of materials related to the Paint and Powder Club dating from the club’s inception in 1893 to the present, including photographs, correspondence, programs, newsletters, meeting proceedings, and member lists.

Circus Maximus, Possibly The Alcazar, 1977, Paint and Powder Club Photograph Collection, PP195, MdHS.

Plot of Mustapha, MS 1735.1, MdHS, reference photo

Set for Lady Be Good, Poly Auditorium, 1953, Paint and Powder Club Photograph Collection, PP195-58, MdHS.

Program for the Paint and Powder Club’s 1971 performance of ‘Miss Print’ at 706 Cathedral Street, today the home of the Baltimore School for the Arts.
Paint and Powder Club Program, April 30, May 1, 1971, MS 1735.1, MdHS (reference photo).

Thomas Robb Jr., 1907, Paint and Powder Club Photograph Collection, PP195-14, MdHS.

Sources and Further Reading:

(1) Paint and Powder Club Inc., Roster and By-Laws, 1975-1976, MS 1735.1

(2) Henry Symes Lehr, Wikipedia

(3) Paint and Powder Club Inc., Roster and By-Laws, 1975-1976, MS 1735.1

(4) Maryland, It’s Resources, Industries and Institutions (The Sun Job Printing Office, Baltimore, MD, 1893), 466.

(5) Judge Judy, The Musical, PaintandPowderClub.org

History of the Club, PaintandPowderClub.org

The Paint and Powder Club – Early Baltimore Drag, Charm City History, March 1, 2013.

Paint and Powder Club Inc., Roster and By-Laws, 1975-1976, MS 1735.1

Paint and Powder Club Photograph Collection, PP195, MdHS.

Baltimore Paint and Powder Club Archives, MS 1735, MdHS.

The Protestant Infant Asylum of Baltimore City was founded in 1875 to provide refuge for orphaned and abandoned babies. It was one of several similar privately funded charitable institutions which helped give shelter, medical attention, and eventually permanent homes to the city’s less fortunate children. These agencies were often set up by concerned citizens, primarily wealthy and middle class women, along religious or ethnic lines. For example, the Hebrew Orphan Asylum and German Orphan Home had been established in previous years to care for children in their particular communities. A group of like-minded women, led by Mrs. William H. Brune, became concerned by the lack of Protestant orphanages and thus started the Protestant Infant Asylum.

The Maryland Lying-In Asylum or Maternite Hospital affiliated with College of Physicians and Surgeons. From “The Monumental City, Its Past History and Present Resources” by George W. Howard. (REFERENCE PHOTO)

The asylum operated exclusively on charitable donations and volunteer support and was given two rooms at the Maternité Hospital at 163 West Lombard Street in Baltimore to host its wards. Doctors and nurses from the associated College of Physicians and Surgeons attended to the medical needs of the children. Women involved with the organization handled the day to day operations of the asylum. They would provide care for the children during the day. They also started sewing circles to make clothing and other essential items for the babies and assisted with fundraising and supply collection.

The institution took in sixty-six infants in its first year. Some of these babies were orphans, but others were placed for temporary care by their parents who could not afford to keep them. The parents paid a nominal board for the child and could take back the child when their financial circumstances improved. The asylum and other institutions which provided the same services were often met with criticism that providing care for these children would encourage people to have children they could not afford or promote “loose morals” among single women. The officers and board of directors deflected this criticism. The members felt that children should not be punished for the circumstances of their birth and should be assisted regardless. The first annual report states this position: “Many of these children are the offspring of honest parents, struggling in the iron grip of poverty, no means to care for them, no home comforts, and by leaving them, in our Asylum, they try to get work…thus enabled to get along moderately well, knowing their infants are in good hands.” The report also does not condemn those women who had children out of wedlock stating, “On the other hand if the children are the fruit of sin we do not encourage it, nor do we hinder it, both are beyond our power, — always will be and we only aspire to save and succor the innocent little ones.”(1)

The former Schroeder Mansion with additional wings that housed the orphanage and hospital services.
Nursery & Child’s Hospital, not dated, Nursery and Child’s Hospital Photograph Collection, PP308.003, MdHS.

