Category: Tours

Put a spring in your step! Baltimore by Foot is back

Happy first day of spring! We’re celebrating the long-awaited return of sunny days with today’s announcement for our 2014 Baltimore by Foot neighborhood walking tours. I hope you can join us on one (or all!) of these leisurely strolls through five fantastic neighborhoods.

I love Patterson Park? We dig Hampstead Hill! Our archeological investigation in Patterson Park starts next week with a high-tech remote sensing survey using ground-penetrating radar, magnetometry, and more to find what might be hidden under the hill. Stop by the park on March 27 for a high-tech show and tell discussion with Dr. Tim Horsely and Dr. John Bedell.

Finally, whether you’re Irish or not, you might enjoy our our latest Baltimore 1814 update on the St. Patrick’s Day “Divine Service” held in Fell’s Point on March 17, 1814. We even shared found a few Irish toasts that reveal how Baltimore perservered “while English drums rattle at our doors.” Enjoy and please subscribe to receive our weekly Baltimore 1814 updates in your inbox.

Photograph of Barclay & East 20th Street, courtesy Jennifer A. Ferretti, March 3, 2014.

New year & new tours! Baltimore’s Victorian City Hall, Natty Boh Brewery and more

Happy holidays! We hope to see you on one of our great heritage tours in the early new year. Don’t forget to take a look at our end-of-year video. It is our way of saying thank you to the hundreds of volunteers and supporters who make all of what we do possible.

Join us next month for a lunchtime Behind the Scenes tour of Baltimore City Hall! All of Baltimore’s political, civic and business leaders came together for the dedication of the new City Hall in October 1875. Architect George Frederick was only 21 when he won the design competition with this handsome French Second Empire civic building. Our tour guide, City Hall curator Jeannie Davis, will lead us on a tour covering both architectural history and the history of city government in Baltimore. In addition to the rotunda, we’ll venture into the building’s ceremonial room, the original mayor’s office, and the council chambers.

Defender’s Day Run & Ride! Two fun and athletic tours to remember the War of 1812 in September

Fort McHenry Bombardment, 1814When Francis Scott Key witnessed the bombardment of Fort McHenry as a captive aboard a British ship, he was one of thousands of Baltimoreans who waited anxiously through the night uncertain if the city would fall before the British attack. Baltimore’s endurance through the battle is remembered still today in the Star-Spangled Banner and in Maryland’s annual observance of Defender’s Day.

On our second annual Baltimore by Bike Defender’s Day Ride and our first ever heritage running tour, we’ll explore the people and places of Baltimore touched by that night in 1814. Enslaved men worked on the massive fortifications that still stand in today’s Patterson Park. Recently arrived German immigrants heard the warning bells ring out from Old Otterbein Church on the news of the British approach. An enterprising seamstress on Pratt Street sewed the famous flag that became our nation’s Star-Spangled Banner. Follow us beyond the ramparts of Fort McHenry and join our Defender’s Day Ride & Run past the landmarks that tell the story of how the city lived and fought through the Battle of Baltimore and the War of 1812.

Defender’s Day Ride!

Sunday, September 8, 2013 9:00 am to 11:30 am
Fort McHenry National Monument & Historic Shrine
2400 East Fort Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21230
Register – $10 for members, $15 for non-members

Love to learn history on two wheels? Ride along with local scholar and cyclist Dr. Kate Drabinksi on our 10-mile route of quiet streets and mixed-used paths from Fort McHenry to Hampstead Hill in Patterson Park and back again

Defender’s Day Run!

Sunday, September 8, 2013 9:00 am to 10:30 am
Fort McHenry National Monument & Historic Shrine
2400 East Fort Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21230
Register – $10 for members, $15 for non-members 

Update: The Defender’s Day Run has been cancelled! If you are interested in learning more about future heritage running tours, please contact Eli Pousson at pousson@baltimoreheritage.org.

At a moderate pace of a 10 minute mile, our guide Dustin Meeker will take us around Baltimore’s once fortified harbor up to the Battle Monument and back to Fort McHenry on an energetic 10K tour. Dustin is doubly prepared for the task as a former ranger at Fort McHenry and a competitive distance runner.

Parks, Preservation & Emancipation: Enjoy three new walking tours around Mount Vernon Place this fall

In partnership with the Mount Vernon Place Conservancy, we are glad to present a new series of walking tours exploring the rich history and architecture of one of Baltimore’s true treasures – Mount Vernon Place. Each month this fall, we’ll be meeting on the south side of the Washington Monument and leading a short tour around new theme – the history of the park squares, the fight to preserve Mount Vernon Place in the face of urban renewal, and the hidden histories of slavery and emancipation.

Mount Vernon Place: A History of the Squares

Saturday, September 7, 2013, 9:30am to 10:45am – Register today!

