Preserving and promoting Baltimore's historic buildings and neighborhoods.
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’s annual unconference on people, places, and the past will be at the Baltimore Museum of Industry on Friday, September 22, 2023! Students are free this year.
Past, in-person unconferences have been structured around four session blocks: two in the morning and two in the afternoon. We usually have between four to six sessions in each of the time blocks for a total of twenty sessions throughout the day.
Today’s Five Minute Histories video is a bit different! The historic block we are featuring on West Preston Street in Mount Vernon showcases one of the city’s grandest Victorian buildings, the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Annunciation, as well as Baltimore’s very earliest switch away from Victorian architecture to a new NeoColonial style. This block was also the home of three pioneering women of science in the early 20th Century, as well as Baltimore’s mayor during the great 1904 Fire. The Greek Cathedral has begun seeking authorization to demolish five of the historic rowhouses on the block and we are sharing this video in hopes that it will help convey why we think this block and these particular rowhouses are important and should be reused rather than demolished. Watch the video here:
This is our series called “Five Minute Histories.” We record short videos about different historic places all over Baltimore and post them on our Facebook page, YouTube channel, and website.
On June 20, 2023, Baltimore Heritage awarded Margaretta Callanan with a Centennial Homes certificate. Her family has owned their home on Foster Ave for over 108 years. Margaretta’s maternal grandmother, Barbara King, lived her sixty of her eighty-nine years. Margaretta’s mom, Marie Emily Miller, lived here ninety-four of her ninety-seven years. Thank you to this family for taking such great care of an iconic Baltimore rowhouse!
On June 17, please join us for a guided tour of Baltimore’s Marble Hill neighborhood, which was the home to an astonishing amount of groundbreaking Civil Rights leaders. Reverend Harvey Johnson began one of the first collective action movements here in the 1880s. In the 1930s Lillie Carroll Jackson engaged youth in “The Movement” and pioneered new non-violent protest tactics that were later picked up in cities across the country. Thurgood Marshall grew up here, as did the chief lobbyist for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Clarence Mitchell. Most recently this was the district for the late Representative Elijah Cummings, one of the most powerful voices for civil rights in Washington. Join us to learn how fundamental pillars of the Civil Rights Movement got built here by driven, activist neighbors with their eyes on the prize. Register here!
At Baltimore Heritage’s 2022 Preservation Celebration, the Maryland Women’s Heritage Center won a $500 microgrant to buy this tv screen! (Image courtesy of Kalin Thomas)
Last Thursday, the Maryland Women’s Heritage Center (formerly the Women’s Industrial Exchange) hosted Baltimore Heritage and friends for a fabulous behind-the-scenes evening. We got to see an array of artifacts (many of which were found on the second floor of the building, untouched for decades) and exhibits that show how the building continues to honor Maryland women. We saw the Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame, which includes people like Margaret Brent, Pauli Murray, and Major General Linda Singh.
Pauli Murray, Civil Rights activist, advocate, legal scholar and theorist, author and – later in life – an Episcopal priest
We also viewed the Valiant Maryland Women: The Fight for Suffrage exhibit, which featured Baltimoreans Frances Ellen Watkins Harper,Etta Maddox, and Augusta Chissell, among other Maryland women. Dr. Amy Rosenkrans then gave us a fabulous historical overview of the Women’s Industrial Exchange, the third oldest women’s exchange in the country! This was a place for down-on-their-luck women to sell crafts and goods to support themselves. It also had an affordable and delicious lunchroom.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, abolitionist, suffragist, poet, temperance activist, teacher, public speaker, and writer
She also highlighted where she wants her research to go in the future. If you have memories or stories about the Women’s Industrial Exchange, or know anything about Baltimore’s Colored Women’s Industrial Exchange, please contact her at amyrosenkransphd@gmail.com.
Image courtesy of Kalin Thomas
Be sure to check out the Maryland Women’s Heritage Center to hear about the courageous, pioneering and often forgotten women that have made Maryland the great state is it today.
