Category: Education

Our education programs include technical assistance to property owners, heritage education around the Civil War Sequicentennial and the Bi-Centennial of the War of 1812, and our ongoing Race and Place in Baltimore Neighborhoods project.

Baltimore Building of the Week: Peale Museum

This week’s Baltimore Building of the Week is the first building in the Western Hemisphere designed and built as a museum, the Peale Museum.

Image courtesy Jack Breihan

Another industry to make an early start in Baltimore was the museum. In 1801, the artistic Peale family (father Charles, sons Rembrandt, Raphaelle, Reubens, and Titian) opened the first American museum in borrowed or rented quarters in Philadelphia. In 1814, Rembrandt Peale commissioned this federal-style museum in Baltimore – the first purpose-built public museum in the Western hemisphere. On display were scientific exhibits like the excavated skeleton of a prehistoric mastodon as well as paintings and curiosities. In 1830, the museum closed, and the building began 45 years service as Baltimore’s City Hall. Later it served as Colored Elementary School No. 1. After restoration in 1928 it once again became a museum, this time of Baltimore municipal history. In 1976 the Peale became part of the underfunded Baltimore City Life Museums, the financial collapse of which was the greatest disaster for the city’s history since the Great Fire. Largely vacant since City Life folded in 1997, the city-owned Peale Museum is the locus of a proposal to open a center for local history organizations.

Baltimore Building of the Week: Washington Mill

Reflecting the rich industrial heritage of the Jones Falls Valley, this week’s Baltimore Building of the Week is the 1807 Washington Mill building.

Image courtesy Jack Breihan

The Industrial Revolution began in England with simple water-powered machines to spin and later to weave cotton. Although Samuel Slater smuggled some of the designs into Rhode Island in 1793, the English mills dominated the market until 1807, when President Jefferson imposed an embargo on trade with England. The Washington Cotton Factory in Mount Washington dates from that year. Besides being the oldest industrial building in Baltimore, it is arguably the third oldest in the USA. Drawing power from the swiftly flowing Jones Falls, the sturdy stone mill was built to bear the weight of heavy machinery. Long rows of windows provided natural light for the three factory floors. This historic building, along with other pioneer industrial buildings on the site, has been imaginatively preserved as part of the mixed office and retail Mt. Washington Mill development. Other textile mills along the Jones Falls south of Mount Washington have been put to a variety of new uses, reminding Baltimoreans of their industrial heritage.

The rehabilitation of the historic mill complex began in 1988 and many more photos of the site may be found on the Mt. Washington Mill website. For more on the industrial heritage of the Jones Falls, check out this history from the Jones Falls Watershed Association or the Maryland Byways brochure on Falls Road (PDF).

Baltimore Building of the Week: St. Mary’s Seminary Chapel

The Baltimore Building of the Week is St. Mary’s Seminary Chapel at 600 North Paca Street in Seton Hill– the first seminary established in the United States. Over two dozen photos of this important building were taken by the Historic American Building Survey in 1936 and tours of both the St. Mary’s Seminary Chapel and the Mother Seton House are offered every day of the week.

Image courtesy Jack Breihan

At a time when neoclassical architecture was in style, this gothic chapel, built in 1808, was an anomaly. Indeed, it is probably the first Gothic Revival building in the United States. It ushered in an era of eclecticism, in which architects worked different styles at the same time. The architect here was Maximilian Godefroy, recruited as a faculty member at St. Mary’s Seminary, founded in 1781 as Baltimore’s first institution of higher education. Godefroy was clearly happier in the neoclassical style (at the Battle Monument and the First Unitarian Church). The chapel is stiff and symmetrical, with “flying buttresses” facing the wrong way, but it pleased his patrons – Sulpician fathers homesick for the gothic monuments of their native France. The Seminary moved to Roland Park in 1927, but the Sulpicians should be congratulated for continuing to maintain this important building.

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Baltimore Building of the Week: First Unitarian Church of Baltimore

Returning to religious architecture, this week’s entry in the Baltimore Building of the Week series is the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore, the very first building erected for Unitarians in the United States, at the northwest corner of Franklin and Charles Streets. Continue to the end for the answer to the question posed in last week’s post on Baltimore’s Columnar Monuments.

Image courtesy Jack Breihan

If the Basilica is Baltimore’s neoclassical Hagia Sophia, its neoclassical Roman Pantheon stands only a block away. Completed in 1819 to the designs of the French architect Maximilian Godefroy, the First Unitarian Church is a simple cube topped with a hemispherical dome. An arched Roman Doric portico and pediment mark the entrance on Franklin Street (the new prayer garden commemorating Pope John Paul II has opened up the view). Despite its classic simplicity, the dome had notoriously bad acoustics. Eventually a lower plaster vault was constructed beneath it. Baltimore’s other Pantheon is Davidge Hall, the original building of the University of Maryland, at Greene and Lombard Streets.

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Baltimore Building of the Week: Baltimore’s Columnar Monuments

This week’s Baltimore Building of the Week is not, in fact, a building. Instead, it is three of Baltimore’s notable “Columnar Monuments.” Both the Battle Monument and Mount Vernon’s Washington Monument have also been featured on the Monument City website. Visitors can take a tour of the Shot Tower’s ground floor exhibit, sound and light show, and informational video are available with appointment at 10:30 AM on Saturday or Sunday. The Washington Monument is open for visitors Wednesday to Friday 10 AM to 4 PM and Saturday and Sunday 10 AM to 5 PM up until Memorial Day.

Battle Monument, Image courtesy Jack Breihan
Battle Monument, Image courtesy Jack Breihan

Completed during the 1820s, two of these towering structures established Baltimore’s distinction as “the Monumental City.” Maximilian Godefroy’s Battle Monument, depicted on the City flag, commemorated the Defenders who died beating off the British attack in 1814. It combines Egyptian and Roman themes, including a giant set of fasces. A gigantic Roman Doric column, Robert Mills’ Washington Monument portrays the Father of Our Country, dressed in a toga, performing what its builders considered his most heroic act. (What was it? answer next week!) The contemporary Phoenix Shot Tower was a monument to Baltimore’s growing industrial sector; it manufactured lead shot for the Chesapeake Bay duck-hunting industry.

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