North Mount Vernon Place Square, 1906When the four squares of Mount Vernon Place were laid out in 1831, George Washington had only sat at the top of the monument for a few years and locals still knew the neighborhood as Howard’s Woods for the forested country estate that long occupied the hills north of the harbor. As the city grew up around the parks, their design was shaped by two luminaries in landscape architecture: Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. contracted in 1876 to carry out improvements to the north and south squares and the architectural firm of Carrère & Hastings who designed the parks’ handsome Beaux Arts fountains, stairs and balustrades in 1917.

Since 2008, the Mount Vernon Place Conservancy has been working on a new vision to restore and maintain the parks as renewed world-class urban spaces. On our first Mount Vernon Place walking tour this fall, we’ll share nearly 200 years of history in these four squares and consider their promising future.​

Mount Vernon Place: Architecture, Urban Renewal & Preservation

Saturday, October 5, 2013, 9:30am to 10:45am – Register today!

Far removed from the city’s bustling harbor, Mount Vernon Place developed as an affluent suburb in the mid 19th century. It was home to men like William Walters, a successful wholesale merchant whose legacy helped to establish the Walters Art Museum, and Robert Garrettt II, the first born son and heir of John Work Garrett, the founder of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Robert and his wife Mary Frick Garrett made the perfect high society couple and engaged architect Stanford White to turn an already grand townhouse into a palatial 40-room mansion.

With such a distinguished history and stylish architecture, it is hard to believe that the neighborhood narrowly avoided being flattened for the development of an east-west highway in the 1960s and the Garrett-Jacobs Mansion itself was lucky to escape demolition in the face of urban renewal. On our second Mount Vernon Place walking tour this fall, we’ll highlight the rich architecture around the Squares and how preservationists saved these unique blocks from destruction.

Mount Vernon Place: Stories of Slavery & Emancipation

Saturday, November 9, 2013, 9:30am to 10:45am – Register today!

The Fifteenth Amendment, c1870Around Mount Vernon Place, memorials in bronze and marble honor slave-holders – George Washington, John Eager Howard, and Roger B. Taney. No statute recognizes the labor of the enslaved people who worked and lived in the neighborhood’s handsome antebellum houses. No plaque recalls Frederick Douglass’ response to Taney’s notorious Dred Scott decision – “All that is merciful and just, on earth and in Heaven, will execrate and despise this edict of Taney” – or preserves the stories of men like Richard Mack, born into slavery and employed as a butler in a the Garrett-Jacobs Mansion at the turn of the century.

The stories of slavery and emancipation on Mount Vernon Place are far from simple, however, including the monument to the Marquis de Lafayette, a hero of the American Revolution who personally urged George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to emancipate their slaves and abolish slavery in the United States. On our third and final Mount Vernon Place walking tour this fall, we’ll uncover the lives of enslaved people and slave-owners with stories from violent politics of the Civil War and the revolutionary changes of emancipation.

Tickets are $10 per person for adults and free for children under the age of 16. All tours proceed rain or shine and advance registration is encouraged.

Behind the Scenes Tour of the Institute of Notre Dame High School – rescheduled for August 12!

Join us on a tour of the Institute of Notre Dame – a Baltimore landmark that has educated young women for over 150 years. Our guide, long-time resident Sister Hilda Marie Sutherland better known as Sister Hildie, is 81 years old and a local treasure in her own right. She came to IND from St. Mary’s Female Orphan Asylum in Roland Park at age 14 and never left.

Originally established in 1847 as the Collegiate Institute of Young Ladies, the Institute of Notre Dame High School (IND) was founded by Baltimore’s own Mother Theresa – the Blessed Mother Theresa of Jesus Gerhardinger. A native of Munich, Bavaria, Mother Theresa helped to found the School Sisters of Notre Dame (SSND) in Germany and came to Baltimore with a small group of sisters to educate the children of immigrants and minister to the poor. Mother Theresa purchased the original convent building from the Redemptorist priests assigned to nearby St. James in 1847 and soon expanded the convent into a boarding school when the sisters discovered two orphans left on their doorstep. By 1852, the sisters had built the school that still stands today.

The school continued to grow through the years: adding an auditorium in 1885, a chapel in 1892, additional classroom space in 1926, and their gymnasium in 1992. Since the first graduation ceremony on July 24, 1864, over 7,000 alumnae have graduated from IND including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (1958) and Sen. Barbara Mikulski (1954) who later recalled, “They taught me more than geography or mathematics; they taught me to help those in need of help. They inspired my passion for service.”

Sister Hildie is the perfect guide to the school’s rich legacy with over 60 years in residence at the school. Her service has touched countless students among the school’s students and East Baltimore residents who have been helped by her weekly efforts to collect clothing, household items and food to share with the school’s neighbors. Come out to Aisquith Street and discover the charms and history of Sister Hildie and IND!