By Ashley Minner Jones
Vince’s Bar was owned by Vincent Staico. His wife, Matilda, “Ms. Til,” often ran the bar. Former patrons describe it as a quiet neighborhood bar, where there was seldom, if ever, fighting. Vince’s had pool tables and American Indian community…

By Ashley Minner Jones
In 1956, the oldest congregation in Baltimore City founded by Lumbee Indians (presently known as South Broadway Baptist Church) rented the storefront at 1918 E. Fairmount Avenue and adopted the name “Fairmount Avenue Missionary Baptist Church” under…

By Ashley Minner Jones
The Volcano Bar is easily the most infamous Indian bar of Baltimore’s “reservation” era, but it was in existence long before the clientele was mostly Indian. It first appears in a Sun ad as the “Volcano Restaurant” in 1944. In the 1960s through…

By Ashley Minner Jones
East Baltimore Church of God, the second oldest congregation established by Lumbee Indians in the City of Baltimore, was in 1955 known as the “Upper Room” Church because services were held above Gordon Cleaners at the corner of Baltimore and Wolfe…

By Ashley Minner Jones
Jesse B. Revels Jr. (Lumbee) and his wife, Lucy May Revels, bought the property at 1819 E. Baltimore Street in 1962 and opened a grocery store. They and their children ran the store until 1968, when they moved to Baltimore County. They sold the…

By Ashley Minner Jones
Sid’s Ranch House Tavern occupied a building that had been converted into a movie theater during the first part of the twentieth century. It had been the Teddy Bear Parlor ca. 1908 – 1919, and the Mickey until 1920 or ‘21. Sidney Silverman, a…

By Ashley Minner Jones
1727 E. Baltimore Street housed a series of ethnic food establishments from the turn of the century through the early 1960s, reflecting greater migration patterns in the neighborhood. In 1917, it was the Shub Bros. Bakery; in 1947, it was the…

By Ashley Minner Jones
East Baltimore Church of God began in 1955, under the leadership of a Lumbee woman, Rev. Lounita Hammonds. It was originally known as the “Upper Room” Church because services were held above Gordon Cleaners, located at the corner of Baltimore and…

By Ashley Minner Jones
The Moonlight Restaurant was Greek-owned. It was one of the first restaurants in which many Lumbee Indians arriving from the Jim Crow South could sit down and eat. Much of the planning for what would become South Broadway Baptist Church and the…

By Ashley Minner Jones
The Baltimore American Indian Center opened the Inter-Tribal Restaurant at 17 S. Broadway, during the tenure of Director Barry Richardson (Haliwa Saponi), ca. 1989. Board members of the Indian Center wanted to try another restaurant venture as part…

By Ashley Minner Jones
Claudie and Mabel Hunt (Lumbee) purchased the Sinclair service station at 100 S. Broadway, ca. 1967. It had a three-bay garage and six gas pumps. After about a year, the station was converted to BP. The Hunts sold the station when they moved back to…

By Ashley Minner Jones
The original portion of this building was constructed in Greek revival style, in 1843, for a sea captain and his family. The captain and his wife placed it into trust for their daughter, who willed it to the Baltimore Humane Impartial Society to be…

By Ashley Minner Jones
In 1975, Earl Brooks (Lumbee) purchased a storefront building at 207 S. Broadway and opened Hokahey Indian Trading Post with his friend, Solomon Maynor (Coharie). The store primarily sold silver and turquoise Indian jewelry purchased in New Mexico.…

By Ashley Minner Jones
This church is the oldest in the Upper Fells Point Historic District, completed in 1848. Originally dedicated as a “mariner’s church,” it has been home to several community institutions over the past 170+ years. South Broadway Baptist Church is…

By Richard F. Messick
The unassuming space on Harford Road belies the work performed there by its craftspeople. Clifton Upholstering has reupholstered everything from that old couch in the den to 16th century French chairs to period pieces for several locally filmed…

By Richard F. Messick
When John H. Murphy, Sr. purchased the Afro-American Newspaper in 1897, the idea of sending a poet to cover a civil war in Spain was probably far from his mind, especially a poet as distinguished as Langston Hughes. His paper, after all, had a…

By Francesca Cohen
In almost every kitchen in Baltimore, and maybe Maryland, there is a tiny yellow, blue, and red tin of Old Bay seasoning. It is an essential part of local cuisine. Yet, most people are unaware of the spice’s dramatic Jewish history. Old Bay was…

By Tyler Wilson
Augusta T. Chissell was one of the most influential activists in the women’s suffrage movement in Maryland. She lived in the red painted row house at the corner of Druid Hill Ave and McMechen St. Through her tireless participation in important civil…

By Richard F. Messick
Austin Woolfolk was one of the first major slave traders in Baltimore, beginning as a 19-year-old in 1816. He was instrumental in turning the trade into a business. Like most traders at that time, he started with informal transactions in taverns and…

By Richard F. Messick
Before trading under his own name, Jonathan Means Wilson was associated with a few other slave traders. During the early 1840s, he worked as an agent for Hope Slatter, then switched to Joseph Donovan in the later 1840s. By 1849, he started his own…

By Richard F. Messick
Hope Hall Slatter, after working in the slave trade in Georgia for a number of years, moved to Baltimore in 1835 and started building up a business of selling enslaved workers to the Southern market. At this time, cotton was vital to the nation’s…

By Richard F. Messick
James Franklin Purvis arrived in Baltimore around 1831 to act as an agent for his uncle, Isaac Franklin, whose firm was the largest purveyor of human beings in the country, Franklin & Armfield of Alexandria, VA. Purvis followed the same business…

By Richard F. Messick
This was the fourth and last base of operations for Joseph S. Donovan, which he opened here in 1858 at the SW corner of Eutaw and Camden Streets. It is likely he chose this location because, across Eutaw Street, the B&O Railroad had recently…

By Richard F. Messick
After several years buying and selling human beings, Joseph S. Donovan started operating a slave pen here at 13 Camden Street in 1846. He had been operating from a slave pen he purchased from Austin Woolfolk, but decided to move closer to the…

By Richard F. Messick
Joseph S. Donovan’s first known business address was here on Light Street, south of Montgomery Street, where he probably began his slave trade before acquiring Austin Woolfolk’s slave pen in 1843. It was then that ship manifests indicate he was…

By Richard F. Messick
John Denning moved his operation in 1849 to a pen at this location, 18 S. Frederick Street, which he noted was the house “with trees in front.” He always made a point in his ads that he was ready to pay “cash for Negroes,” often repeating the…

By Richard F. Messick
Intelligence offices were similar to employment agencies, acting as brokers between employees and employers collecting a fee from each. They also acted as brokers for enslavers who didn’t want to handle the transactions of selling people…