Baltimore Heritage

When a tremendous Gilded Age mansion gets fully-adorned with holiday decorations, there’s a lot to see. Please join us for a special winter tour of the Evergreen Museum and Library, which holds 48 rooms, a soaring portico, a Tiffany designed glass canopy, and loads holiday decorations. We’ll take in the seasonal surroundings while learning about the mansion’s rich history, including the 1878 purchase of the estate by John Work Garrett, president of the B&O Railroad, for his son T. Harrison Garrett. 

Evergreen still has over 50,000 items from the Garrett family, including drawings by Degas and Picasso and one of the nation’s largest collections of Tiffany glass pieces. The building’s rare book library contains 8,000 volumes that include works by Shakespeare and Audubon, as well as the signatures of every signer of the Declaration of Independence. The mansion even has its own theater! Please join us this holiday season for a tour of this wonderful Baltimore treasure!

On Tuesday, December 19, join Baltimore Heritage at the Baltimore Immigration Museum to hear the stories of the various ethnic groups, including Germans, Irish, Jews, Poles, Lithuanians, Czechs, Italians, and Greeks, who started their American journey in Baltimore between 1830 and 1914. We also learn about more recent immigrant arrivals, including Asians and Latinos, and African Americans, traveling from the rural South to Baltimore between the 1920s and the 1960s. Finally, we'll discover the history behind the building originally called Deutsches Emigranten Haus that was built in 1904 to provide temporary accommodations to individuals new to Baltimore. A light wine and cheese reception will be provided. We hope to see you on December 19!

Always one for flamboyance, Captain Isaac Emerson came back from a trip to Italy and decided he wanted to build a new factory in downtown Baltimore and that it should look like Florence’s fabulous town hall, the Palazzo Vecchio. Completed in 1911, the tower’s four clocks each measure 24 feet across, a foot more London’s Big Ben, and the tower itself was the tallest building in Baltimore at the time. Emerson, the man who became wealthy from his invention of Bromo Seltzer and gave us the slogan “if you keep late hours for society’s sake, Bromo Seltzer will cure that headache,” was quite proud. Our tour through the building will include a trip up into the clockworks at the top to look at the tick-tock operation in process and peer out the translucent windows. We’ll also stop in at the museum room that holds the world’s largest collection ephemera from Captain Emerson, Bromo Seltzer, and Maryland Glass. And along the way, we’ll get a taste of the newest art that comes from the Tower’s artists: it is now home to dozens of local art studios. If you’ve wondered what goes on in the Bromo Seltzer Tower and how the imposing clocks actually work, now’s your chance!

Baltimore sculptor Hans Schuler was the first American to win the French Salon’s gold medal at the Academie des Beaux Arts in Paris in 1901. Luckily for us, this former president of the Maryland Institute College of Arts has monuments dotted throughout the city: Martin Luther at Lake Montebello, Johns Hopkins and Sidney Lanier at Hopkins University, Samuel Smith in Federal Hill Park, to name a few. Schuler’s legacy is carried on today at the Schuler School of Fine Arts and Gallery. Eight years after his death in 1951, his son Hans Schuler, Jr. formed the school, converting the family home on Lafayette Avenue into a studio and gallery. Since its opening in 1959, the school has trained students in techniques of the Old Masters in the home where Schuler once lived and worked. On January 11, please join us and our guide from the Schuler School for a tour of the house and the working studio.