Baltimore Heritage

Celebrate Pride with us on this 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. Guides Richard Oloizia, Louis Hughes and Kate Drabinski 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 that called Charles Village its home. 

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.

Join us for a guided tour of Baltimore’s Marble Hill neighborhood, which was the home to an astonishing amount of groundbreaking Civil Rights leaders. Reverend Harvey Johnson began one of the first collective action movements here in the 1880s. In the 1930s Lillie Carroll Jackson engaged youth in “The Movement” and pioneered new non-violent protest tactics that were later picked up in cities across the country. Thurgood Marshall grew up here, as did the chief lobbyist for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Clarence Mitchell. Most recently this was the district for the late Representative Elijah Cummings, one of the most powerful voices for civil rights in Washington. Join us to learn how fundamental pillars of the Civil Rights Movement got built here by driven, activist neighbors with their eyes on the prize.

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!”