History from the Middle of the Street: A Walking Tour for the Charles Street Promenade
2024-06-08 14:00 - 15:00 (America/New_York) | 1 W Saratoga St, Baltimore, MD 21201, 1 W Saratoga St, Baltimore, MD, 21201, United States
Baltimore is kicking cars off of portions of Charles Street for a day, and we’re taking advantage of it! On Saturday, June 8, only pedestrians and bicycles will be allowed on a good portion of Charles Street between Saratoga and North Avenue as part of the Charles Street Promenade. Join Baltimore Heritage’s Executive Director, Johns Hopkins, on a stroll down the middle of the street to get a perspective that we normally don’t get of many of the city’s most interesting historic buildings. We’ll talk about some of Maryland’s oldest churches, take in architecture from Colonial Revival to Brutalist, and share stories from the founding of American philanthropy to the role rye whisky played in shaping more than a few beloved institutions…all from the middle of the street!
What is Charles St Promenade? Enjoy the day shopping, strolling, and dining, as Charles Street closes down to vehicular traffic for a full day of exploration and Downtown fun!

Historic Ridgely’s Delight
2024-06-09 09:30 - 10:30, 2024-07-14 09:30 - 10:30, 2024-08-11 09:30 - 10:30, 2024-09-08 09:30 - 10:30 | Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum, 216 Emory Street, Baltimore, MD, United States
For a tiny neighborhood squeezed between the University of Maryland and Camden Yards, Ridgely’s Delight contains an oversized history. George Washington rode here and Babe Ruth was born here! Join us to walk the preserved, picturesque streets of one of the earliest neighborhoods in Baltimore while we look back at the stories of both its famous visitors and the ordinary Baltimoreans who worked and raised their families here.
Our Monumental City tours are guided walks exploring iconic Baltimore landmarks in Federal Hill, Downtown, and Ridgely’s Delight on the first three Sundays of each month from May through November, except holiday weekends.

Federal Hill Beyond the Views: A Monumental City Tour
2024-06-16 09:30 - 10:30, 2024-07-21 09:30 - 10:30, 2024-08-18 09:30 - 10:30 | Federal Hill Park (Southwest Corner), 301 Warren Avenue, Baltimore, MD, 21230, United States
Baltimoreans celebrated atop Federal Hill when we ratified the U.S. Constitution. We used it to defend the city from the British in the War of 1812 and to make sure we stayed in the Union in the Civil War. We have even tunnelled under it to quarry minerals. Join us on a tour of Federal Hill and the neighborhood around it to learn about this waterfront community’s rich history, including stops at one of the last wooden houses in the city, the oldest house in Federal Hill, and the wonderful alley houses along Churchill Street.
Our Monumental City tours are guided walks exploring iconic Baltimore landmarks in Federal Hill, Downtown, Mount Vernon and Ridgely’s Delight on the first four Sundays of each month from April through November, except holiday weekends.

Sustainable, Small Batch Production: A Factory Tour of Mount Royal Soaps
2024-06-18 15:00 - 16:00 | 2165 Druid Park Drive, Suite 15, Baltimore 21211, 2165 Druid Park Drive, Suite 15, Baltimore, MD, 21211, United States
Mount Royal Soap Company was founded in Baltimore, MD in the Spring of 2014 by three soap-obsessed friends: Matt, Pat & Sam. With the explosion of soap and sanitizer demand during the pandemic they opened their first manufacturing space in the Woodberry neighborhood just 2 miles from the Remington store. You may have seen their products at Lexington Market or a farmer’s market.
If you have wondered what goes into creating their palm oil free, plant based, cruelty free products, this is your chance! Our tour will look behind the scenes and give you the opportunity to ask any burning questions you may have. On June 18, join us for a fascinating tour of sustainably sourced bath and body products made through a small batch production process right here in Baltimore.
**Every attendee will receive a free bar of wonderful Mount Royal soap!

Historic Green Mount Cemetery
2024-06-22 09:30 - 11:30, 2024-09-07 09:30 - 11:30, 2024-09-14 09:30 - 11:30 | Green Mount Cemetery, 1501 Greenmount Ave, Baltimore, MD, 21202, United States
Inherited from the great Baltimore historian Wayne Schaumburg, join Baltimore Heritage to tour Baltimore’s historic Green Mount Cemetery.
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, John Wilkes Booth, and Elijah Bond, who patented the Ouija Board!
Accessibility: Although there are some paved pathways, we will be walking over mostly uneven grassy terrain and cobblestones.

