By Alan Gibson & Eli Pousson
In April 1942, less than six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, a group of Elkridge residents established a new volunteer fire department. The new fire department was one of many initiatives in U.S. cities and towns…

By Alan Gibson & Eli Pousson
The handsome Victorian on Elkridge’s Main Street now known as the Brumbaugh House was built around 1870 and began serving as a doctor's office in the nineteenth century. The home’s most famous resident, Dr. Benjamin Bruce Brumbaugh, started his own…

By Alex Runnings
The Maryland School for the Blind (MSB) was established in 1853. Formal education for blind people in the U.S. and western Europe was still a relatively recent invention. In 1765, Henry Dannett established the first school with this mission in…

By Dustin Linz & Eli Pousson
The Columbus Monument is a forty-four foot tall brick and cement obelisk standing in a small park at Harford Road and Walther Boulevard. The monument to Christopher Columbus was erected by French consul, Charles Francis Adrian le Paulmier Chevalier…

By Tucker Foltz & Sarah Huston
The Baltimore Manual Labor School for indigent boys, also known as the Arbutus Farm School, was established in 1841. The school emerged from of a larger social movement developing in urban Victorian society at the time. Amidst the energetic fervor…

By Yamid A. Macías & Sarah Huston
In the summer of 1976, Marc O’Carroll, a student and artist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), designed and installed the Mnemonic sculpture next to the campus’ Fine Arts Building. The sculpture, a collection of steel trees…

By Jacob Bensen & Sarah Huston
Constructed of tooled Indiana limestone, glass, steel, concrete, and granite, the Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery is at the center of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County campus both literally and figuratively. Since the library first…

By Jessi Deane
Designed and built by George Frederick in 1870, the Moorish Tower remains an impressive sight for anyone visiting Druid Hill Park or driving on the Jones Falls Expressway. The structure stands over thirty feet tall with eighteen-inch wide solid…

By Auni Gelles
For more than 85 years, the large sign atop the Stieff Silver Building has spelled out the name of a company once synonymous with Baltimore. The movement of the Stieff Company from downtown to the bucolic neighborhood of Hampden mirrored the changes…

By Allyson Schuele
The Grove of Remembrance Pavilion has stood nestled amongst the trees on Beechwood Drive near the Maryland Zoo for nearly a century. Designed by architect E.L. Palmer, the rustic pavilion’s placement within the Grove of Remembrance is fitting. The…

By Allyson Schuele
The Wagner Bust is as German as any statute could be. Cast in bronze, mounted on a granite base, and situated on the lawn of the Rogers-Buchanan Mansion, the bust of German composer Richard Wagner was created by a German-born sculptor R.P. Golde…

By Jessi Deane
On the west side of Druid Lake, opposite of the Moorish Tower, stands an imposing statue. At nearly thirty feet from the ground to the tip of the sword, the Wallace the Scot statue strikes an imposing figure. Bearing little resemblance to Mel…

By Eli Pousson
Built between 1856 and 1857 at a cost of $600,000, Camden Station is a grand reminder of the long history of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in Baltimore. Designed by Niernsee and Neilson with contributions by architect Joseph F. Kemp, the station…

By Theresa Donnelly
Long before places like Sports Authority or Dick's Sporting Goods opened their doors, Little Joe's on the northwest corner of Howard and Baltimore was selling everything from camping equipment and fishing gear to bikes and saddles. In…

By Theresa Donnelly
Designed by noted Scottish American theatre architect Thomas Lamb, the Hippodrome Theatre opened in 1914 as one of the first theatres in the United States to operate both as a movie house and a vaudeville performance venue. Local theatre impresarios…

By Theresa Donnelly
Davidge Hall, on the University of Maryland Medical School Campus, is the oldest medical facility building in the nation. The red brick structure is named after the school's founder and first dean, John Beale Davidge. It was designed by architect…

By Shae Adams & Theresa Donnelly
With a gleaming black marble façade reading "Charles Fish and Sons Company" and Victorian brick arches above, the architecture of this building clearly points to a varied history. The surprising story of the building begins before the start…

By Theresa Donnelly
Doors opened at the Baltimore General Dispensary on Fayette Street in February 1912 and is the only surviving building designed for Baltimore's oldest charity, The Baltimore General Dispensary was formed in 1801 on West Lexington Street to…

By Dan Windmueller & Theresa Donnelly
The Appold- Faust Brothers Building at 307-309 West Baltimore Street is one of a handful of surviving cast-iron fronted buildings in Baltimore and one of the only structures in the city that can boast two iron facades on front and back. The…

By Dorothy Beyer & Theresa Donnelly
Pine Street Station, the handsome, slate-roofed High Victorian Gothic building was built between 1877 and 1878 and designed by architect Francis E. Davis. The red brick structure, which is trimmed with painted bluestone lintels and adorned with…

By Meghan Gilbert & Theresa Donnelly
Adorned with graceful arches and elegant art deco lights the eight story Beaux Arts Hecht-May Co. building at the corner of Lexington and Howard streets (designed by Smith and May architects) was originally built in 1908 as an annex to the…

By Elizabeth Pente & Theresa Donnelly
Spinning wheel manufacturers, cigar makers, tailors, hat makers, multiple banks, and a music school all occupied this site—often at the same time—going back to the early nineteenth century. During the decade after the Civil War, the upper stories…

By Tarin Rudloff & Theresa Donnelly
Erected in 1879 as an investment property for Arunah Shepherdson Abell, founder of The Baltimore Sun, the Abell Building was designed by famed Baltimore architect George Frederick—architect for Baltimore's City Hall, Hollins Market, and the Old…

By Theresa Donnelly
When Samuel Posner moved his successful dry goods business to the corner of Lexington and Howard, architect Charles E. Cassell's gorgeous and ornate white Renaissance Revival building—complete with roaring lions and majestic wreaths and fluted…

By David Thomas & Theresa Donnelly
In 1819, wealthy French merchant Louis Pascault, the Marquis de Poleon, constructed a row of eight houses on Lexington Street that now remain as the one of the earliest examples of the Baltimore rowhouse. Born in France, Pascault later moved to the…

By Johanna Schein & Theresa Donnelly
One of the largest businesses on the West Side in the early twentieth century the Baltimore Bargain House—a mail-order wholesale business that employed over a thousand people and earned profits in the millions that grew to become the fourth largest…

By Theresa Donnelly & Sydney Jenkins
"If you wanted the good stuff, you went to Hutzler's," said Governor William Donald Schaefer and for generations of Baltimoreans, Hutzler's represented the height of downtown shopping, simply the place to shop. Many Marylanders…

By Emma Marston & Theresa Donnelly
Known originally as the Hotel Kernan, the Congress Hotel was built in 1903 by James L. Kernan. Kernan was a savvy businessman who sought to capitalize on the ways in which immigration had influenced the tastes of wealthy visitors and Baltimore…

By Theresa Donnelly
In contrast to the high-end shopping at Stewart's or Hochschild-Kohn's on Howard Street, West Lexington Street offered goods of all kinds at affordable prices thanks to a row of five-and-tens from Read's Drug Store down to…