By Julie Saylor
Built in the 1830s, the 600 block of Stirling Street was home to free working people, both African-American and white, living in modest Federal style rowhouses. Some residents worked in the industrial and commercial businesses that grew up around…

By Julie Saylor
Once a bustling department store complex on North Gay Street, the Great House of Isaac Benesch and Sons has been vacant for over a decade as the Old Town Mall waits on the progress of long stalled revitalization efforts. Isaac Benesch started his…

By Julie Saylor
Located on Hillen Street, the Null House is a rare eighteenth century home dating from around 1782. Once common throughout the city, only a handful of these small wood frame houses remain, largely in Fells Point. Named for the antique shop that…

By Julie Saylor
Founded in 1799, Oldtown’s Independent Fire Company maintained their Independent No. 6 engine house at Gay and Ensor Streets for over fifty years. In 1853, the company tore down their original engine house and replaced it with the present home of…

By The McKim Community Association
In 1775, Patapsco Meeting, in what was then Baltimore County recorded that they wished to move their Meeting to Baltimore Town. By 1781, at the cost of $4,500, a new Meetinghouse had been erected at Fayette Street (then Pitt) and Aisquith Street…

By Eli Pousson
The 1833 McKim Free School building is one of Baltimore’s most important landmarks with deep roots in the city’s history and an unsurpassed 175 year record of education and social service. Founder John McKim came to Baltimore as a young man,…

By Eli Pousson
In 1919, the Governor of Maryland and the Mayor of Baltimore appointed a War Memorial Commission that initiated a nationwide architectural competition to design a memorial building dedicated to the 1,752 Marylanders who died in military service…

By Marsha Wight Wise
The Shot Tower, when it was built in 1828, was the tallest structure in the United States until 1846. Once there were three such towers in Baltimore; now there are only a few left in the entire world. The design of the 215-foot tall Phoenix Shot…

By Eli Pousson
Built in 1899, the West Arlington Water Tower was originally used to supply water to the West Arlington neighborhood in northwest Baltimore just across the city line. The community developed quickly around it with the West Arlington Improvement…

By Johns Hopkins
The Clifton Park Valve House on St. Lo Drive in Clifton Park is a magnificent Gothic revival stone and tile-roofed structure built between 1887 and 1888. It was built to house the machinery used in the operation of Lake Clifton, which was once part…

By Eli Pousson
The Roland Water Tower was built in 1905 as a 211,000-gallon water tank to supply residents in Hampden and nearby neighborhoods. It was part of a complicated water supply system that included the Western Pumping Station at Druid Lake. The design by…

By Nathan Dennies
In 1936, Sidney Friedman was riding a train to Baltimore and carrying a charcoal grill. Earlier that week, Friedman had dined at Ray's Steak House in Chicago and ate his very first charcoal-grilled steak. He'd never had anything like it. He…

By Nathan Dennies
The Duchess of Windsor, born Bessie Wallis Warfield, moved into the three-story brownstone at 212 East Biddle Street with her mother in 1908. It was the first home they could call their own as they were dependent on the charity of wealthier…

By National Park Service
In this small brick house on East Pratt Street, Mary Young Pickersgill, assisted by her mother and niece, designed and fabricated the Star-Spangled Banner. This fifteen star, fifteen stripe flag flew over the ramparts of Fort McHenry while it was…

By Eli Pousson
On the morning of September 12, 1814, five thousand British troops landed outside of Baltimore and marched on the city of Baltimore with a plan to capture the city. Major General Robert Ross, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars who had burned the White…

By Auni Gelles
Daniel Wells and Henry Gough McComas gained fame as the "boy heroes" of the Battle of Baltimore. Though the historical record may offer slim evidence to confirm their role during the battle, Baltimoreans have celebrated the legend of Wells and…

By Eli Pousson
At the close of the eighteenth century, the far eastern edge of Baltimore was marked by Harris Creek, a modest tributary of the Patapsco that spilled into the River near where Boston Street and Lakewood Avenue in Canton today. In an area of…

By Eli Pousson
Today, from the rise within Riverside Park, established in 1875, a visitor can see the rowhouses and churches of South Baltimore densely packed around the park in every direction. During the War of 1812, this rise, long known as Look-Out Hill,…

By Nathan Dennies
The Edgar Allan Poe statue sitting in the Gordon Plaza at University of Baltimore has a colorful past. The statue was commissioned in 1911 by the Edgar Allan Poe Memorial Association of Baltimore and was the last work of renowned American sculptor …

By Richard Hardesty & David Patrick McKenzie
On an auspicious afternoon in late September 1903, a crowd of Baltimoreans converged onto the intersection of Mount Royal Avenue and Lanvale Street to witness the unveiling of the William H. Watson monument. The monument, erected by the Maryland…

By Nathan Dennies
Ottmar Mergenthaler was only 18 years old when he immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1872 to work with his cousin August Hahl at his machine shop in Washington, D.C. Four years later, after Hahl moved his shop to Baltimore, inventor…

By Eben Dennis
In 1863, the Baltimore City Council approved a $300,000 loan to construct a billion gallon capacity reservoir in the newly established Druid Hill Park. Though the new city waterworks project from Lake Roland to the Mount Royal Reservoir on the Jones…

By Eben Dennis
Only long-time residents of Baltimore can remember the Hampden Reservoir, buried since 1960 under debris from the construction of the Jones Falls Expressway and used as Roosevelt Park. The Hampden Reservoir was completed in 1861 three years after…

By Eben Dennis
The Mount Royal Reservoir was once an essential element within an extensive system of waterworks built to deliver clean drinking water to a growing, thirsty city. In 1857, the Baltimore City Council passed an ordinance to provide additional water to…

By Nathan Dennies
In August 1933, F. Scott Fitzgerald moved with his family to 1307 Park Avenue. Fitzgerald had been forced out of his previous home in Towson due to a house fire attributed to his mentally ill wife, Zelda. Their rowhouse, a ten minute walk from the…

By Johns Hopkins
John McDonogh, a Baltimore-born merchant and philanthropist, was born in 1779 and died in 1850, bequeathing half of his estate to the City of Baltimore to educate children. However, since the public school system already existed in Baltimore, the…

By Johns Hopkins
The Gwynns Falls first saw industrial development as early as the late 1700s and, by 1808, the small industrial village began to form around an early paper mill along the water where Dickeyville sits today. Although few of these early stone…

By Johns Hopkins
Erected high on a hill above the Gunpowder River Valley, Perry Hall Mansion dominated life in northeastern Baltimore County in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Built in the 1770s by Harry Dorsey Gough, Perry Hall was named after…

By Johns Hopkins
The Mansion House, built by Revolutionary War Colonel Nicholas Rogers, has stood in what is now Druid Hill Park since 1801. The house is the third to stand in this location. Originally a castle known as “Auchentorolie,” built by Rogers’ ancestors,…