By The Explore Baltimore Heritage team
The first headmaster of the Calvert School, Virgil Hillyer, built Castalia between 1928 and 1929, naming it after the spring at the foot of Mount Parnassas in Italy that is said to have been the inspiration for the muses. The prominent Baltimore…

By The Explore Baltimore Heritage team
The story of the Emerson Mansion began in 1895 when Captain Isaac Emerson commissioned the building as a home for his family. Captain Emerson lived at this location up to 1911 when he and his wife divorced. Emerson remarried just two months later…

By The Explore Baltimore Heritage team
In 1939, the trustees of Morgan College decided to sell the institution to the State of Maryland. The proceeds from that transaction were earmarked for the construction of a center for religious activities, the Morgan Christian Center (now Morgan…

By Aimée Pohl
In 1872 Baltimore’s historic Sharp Street Memorial United Methodist Church purchased land in Southwest Baltimore to establish a place for Black families to bury their dead. Today it is called Mount Auburn Cemetery. Covering approximately 32 acres,…

By The Explore Baltimore Heritage team
The Scottish Rite of Freemasons began construction of the temple building on North Charles Street in 1930, and the building was opened in 1932. The building was designed by noted architect (and Scottish Rite Mason) Clyde N. Friz and renowned…

By Eli Pousson
The former Royer's Hill Methodist Episcopal Church at 400 West 24th Street is a small stone building with a gable roof used in 2010 as a garage. Despite several modern additions and changes, the building retains original window openings,…

By The Explore Baltimore Heritage team
Built around 1905 in the vernacular Beaux Arts style, the Polish Home Hall originally functioned as a town hall and home to the volunteer fire company of Curtis Bay. In 1919, when Baltimore City annexed the area from Anne Arundel County, the Wise…

By The Explore Baltimore Heritage team
“Boss” John S. (Frank) Kelly, the leader of the West Baltimore Democratic Club, controlled all things political in West Baltimore in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He moved into the house in the 1860s and lived here for the rest of his…

By Eli Pousson
The former St. Vincent’s Infant Asylum/Carver Hall Apartments buildings was a complex of structures built between 1860 and the 1910s to provide housing and medical services to dependent children and women, along with housing for the nuns who…

By Eli Pousson
The former U.S. Marine Hospital on Wyman Park Drive near the Johns Hopkins University Homewood campus was built in 1934—but the Marine Hospital Service itself dated back over a century earlier. In 1798, President John Adams signed "An Act for the…

By The Explore Baltimore Heritage team
Crittenton Home was originally the home of David Carroll, owner of the Mount Vernon Mill Company. The building got its name after being absorbed by the Florence Crittenton Mission in 1925. The Mission was started in 1882 by wealthy New Yorker and…

By The Explore Baltimore Heritage team
R. House was built on the southwest corner of the intersection of Remington Avenue and West 29th Street in 1924 as the Eastwick Motor Company garage. Up until the 1920s, most of Baltimore’s car dealerships were located in the "automobile…

By The Explore Baltimore Heritage team
On July 11, 2015 the Eastern Female High School on Aisquith Street caught fire—just the latest challenge for this 1869 school-house turned apartment building that has stood empty since it closed in 2001. Designed by architect R. Snowden Andrews, the…

By The Explore Baltimore Heritage team
In December 1919, the Rainbow Theatre first opened on Pennsylvania Avenue entertaining an African American audience with vaudeville performances and films. The theatre continued in operation until 1925 and then spent a decade as a garage. The…

By UMBC Research Interns
The Home of the Friendless at 1313 Druid Hill Ave opened as a refuge for orphaned boys in 1870. An earlier institution, the Home of Friendless Vagrant Girls was established in 1854 on Pearl Steet. By 1860, it had moved to a new building on Druid…

By The Explore Baltimore Heritage team
One of a few (possibly the only!) fully intact late-nineteenth-century urban mansions designed almost exclusively by acclaimed by New York architect, Standford White of McKim, Mead & White, the Ross Winans House at 1217 Saint Paul Street is the…

By The Explore Baltimore Heritage team
The origins of the Baltimore & Potomac Tunnel begin in 1858, when Charles County planters pushed for the Baltimore & Potomac Railroad to connect their farms to markets in Baltimore. Progress remained slow until 1867, when the Pennsylvania…

By Lauren Schiszik
Founded in 1847, the Canton Methodist Episcopal Church was the first church established in Canton. The Canton Company donated land for the congregation’s first and second church buildings, because the company strongly encouraged the establishment of…

By The Explore Baltimore Heritage team
9 North Front Street is the former residence of Thorowgood Smith, a successful merchant and Baltimore’s second mayor. Built around 1790, the Federal style residence served as Smith’s home between 1802 and 1804. The federal style of architecture…

By Eli Pousson
The former Fleet-McGinley Company building at the northwest corner of Water and South Streets was built in 1908—one of scores of new warehouses and factories built around downtown as the city rebuilt from the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904. The…

By Nathan Dennies
Before the rise of textile mills, the fast-flowing water of the Jones Falls instead powered gristmills supplying Baltimore's lucrative flour trade. Whitehall Mill was established as a gristmill in the late 1700s and owned by James Ellicott, a member…

By The Explore Baltimore Heritage team
With thick buttresses, parapets, a crenelated roof-line, and a steel roof, the enormous 5th Regiment Armory has served as an imposing landmark between Bolton Hill and Mount Vernon since 1901. The building was designed by architects Wyatt and Nolting…

By Johns Hopkins
The historic Ivy Hotel got its start in the late nineteenth century when a prominent Baltimore banker named John Gilman commissioned a mansion in Mount Vernon for the princely sum of $40,000. Gilman died before the building's completion in 1889,…

By Eli Pousson
The Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad, known as the Ma & Pa, connected Baltimore, Maryland and York, Pennsylvania, over a circuitous seventy-seven mile route. In 1881, the Falls Road site became the Baltimore terminal for the Baltimore &…

By Eli Pousson
Founded in 1887 by twenty-eight-year-old German immigrant Herman Kerngood, the Alma Manufacturing Company manufactured a wide variety of metal clothing trimmings including buckles, clasps, fasteners and steel buttons. The new operation was…

By Eli Pousson
The Eutaw Chapel is a largely forgotten landmark hidden in the woods above Hall's Springs in Herring Run Park. The former church dates to 1861 when the small stone building was built on a property donated by Horatio Whitridge, Esq. Located…

By Jeremy Kargon
The ordinary or quotidian in architecture often masks the unique, especially if time serves to dull the patina of something’s newness. St. Philip’s Lutheran Church is case-in-point: a faded Modernist gem, the church nevertheless embodies the…

By The Explore Baltimore Heritage team
The church on Wildwood Parkway, now used as the New Covenant United Methodist Church, was originally built for the Central Methodist Episcopal Church South in 1930. The church's original congregation was organized around 1866 and, in 1876,…