Eleven children were placed with adoptive families in the first year. Several others were returned to their mothers as their financial position had improved. Despite these successes, the early years were plagued by very high mortality rates because of illness and malnutrition. The infants often came into the Asylum’s care as hopeless cases, woefully underfed and sick. Wet nurses were employed to feed the youngest babies, but this did not always save them, and the institution often struggled to assist. Physicians’ reports from these first years lament the struggle to keep these infants alive because of the lack of a sufficient replacement for mother’s milk. This problem was unfortunately not exclusive to the orphanage. The Board was forced to purchase a lot in Loudon Park Cemetery for the wards who were lost. Babies beyond breast-feeding age and toddlers fared much better, and the physicians’ reports often proudly celebrated “epidemic” free years.

The Protestant Infant Asylum moved to a house at Gilmor and Presstman Streets to accommodate the large number of wards in the following year. The asylum quickly outgrew this space, and moved in 1879 to the former Schroeder mansion at 400-410 North Schroeder Street, which had previously housed the Union Orphan Asylum. Hospital services were added and the move also prompted a name change to the Nursery and Child’s Hospital.

The founders of the asylum had always aspired to provide more advanced health care to impoverished children up to 18 years of age. Lack of space and funds had prevented this, but the new property was much larger and donors endowed new wings and beds for patients. The hospital provided medical services to needy children for free. A majority of the cases required long term care for chronic illness or physical ailments. The doctors and nurses often treated cases of “lameness,” which were the result of injury or illness. Private rooms were also available to those who could afford to pay for treatment, fees from which helped sustain the charitable work. In 1893, a free dispensary was opened to better serve the community but was forced to close three years later due to a lack of funds. By 1898, the maximum admission age to the hospital had dropped to 15.

Nurses and children outside of the Schroeder Street facility.
Children at Nursery and Child’s Hospital, ca. 1880-1890, Nursery and Child’s Hospital Photograph Collection, PP308.005, MdHS.

As the organization expanded its medical services, the Nursery faced challenges accommodating demands to take in more children. Even in the larger building at Schroeder Street, the asylum was forced to turn away four out of five applicants to the nursery. To alleviate some of the financial burden, the Maryland State Legislature voted $10,000 to support the agency in 1882. This began an era of state and city government funding. The city also began to pay a small daily fee to cover the expenses of children placed at the Nursery. Despite this support, the institution was still heavily dependent upon private donations of money and supplies. Board members were constantly challenged to raise more and more cash to cover basic operating expenses and pay for necessary upgrades and repairs to the building. The early 1900s were a particular time of financial struggle for the Nursery and Child’s Hospital. The great fire of 1904 in Baltimore and World War I diverted donations from the hospital. The war also made finding foster families much more difficult. Hard economic times forced members to reevaluate the process for admitting new wards and they capped enrollment at 90 children. The Nursery also moved away from taking children younger than six months old. It was also suggested that the institution exclusively take African-American children as no such agency existed in the city, but the staff and board decided it was best to continue as the Nursery as an orphanage without race restrictions.

The board and staff of the institution tried to prevent the lack of funds from affecting the children in their care. For many of the wards, the Nursery had more luxury than they had ever known. Generally, the children came to the institution through city and county government agencies and other private charities. However, there are a few accounts of children being abandoned on the steps of the building. A baby boy, later named Billy Barton, was anonymously dropped off in a florist’s box with air holes punched in it in 1928. In 1895, a baby boy of supposed Japanese heritage caused quite a sensation. Women and children from all over the city came to visit Frank, as he was known. He had apparently been left at the Nursery soon after his birth at the Baltimore University Hospital by his mother, a travelling performer. The staff tried to give each child a normal upbringing that did not feel overwhelmingly institutional. Play was encouraged, and the children were often taken on field trips and treated to ice cream and candy. A quick adoption or return home was always the main goal.

By 1932, the Schroeder street buildings had become too antiquated and costly to maintain. The institution temporarily moved to 420-422 North Fulton Street while the board searched for appropriate property to purchase to build a new facility. The board had always wanted to have a custom built space, and the following year, property on Woodbourne Avenue was purchased to build a tailor made building. The move to Fulton Street also signaled the end of an era for the Nursery and Child’s Hospital. The organization ended its hospital work. Also by this time, the foster care system had overtaken traditional orphanages, and the Nursery and Child’s Hospital struggled to remain relevant in this climate.

An artistic rendering of the new facility on Woodbourne Avenue in Baltimore’s Govans neighborhood.
721 Woodbourne Avenue, not dated, Nursery and Child’s Hospital Photograph Collection, PP308.019, MdHS.

