Category: Preservation

Join Us at Our Preservation Celebration 2022!

Join us for our Preservation Celebration 2022 at the newly restored and re-opened Peale Museum! On October 13, we’ll honor our 2022 Preservation Award winners and, with your help, give out four microgrants to people working on the front lines in our historic neighborhoods. We’ll say thank you to our volunteers and honor all of their hard work this year. This gathering also acts as Baltimore Heritage’s annual meeting where the board will elect its new members. With food from Baltimore vendors, wine and beer from Maryland suppliers, and complimentary valet service, we hope you will join us for what promises to be a wonderful evening. And we couldn’t be in a better historic place than the newly renovated Peale Museum. We hope you’ll join us on October 13!

Register here! Tickets are a suggested donation of $25.

CHAP Update: Sarah Ann Street Historic District Nomination Advances!

This afternoon the city’s historic preservation commission (CHAP) advanced the nomination for Sarah Ann Street in the Poppleton neighborhood of West Baltimore to become a local historic district. The district would include the alley houses in the 1100 block of Sarah Ann Street that have been owned by Black Baltimore families since they were built in the 1870s, as well as two houses on North Carrollton Street that also have rich histories. The next step for the nomination is for the preservation commission to conduct further research and solicit additional input from the public before holding a second and final hearing this fall.

We at Baltimore Heritage first got involved in the effort to save these historic houses from being demolished back in 2004. We joined neighborhood residents, including homeowner Sonia Eaddy and her family who still live there and are still active advocating for their homes, along with retired judge Tom Ward who worked for decades preserving historic places in West Baltimore. The city’s recent willingness to create a new historic district and preserve the houses comes after years of uncertainty. It also comes after new allies joined the fight, including Dr. Nicole King and her students from the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

If you would like to have your voice heard on this issue, you can email comments to the preservation commission’s executive director, Eric Holcomb: eric.holcomb@baltimorecity.gov. And check back here for additional information as the Sarah Ann Street historic district proposal advances.

Celebrating Noted Baltimore Historian Wayne Schaumburg

I am sad to report that Baltimore Heritage board member Wayne Schaumburg passed away last week. Wayne was a superstar at helping people fall in love with Baltimore. He developed and led tours at Green Mount Cemetery for something like 40 years and they will forever be known as the Wayne Schaumburg Tour. That’s how everyone in Baltimore refers to them! He also developed and led tours of the 1904 Fire downtown, which Baltimore Heritage was fortunate enough to have inherited. Wayne was a teacher in the city’s public schools for his career, but spent an equal amount of energy on helping Baltimore’s historic places. In addition to our board, he was a long time board member of the Irish Railroad Workers Museum and the Baltimore City Historical Society and other groups. And for something like 20 years, he gave lectures on Baltimore’s history to thousands of people all over the region. Almost anywhere I go, people ask me: “Do you know Wayne Schaumburg? He gives the best talks and tours!” In addition to all of this, if you had the privilege to know Wayne, I am sure you will agree that there was not a nicer person to walk on planet Earth.

Victory in Poppleton!

Baltimore Heritage is thrilled to share the news that the Eaddy family and all of the advocates in Poppleton have won. The city just announced that it will not evict the Eaddy family (they will get to continue to own their homes), and that the City is selling the Sarah Ann Street alley houses to non-profit developer Black Women Build for $1 each. Black Women Build has already started thinking through their rehab and eventual sale, with the former tenants getting first priority. This has been 20 years in the making and is a huge victory. A big thank you and congratulations to the Eaddy family and Organize Poppleton for their sustained campaign to save these historic homes. We’ll share more later, but here is a wonderful Baltimore Brew article.

Save the Date: Bmore Historic is on September 23, 2022!

Baltimore’s annual unconference on people, places, and the past will be held in-person at the Baltimore Museum of Industry on Friday, September 23, 2022!

What is Bmore Historic?

Bmore Historic is a participant-led unconference for people who care about public history and historic preservation in and around Baltimore. This includes historians, preservationists, museum professionals, archivists, librarians, humanities scholars, students, volunteer activists, Main Street board members, educators, and anyone interested in exploring the intersections between people, places, and the past in Baltimore and Maryland.

Unconferences are events run by participants. Attendees set the agenda for what’s discussed, lead the sessions and workshops that fill the schedule, and create an environment of innovation and productive discussion.

Past, in-person Bmore Historic 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. Learn more about Bmore Historic or read our introduction to unconferences. 

 

We hope to see you on September 23!