The Catacombs Under Westminster: Two Hundred Years of Tombs and Edgar Allan Poe’s Gravesite
2024-06-22 11:00 - 12:00 | Westminster Hall and Burying Ground, 519 W Fayette Street, Baltimore, MD, 21201, United States
Join us to explore the eerie catacombs underneath Baltimore’s First Presbyterian Church, now called Westminster Hall, and the graves that surround it, including the final resting place of Edgar Allan Poe. The burial ground predates the church, which was built on arches above the gravesites, so that the graveyard and its tombstones lie both underneath and around the building. We bet you will also recognize more than a few Baltimore street names as we walk among the patriots and civic leaders buried at Westminster including Calhoun, Hollins, Gilmore, and Bentalou. All told, the compact cemetery next to the University of Maryland School of Law is the final resting place for over 1,000 individuals. We can’t wait to see you “Where Baltimore’s History Rests in Peace!”

Mount Vernon Place: A Monumental City Tour
2024-06-23 09:30 - 10:30, 2024-07-28 09:30 - 10:30, 2024-08-25 09:30 - 10:30 | Washington Monument (South Entrance), 699 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD, 21201, United States
Mount Vernon began as a country estate for Revolutionary War hero John Eager Howard and grew to be the place to live for Baltimore’s rich and famous in the mid-nineteenth century. The Garrett family, owners of the B&O Railroad, the Walters, founders of the Walters Art Museum, and the Thomases, owners of Mercantile Bank, are among the families that built handsome mansions along the four parks that surround the Washington Monument. Join us on a tour to hear the stories behind the landmarks of Baltimore’s grandest historic neighborhood.
Our Monumental City tours are guided walks exploring iconic Baltimore landmarks in Federal Hill, Downtown, Mount Vernon and Ridgely’s Delight on the first four Sundays of each month from April through November, except holiday weekends.

Celebrate Pride! LGBTQ Heritage in Charles Village
2024-06-30 10:00 - 11:30 | Normal’s Books & Records, 425 East 31st Street, Baltimore, MD, 21218, United States
Celebrate Pride Month with us on a LGBTQ Heritage walking tour of Charles Village! You may know this neighborhood for its colorful “painted ladies,” but it was also home to many activists and institutions at the heart of the city’s LGBTQ community in the 1970s and 1980s. Our wonderful guides will take us on a walk past local landmarks from the original home of the Gay Community Center of Baltimore, now the GLCCB, to the St. Paul Street church that supported the growth of the Metropolitan Community Church, Baltimore’s oldest LGBT religious organization, and the radical feminist writers and publishers that gave a voice to lesbian authors who might not otherwise have been read. We hope you’ll join us to celebrate Pride and the incredible community that called Charles Village its home.

Historic Clifton Mansion
2024-07-13 10:00 - 11:00, 2024-07-24 17:30 - 18:30, 2024-08-03 10:00 - 11:00, 2024-08-21 17:30 - 18:30 | Clifton Mansion, 2701 Saint Lo Drive, Baltimore, MD, 21218, United States
Join us for a tour inside Clifton Mansion, the unique Italianate country house that has overlooked Baltimore City for over 200 years! At one time the summer home of War of 1812 captain Henry Thompson and then philanthropist Johns Hopkins, the story of Clifton Estate is one about two prominent businessmen, enslaved & free Black people, and more. You’ll see the latest restorations made possible by the Friends of Clifton Mansion and Civic Works. You will also be invited into unrestored spaces that are brimming with stories to tell! And the tour wouldn’t be complete without climbing the tower and taking in one-of-a-kind views of Clifton Park and our surrounding city. We hope to see you there.

Ghost Rivers: A Walking Tour of a Buried Waterways Public Art Project
2024-07-24 18:00 - 19:00 | 3000 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218, 3000 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD, 21218, United States
Did you know there is a lost stream buried below the streets of Baltimore? The creek Sumwalt Run vanished from Baltimore’s landscape in the early 1900s. Before its disappearance, its frozen waters appeared in ice boxes across the city, cut from the city’s first commercial ice pond and a later artificial ice factory. Trolley tracks crossed its ravine, bringing workers home from downtown factories. The Olmsted Company attempted to preserve part of the stream as a greenway, but real estate developers filled its valley (using debris from the Great Baltimore Fire of 1905, according to local lore). When Baltimore built a new sewer system in the early 20th century, Sumwalt Run— along with dozens of other creeks across the city — were turned into buried storm sewers. They now flow hidden and mostly forgotten below our neighborhoods. You can catch echoes of their waters whispering from certain storm drains. On July 24, join us and artist Bruce Willen to discover his recent public art project, Ghost Rivers, which reveals the hidden history and path of Sumwalt Run beneath the Remington and Charles Village neighborhoods. Through a series of installations, wayfinding markers, and writings Ghost Rivers brings lost landscapes and histories to the surface for the first time in over 100 years.