The new building at 721 Woodbourne Avenue opened in 1938, and the institution once again changed its name and took on a new identity. The Nursery and Child Study Home of Maryland, Inc. became a group home which cared for children who struggled to find a place elsewhere. The new admittees ranged in age from four to fourteen. These children faced different challenges then the population the Nursery had previously served. Those admitted had “emotional disturbances manifest themselves, on the one hand, in aggressive acting out behavior, or, on the other, withdrawal into a hard-to-reach fantasy world,” which required close supervision and psychiatric care.(2) This included chronic truants, those who had difficulties adjusting to foster care, some juvenile court cases, and children whose behavior led their parents to seek outside help.

The home employed an on-site psychiatrist, an on-call medical doctor, nurses, and housemothers and fathers to care for the children. The patients would stay for a few months receiving treatment to address whatever ailed them. The doctors and social workers also worked with their patients’ parents to continue progress made while at the home. They also sought to create a safe space for the children that felt more like home than a psychiatric hospital. These children were not treated as prisoners but given freedom to play, visit with family, and some even continued to attend their own school, or in other words, live as normally as possible. They were not subject to harsh punishment but gentle encouragement to behave appropriately. This change in mission also necessitated another name change in 1943 to the Child Study Center of Maryland, a title which reflected its new services. The center’s goal was to rehabilitate the children in its care, so they could return to society. The study center continued in this vein for many years and evolved its practices and policies as the field of child psychiatry changed and grew. In 1964, the center became affiliated with the Children’s Psychiatric Services of Johns Hopkins Hospital.

The Woodbourne property was sold in 1972 to the Baltimore City Department of Juvenile Services. The facility became the Maryland Youth Residence Center, a residence for boys ages 14 to 18 committed by the court. It operated in similar capacities until 2008 when the building became office space. (Lara Westwood)

The Nursery and Child’s Hospital Manuscript and Photograph Collections were donated in 2015 by the Woodbourne Center. The collections contain materials, such as annual reports, meeting minutes, and documents, which document the history of the organization and its social work.

Sources and Further Reading:

(1) Protestant Infant Asylum. The First Annual Report of the Protestant Infant Asylum of Baltimore City. Baltimore: Hanzsche &, 1876, 4.

(2)The Child Study Center of Maryland, Inc. report, no date (ca. 1943), Nursery and Child’s Hospital Manuscript Collection, MS 3180, Box 1, Folder 5, MdHS.

“A Five-year Plan for the Orphan.” Baltimore Sun, November 21, 1937.

“Baby Left on Nursery Steps in Box Is Named Billy Barton.” Baltimore Sun, April 2, 1928.

“Baby Jap Christened.” Baltimore Sun, June 24, 1895.

“Home to Be Built for Treatment of Problem Children.” Baltimore Sun, July 13, 1937.

Nursery and Child’s Hospital Manuscript Collection, MS 3180, Maryland Historical Society.

“Nursery and Child’s Hospital Moves into New Quarters.” Baltimore Sun, June 2, 1938.

“DEPARTMENT OF JUVENILE SERVICES.” Juvenile Services, Maryland Department of.

Zmora, Nurith. Orphanages Reconsidered: Child Care Institutions in Progressive Era Baltimore. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994.

Lubov Breit Keefer, not dated, MS 2859, MdHS.

Lubov Breit Keefer – musician, scholar, teacher, arts activist – was born in 1896 in the industrial city of Nikolaev in southern Ukraine. In the 1910s, her father Alfred Breit came to the United States to teach mathematics at Johns Hopkins University, leaving Lubov, her mother and two brothers, Leo and Gregory, in Russia. Following the death of his wife and the outbreak of World War I, Alfred brought his children to live in Baltimore. Leo went on to become a doctor and the Gregory became a renowned physicist at Yale, who was involved in the U.S. development of the atomic bomb.

Lubov attended school in Russia and studied piano at the tsarist Petrograd Conservatory when composer and conductor, Alexander Glazunov, was director. Before leaving Russia, she attended performances by Sergey Prokofiev and Alexander Scriabin. Keefer was one of the last people in the United States to have witnessed a performance by Scriabin, who died in April 1915.(1)

In the United States, Keefer was present at the first performance of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra on February 11, 1916. She went on to earn her Ph.D. in German at the Johns Hopkins University, writing her dissertation on the origins of German Romanticism in that language. She also read fluently in French, Italian, Polish, Norwegian, Danish and Spanish. In addition, she received a diploma in music from the Peabody Conservatory.(2)

