It’s membership renewal time at Baltimore Heritage! If you haven’t yet done so, please consider joining or renewing your membership today. To learn more about our upcoming walking tours, recent Five Minute Histories videos, the next Friday afternoon virtual histories talks, and more, check out our event calendar!
Your membership makes preservation possible in Baltimore. Thank you for doing so much for our city.
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.
Downtown is opening up!
Since we’re coming back into the office, now’s the time to learn about where you work. Why does Charles Street narrow at Saratoga? Why do the enormous bronze doors at Ten Light Street sport bee hives, locomotives, and clipper ships? Where can you find hundreds of lions peering down on unsuspecting pedestrians? Join Mr. Johns Hopkins, director of the nonprofit Baltimore Heritage, on a 45-minute guided walking tour to learn about the history, architecture, and stories that make downtown interesting.
Logistics
Length: 45 minutes
Location: Leave from and return to your office lobby (we will tailor the tour to fit your location)
Time: Anytime weekdays 7:00 am to 5:00 pm (fits into a lunch hour or can be the start of a happy hour!)
Cost: $100
Please contact Molly Ricks at ricks@baltimoreheritage.org or 410-332-9992 for scheduling.
Want to take your office out for more tours? We’ve got over 15 different tours of downtown. Click here for a whole list!
All tours are full
Baltimore Heritage is happy to announce that we will be hosting four tours of historic Green Mount Cemetery starting in April. After 30 years without a break, Baltimore historian Wayne Schaumburg is finally taking a spring off and he has kindly shared his tour notes with us. We hope you’ll join us and tour guide Tim Fabiszak on one of these four dates: April 3, April 17, May 1, & May 15.
Opened in 1839, Green Mount is an early example of an urban-rural cemetery, that is, a cemetery with a park-like setting located close to the countryside. Green Mount is the final resting place of some of Maryland’s most famous, and infamous, figures including Johns Hopkins, Enoch Pratt, William and Henry Walters, Mary Elizabeth Garrett, Betsy Patterson, A.S. Abell, John H. B. Latrobe, A. Aubrey Bodine, John Wilkes Booth, and Elijah Bond, who patented the Ouija Board!
Due to Covid precautions, we are limiting space more than usual. All participants will be required to wear face masks and socially distance during the tour. See these events and more on our Events page!
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We at Baltimore Heritage cannot say it enough. This year has been challenging for everyone and we could not have navigated it without your support. Our new Five Minute Histories video series and our ongoing Legacy Business and Centennial Homes programs, to name a few, are possible only with your help. If you haven’t yet done so, please consider joining or renewing your membership today.
Here are just a few of this past year’s projects made possible with your support:
We produced over 100 Five Minute Histories videos. Beginning the first day of Maryland’s Covid lock-down, we have traveled all over our city covering topics such as the Civil Rights Movement, mercantile history, immigration, religious development, Native American history, LGBTQ heritage, transportation, landscape design, women’s rights, and even some geology.
We expanded our Friday afternoon history lecture series and went virtual. In partnership with the Baltimore Architecture Foundation, we held engaging talks by Charlie Duff, Nancy Proctor, Jackson Gilman-Forlini, Aaron Henkin, Anne Bruder, Meg Fairfax-Fielding, and more.
We handed out 5 micro-grants and 18 preservation awards virtually. We pivoted to a Zoom pitch party to continue to make preservation a participatory sport with micro grants. Thank you to member Brigid Goody for making this yearly event possible. And we have been featuring our 2020 preservation awards winners on our website and on our YouTube channel.
We continued to fight to preserve Baltimore’s heritage. Restoration has begun at the Bruce Street Arabber Stable. Construction continues at the Lafayette Square bathhouses. And the Center for Health Care and Healthy Living at the Baltimore Hebrew Orphan Asylum will soon be 100% occupied by the Baltimore City Health Department and Behavioral Health System Baltimore.
For all of you who volunteer, log-on to our programs, email us kind words (and correct our mistakes), and support our advocacy work in Baltimore, please accept a sincere thank you from all of us at Baltimore Heritage. Your time, talents and financial support make a difference. Please consider joining or renewing your membership.
We wish you a safe holiday season and thank you again for doing so much for Baltimore.
P.S. Need a holiday present idea? Get in touch about how you can get a gift membership for a friend or family-member!
