Tag: valentine’s day

Fall in love with a beautiful building on our upcoming heritage tours

February is the perfect time of year to share a memorable love story and fall in love with a beautiful building. Please join us on Sunday, February 15 for a Valentine’s Day tradition—the Mount Vernon Love Stories Valentine’s walking tour with volunteer guide Jamie Hunt!  Jamie’s tour weaves together stories of trysts, true loves and everything from Benedict Arnold to Al Capone. It’s a real treat and we hope you can join us.

Later in the month, we are looking forward to a preview of a restored Civil Rights museum at the Lillie Mae Carroll Jackson house on Eutaw Place. This tour is the first program in our Civil Rights Landmarks series highlighting historic places tied to the history of Baltimore’s African-American Civil Rights movement. The series is organized through our new partnership with the Maryland Historical Trust and the Baltimore National Heritage Area to document Baltimore’s Civil Rights heritage in the year ahead.

We are always looking for places to tour so, if you have ideas, we’d love to hear from you. You’ll see from our calendar of upcoming tours that we are continuing to branch out with new spring tours planned for Ellicott City and Havre de Grace, so any and all ideas are welcome! Don’t forget, membership support includes discounts on tours and early access to our spring 2015 Baltimore by Foot tours—including walks with local experts in Pigtown, Mount Washington, Hampden and more.

200 Years of Love Stories: Mt. Vernon Valentine’s Tour

Wallis_Simpson c. 1936
Wallis Simpson c. 1936

Love, romance, jealousy… Mt. Vernon is the home not only of great architecture but also of great love stories. After a six-year hiatus, historian Jamie Hunt is back with a tour of historic romance in Mt. Vernon this Sunday. What better way to gear up for Valentine’s Day? We hope you can join us!

Tour Information

Sunday, February 10, 2013
1:00 pm to 2:30 pm or 3:00 pm to 4:30 pm (tours are the same, choose just one)
Meet at 14 West Mt. Vernon Place (Agora / Marburg Mansion), Baltimore, MD 21201
RSVP today! $10 per person for Baltimore Heritage members / $20 for non-members

For two centuries, Mt. Vernon has seen spectacular love stories, bitter feuds, and more than a few juicy trysts. The neighborhood’s earliest days inlclude the patriot and Mt. Vernon landowner John Eager Howard marrying a charming young Philadelphian, Harriet Chew, after her first love was hanged for treason in a plot that involved Benedict Arnold. Fast forward 200 years and Mt. Vernon saw a 20th century gradutate of its Baltimore School for the Arts, actress Jada Pinkett Smith, fall in love with and marry another noted Philadelphian, actor Will Smith.

In between these two sets of lovers are the royal tales of Betsy Patterson Bonaparte, who died wealthy but bitter in Mt. Vernon years after an annulled marriage to Napoleon’s brother Jerome, and Bessie Wallis Warfield, who was christened in a neighborhood church (just across the street from where Betsy died) and grew up to become the Duchess of Windsor. Not to be outdone by royalty, some of Baltimore’s most storied authors have ties to Mt. Vernon along with their beautful, sad marriages, including Edgar Allan Poe, H.L. Mencken, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. And of course the rich and famous of Baltimore’s Gilded Age include more than a few with offbeat love lives. Please join us and historian Jamie Hunt as we uncover historic loves won and lost in Baltimore’s great Mt. Vernon neighborhood.