Join us for an upcoming heritage tour! We ride bikes, climb scaffolding, and walk up and down hilly streets on our tours of Baltimore’s historic buildings and neighborhoods all across the city. Have a question? Look through our FAQ page.
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Today

Jonestown & the Shot Tower: A Walking Tour

Carroll Mansion 800 Lombard Street, Baltimore, MD, United States

Originating in 1661, Jonestown is Baltimore’s oldest and most historic neighborhood. 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, the 1808 home of Charles Carroll, the longest living signer of the Declaration of Independence, and the Hendler Creamery, the nation’s first fully-automated ice cream manufacturing plant. And of course, what is a visit to Jonestown without a look inside the iconic Phoenix Shot Tower, which until 1846 was the tallest building in the country!

$10

No Ball Playing: Baltimore Kids Playing in Streets and Hanging on Corners (Virtual Talk)

Virtual MD, United States

Before the early 1900s, families in Baltimore never had to tell a kid to “watch out for cars”. However, as the number of cars in the city grew during the early 20th century, playing in the street became increasingly dangerous and even illegal. Criminalizing children at play has a long history in Baltimore from complaints in the Sun about young “baseball maniacs” breaking windows in the 1870s to a 1898 police order designed to “disperse” children from gathering on newly “smoothly paved streets to play.” In 1910, the Children’s Playground Association of Baltimore formed a “Guild of Play” to host supervised street play at locations around the city and started working to keep children safe through building more playgrounds. Despite their efforts and others, more than one in three East Baltimore youth surveyed in 2017 said they didn’t have or didn’t know of any safe place to play in their neighborhood.

By Donation

Historic Green Mount Cemetery

Green Mount Cemetery 1501 Greenmount Ave, Baltimore, MD, United States

Baltimore Heritage has inherited the Green Mount Cemetery tour from the great Baltimore historian Wayne Schaumburg and we invite you to join us. 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! Join us to tour Baltimore’s historic Green Mount Cemetery.

$20

Out of the Ashes: The Great Baltimore Fire of 1904

The Replica Gaslight 300 E Baltimore St, Baltimore, MD, 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.

$10