The Lillie Carroll Jackson Civil Rights Museum: A Behind-the-Scenes Tour
2024-07-27 09:30 - 11:00 | Lillie Carroll Jackson Museum, 1320 Eutaw Place, Baltimore, MD, 21217, United States
From 1935 until her retirement in 1970, Lillie Carroll Jackson was president of the Baltimore chapter of the NAACP and for much of this time her home on Eutaw Place was a hub of Civil Rights organizing for Jackson and her daughter, Juanita Jackson Mitchell. On July 27, join Baltimore Heritage Executive Director Johns Hopkins for a short walk around Lillie Carroll Jackson’s neighborhood, which was also the home of many other Civil Rights luminaries including Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Mitchell. Then we will go inside the museum to tour where Jackson, called the “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement,” lived and worked for the cause.
This tour will include a short, 30-min walk outdoors, followed by an hour-long indoor tour. The Museum and exhibits are accessible by wheelchair and others with limited mobility. There is elevator access to all floors.

Out of the Ashes: The Great Baltimore Fire of 1904
2024-08-04 09:30 - 10:30 | The Replica Gaslight, 300 E Baltimore St, Baltimore, MD, 21202, United States
In February 1904, Baltimore’s chief firefighter cabled Washington DC: “Desperate fire here. Must have help at once!” A tremendous fire was sweeping through downtown and showed little signs of stopping. Not until 5:00 p.m. the next day was the fire brought under control. Overall, it destroyed 1500 buildings, left 35,000 people unemployed, and damaged $150 million of property. Resilient Baltimore rebounded quickly, erecting new buildings, widening streets, and improving fire safety designs. Rising out of the ashes, Baltimore used the fire to rethink the city, and the downtown we know today is shaped largely by this incident. Join us on this walking tour as we see what 2500 degrees Fahrenheit heat can do to blocks of solid stone, learn how the fire shaped architecture locally and across the country, and hear the tale of one of the fire’s great heroes: Goliath the horse.
Our Monumental City tours are guided walks exploring iconic Baltimore landmarks in Downtown, Ridgely’s Delight, Mount Vernon and Federal Hill on the first four Sundays of each month from April through November, except holiday weekends.

Hampden History Bar Crawl
2024-08-10 15:00 - 16:30 | Atomic Books, 3620 Falls Rd, Baltimore, Maryland, 21211
On August 10, join us on a pleasant stroll through historic Hampden to learn about many of the local bars in the neighborhood! We’ll also delve into our city’s long and beloved relationship with local bars and the changes brought about during the tumultuous Prohibition era. We’ll stop at a beer garden where we will sample some locally-brewed beer and then we will end at a former speakeasy tucked away on a residential street to quench our thirst one last time. We hope you’ll join us on August 10 for a brew-tiful walk around Hampden (ticket includes 2 beer samples).

A Walking Tour of East Baltimore’s Historic American Indian “Reservation”
2024-09-04 17:30 - 18:30 | South Broadway Baptist Church, 211 South Broadway, Baltimore, 21231, United States
The place now known as Baltimore, like the rest of what is now known as the United States, has always been home to Native peoples. Baltimore is part of the ancestral homelands of the Piscataway and the Susquehannock, and a diverse host of American Indian folks from other nations have passed through or lived here at different times — and still do! In the mid-twentieth century, thousands of Lumbee Indians and members of other tribal nations migrated to Baltimore City, seeking jobs and a better quality of life. They settled in Upper Fells Point and Washington Hill and created a vibrant, intertribal American Indian community, which they affectionately referred to as “the reservation,” in its heyday. In the decades since the community has gradually moved away from the area. Recent generations never experienced “the reservation” as such. Today, most Baltimoreans are surprised to learn that it ever existed. On September 4, join historian and artist Ashley Minner Jones to learn about places and spaces important to American Indian history and heritage in the city, with a focus on East Baltimore’s Historic American Indian “Reservation” in the 20th century.

Heart of Local Government: City Hall
2024-09-05 15:00 - 16:00 | Baltimore City Hall, 100 N. Holiday Street, Baltimore, MD, 21202, United States
Housing the offices of the Mayor and other officials, Baltimore City Hall is the heart of local government. Designed in a French Second Empire style, local leaders dedicated the new City Hall in October 1875. Architect George Frederick was only 21 when he won the design competition organized for project. The Baltimore City Hall may be Frederick’s claim to fame but he also designed Maryland’s Pavilion for Philadelphia Exposition, Baltimore City College, Hutzler’s Palace Building, and many more landmarks across the city. In an appropriate move for a bustling industrial city, the structure employed a good deal of cast iron, including the 227-foot tall dome designed by Wendel Bollman and cast by Bartlett, Robbins, and Company.
Our tour will cover architectural history, as well as Baltimore and city government history. In addition to the rotunda, we’ll venture into the building’s ceremonial room, the original mayor’s office, and the council chambers (as long as they are not in use). We’ll also witness close-up the prize-winning renovations that happened in the 1970s and saved City Hall from demolition. Peer behind the curtain and get an up close look at the architecture and renovations where our city’s leaders make some of their biggest decisions.