Lubov taught Russian, music appreciation, and music history at Hopkins, and for 52 years, piano at the Peabody Preparatory, retiring in 1967. She said, “I didn’t develop any virtuosos, but a great many of my students became ardent fundraisers for the Peabody.”  She worked hard for low pay and managed to leave $100,00 to be divided between Peabody and JHU. She also taught the first foreign language class to be offered at a Baltimore public school at Edmondson High School.(3)

Keefer enjoyed a rich and varied social life, renowned for her love of parties and good conversation. With her only marriage ended in divorce in 1935, she could devote her life to music, teaching and an extensive social life.(4) Her home on Tudor Arms Avenue was the scene of many parties where she entertained famous musicians. She dressed exotically, wearing flamboyant hats, and often in beautiful evening gowns of her own creation. This was not limited to parties or musical functions, appearing at her oral examinations for her doctorate at Johns Hopkins at nine in the morning in full evening dress. It was not unusual for her to share her love of Russian culture by speaking in languages other than English because “I find eet convenient.” She particularly fond of horseback riding in Druid Hill Park.

As a patriotic citizen, she served as an air raid warden during World War II. One freezing night, the air raid sirens interrupted a Peabody concert. Lubov, dressed in her evening gown and party shoes, immediately ran outside into the cold night to fulfill her warden duties.(5) She also put her music career on hold temporarily to help the war effort working as a welder at a Westinghouse plant in Massachusetts.(6)

Peabody Institute Preparatory School, interior of conservatory auditorium, April 1925, Baltimore City Life Museum Collection, MC6192-1, MdHS.

Keefer earned many accolades throughout her career. She was named Woman of the Year by the Business and Professional Women’s Club of Baltimore (which later became the Baltimore Symphony Associates).(7) As chair of the Associates Adult Education Committee, she founded the Baltimore Symphony Associates concert series at the Enoch Pratt Library. Although the concerts were free to the public, the musicians were paid at her request. The BSA established the Lubov Breit Keefer Award for Young Soloists scholarship in her honor and radio station WFBR dedicated its “Concert of the Classics” to her.(8)

A prolific writer, Dr. Keefer authored several books and numerous articles. Among her books were Gogol and Music and Music Angels, about 1000 years of patronage of music by women. Her Baltimore’s Music—The Haven of the American  Composer, published in 1962 was the first published history of music in Maryland – for decades the definitive work on the city’s musical history. Some of her articles, published in the “Peabody Bulletin, were “Mussorgsky Letters” and “The Enigma of Bach.” Her writings about travels to Russia, Greece, and Paris were spicy and humorous.

Keefer also hosted “Symphony Forum,” a weekly radio show broadcast during the Baltimore Symphony season. In the audio clip below, taken from an oral history conducted in 1973, you can get a sense of the 77 year old Keefer’s vitality and forceful personality. Here she provides her views on the importance of the Baltimore Symphony:

Keefer died in her Tudor Arms apartment on December 17, 1983. Robert Pierce, director of the Peabody, said “She was a female Mencken with a Russian accent. She had the same love of Baltimore and its achievements.  Everything she did was tinged with flair and a sense of humor.  She set a standard of involvement and maintained it for so many years. She had a sharp, inquisitive mind, unbounded curiosity, which she always projected. You could never get her to talk about herself, but she could always get others to talk about themselves. She always brought out the best in everyone. Her love of life, culture and gaiety were infectious.”(9) (Michael Mark)

Michael Mark is retired Professor Emeritus of Music at Towson University and a volunteer in the Special Collections Department of the Maryland Historical Society.

The Maryland Historical Society holds a number of materials related to Lubov Breit Keefer, including her published books, correspondence, photographs, manuscript notes, and three oral histories conducted with her in the 1970s.

In Memoriam: Lubov Breit Keefer, Baltimore Symphony Program, January 13, 1983, MS 2859, Lubov Breit Keefer Collection, MdHS (reference photo)

Sources and further reading:

(1)(2) The Baltimore Sun, 12/16/1956

(3) The Evening Sun of Baltimore, 12/20/1962

(4) The Messenger, 1/12/1983

(5) The Baltimore Sun, 12/23/1982

(6) The Baltimore Sun, 12/19/1982.

(7) The Messenger, 6/28/1982

(8) The Baltimore Sun, 12/23/1982; Woman of the Year Award, 10/31/1969

(9) The Baltimore News American, December 1982.

The Baltimore Sun, December 23, 1982.

The Baltimore Sun, December 12, 1962.

Peabody News, December 1982.