Thank you to everyone who has supported Baltimore Heritage and our city’s historic places by joining us on some of our past heritage tours and programs. Today, I am asking you to continue your support by becoming a member. As a small organization with two paid staff and a great group of volunteers, members provide over half of Baltimore Heritage’s operating budget. With member support, we can continue to teach students about local history, fight to protect threatened landmarks, and offer assistance to Baltimore homeowners.

By becoming a member, you can keep enjoying great heritage tours and events like our upcoming visit to Lexington Market to meet long-time merchants and descend into the catacombs underneath the stalls. But your membership gift allows us to do more than tours.  Over the last year, we worked with students and faculty from the University of Maryland Baltimore County to create a new virtual tour of UMBC’s Catonsville campus. We participated in the review of the B&P Tunnel Project for months and helped project planners avoid tearing down historic buildings along the route. We are empowering residents to address the issue of vacant buildings in their historic neighborhoods in partnership with the Community Law Center. We are continuing to research and document Baltimore’s Civil Rights movement and to share what we’re learning online.

As a Baltimore Heritage member, you can help us do even more. In the coming year, Baltimore City and the State of Maryland are undertaking a $75 million project to demolish or stabilize thousands of vacant rowhouses in Baltimore. Most of these buildings are located in historic neighborhoods. We are working closely with city and state officials to protect buildings that matter most to local residents and to use program funds to stabilize buildings where investment can make a real difference.

Our members make all of our work possible. Please make a donation of $35 for an individual membership or $50 for a household and become a member of Baltimore Heritage today.

On behalf of Baltimore Heritage, I hope you are enjoying a cheerful holiday season. I am thankful for the volunteers, members, and supporters who helped us to sustain and expand Baltimore Heritage’s education and preservation programs over the past year.

Before we all start to sing Auld Lang Syne, I’d like to share a few highlights from our year in review:

• We expanded our tours. With our new Monumental City Tours, we offered volunteer-led tours every Sunday morning from April to November from Patterson Park to the Shot Tower. And we are getting ready to do it again in 2016!
• We celebrated heritage milestones. We welcomed the tenth family into our Centennial Homes program honoring families that have been in the same house for a century. We also organized a year-long series of Fell’s Point walking tours celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Robert Long House.
• We documented Baltimore’s Civil Rights heritage. In partnership with the Maryland Historical Trust, our project—Looking for Landmarks from the Movement—has mapped over 200 places (from churches to rowhouses to tennis courts) associated with the Civil Rights movement in Baltimore. We are already putting this research to work with a new initiative to protect threatened Civil Rights landmarks.

Be sure to learn more about what we do with your support in our 2015 year in review! Thank you again to everyone who volunteered with us, joined or renewed their membership, and came out on a tour to learn more about Baltimore. If you have not contributed yet in 2015, please donate online today or send a check to 11 1/2 W. Chase Street, Baltimore, MD 21201.

I wish you a happy holiday season and I look forward to seeing you in the new year.