“Life Goes On:” The Legacy of Henrietta Lacks and Turner Station
2024-09-07 10:00 - 11:30 | Sollers Point Multi-Purpose Center, 323 Sollers Point Road, Dundalk, MD, 21222, United States
Don’t know who Henrietta Lacks was? Most of the world didn’t until about ten years ago. Mrs. Lacks is best recognized for her immortal cells, which scientists and doctors still use today to study the effects of toxins, drugs, hormones and viruses on people without experimenting on humans. Her cells helped create the HPV and polio vaccines. Yet it took some twenty-five years before the Lacks family received any knowledge of the important contribution of their beloved wife and mother. Please join us and the Henrietta Lacks Legacy Group for a walking tour of Turner Station in Dundalk, the last home of Henrietta Lacks, to hear about Henrietta, her family, and her life in Turner Station.
In 1951, Mrs. Lacks went to Johns Hopkins Hospital for treatment of cervical cancer. Without informing Mrs. Lacks, Hopkins doctors noticed that the removed cancer cells continued to grow in the lab. This marked the first instance of continuous growth of human cells outside the body. Henrietta died on October 4, 1951 from her cancer. She was 31 years old.
Doctors named her cells HeLa (from the first letters of her first and last names) and, without Lacks family approval, began sending them to laboratories around the world for research. Mrs. Lacks’ story weaves together important ethical and racial issues of the medical industrial complex, segregation, and the polarized economy of Baltimore. We are honored to be partnering with the Henrietta Lacks Legacy Group for this tour. Join guides Servant Speed and Adele Newson-Horst as we walk through Henrietta’s Turner Station community and learn about her incredible story.
Want to learn more about Henrietta Lacks?
The Double-Edged Helix” in Rolling Stone Magazine
“The Miracle of HeLa” in Ebony Magazine
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Jonestown & the Shot Tower: A Walking Tour
2024-09-07 10:00 - 11:30 | Carroll Mansion, 800 Lombard Street, Baltimore, MD, 21202, United States
Jonestown is one of Baltimore’s oldest and most historic neighborhoods. Both groundbreaking industry and vibrant communities have thrived here. On this tour, we will see the vestiges of its Eastern European Jewish residents as we pass Corned Beef Row. We hope you’ll join Baltimore Heritage and tour guide Bev Rosen as we stroll past a series of firsts: the McKim Free School, the city’s oldest education building from 1833, the Lloyd Street Synagogue, the first synagogue in Maryland and the third oldest in the country, and the 1808 home of Charles Carroll, the longest living signer of the Declaration of Independence. And of course, what is a visit to Jonestown without a stop at the iconic Phoenix Shot Tower, which until 1846 was the tallest building in the country!

Creating the Foundations of The Movement: Baltimore’s Civil Rights Bus Tour
2024-09-14 10:00 - 12:00 | 211 N. Paca St, Baltimore, MD 21201, 211 N Paca St, Baltimore, MD, 21201, United States
Baltimore has an incredible history of Civil Rights activism. Join us on this bus tour to explore neighborhoods like Marble Hill, which gave rise to some of the fundamental pillars of the Civil Rights Movement. We will discover how luminaries like Juanita Jackson Mitchell, Thurgood Marshall, and our late congressman, Elijah Cummings, were at the forefront of the fight for equality for Black citizens. We’ll see sites of demonstrations against Jim Crow laws in Druid Hill Park and department stores near Lexington Market, as well as the homes of activists who waged legal battles against racist housing laws in West Baltimore. We’ll discuss the efforts to end segregation in schools and the work of Black suffragists to gain the right to vote. We hope you’ll join us to see how the incredible organizing of people like Lillie Carroll Jackson and Rev. Harvey Johnson promoted Civil Rights not just for Baltimoreans, but for Americans across the nation.

Students are free

This tour will start and end near Lexington Market. This tour will be two-hours long with one stop where we disembark the bus and walk two blocks. There will be an option to stay on the bus and receive the same information as the walking portion. There are bathrooms for use before the tour at Lexington Market.

This project has been financed in part with funds from the Charles A. and Lois H. Miller Foundation and State funds from the Maryland Heritage Areas Authority, an instrumentality of the State of Maryland. However, project contents or opinions do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Maryland Heritage Areas Authority.
