On Beechwood Drive, leading up to the Rawlings Conservatory in Druid Hill Park stands a small historical marker. Erected in 1992, it sits where the main clay tennis courts in Druid Hill Park once stood. It was at these courts that one of the earliest Civil Rights protests in America took place: a tennis match. On Sunday, July 11th, 1948, a group of black and white tennis players gathered at two of the “whites only” clay courts to play. The game was organized by the civil rights activist group the Young Progressives of Maryland. 

At the time, African American tennis players had to go to separate courts in the park to play tennis. These courts were crumbling and in much worse condition than the “whites only” ones. However, this ban on interracial tennis matches was not written in any law. Instead, it was an informal city policy enforced by the police. Because of this, the Young Progressives saw the courts as a good target for a protest.

The Young Progressives had already held multiple interracial matches at the clay courts protesting segregation. However, these matches were often on Sundays during church services, so few people noticed them. For the July 11th match, the Young Progressives wanted to draw a larger crowd. They posted a flier reading “KILL JIM CROW! DEMAND YOUR RIGHTS! Organize to smash discrimination in recreational facilities.” They also sent a letter to the superintendent of the Bureau of Recreation telling him their plan to hold an interracial tennis match at the park.

Their attempts at drawing a crowd on July 11th were more than successful. Hundreds of people had come to the clay tennis courts to support the Young Progressives. The Park Police were also at the courts waiting for the players to start. The players included four men and four women, with two African Americans and two whites in each group. The men were the first to try and start a game. However, as soon as they went to serve the ball, they were immediately told to leave or be arrested. The players refused to leave, and sat down on the courts. The police had to carry them off the court in order to arrest them. The women then attempted to play, but they too were arrested. Along with the players, many people in the crowd and later outside the Northern Police Station were also arrested for disorderly conduct. In total, 22 people were arrested in relation to the protest.

Those who were arrested were accused of violating park rules, disturbing the peace, and/or conspiracy to unlawfully assemble. Only 7 people charged with disturbing the peace served out a jail sentence. All of the other charges were dropped because what the protesters had done was not actually illegal. This case was an important first step in Maryland’s long Civil Rights movement. It was the first time in Maryland history that both Blacks and Whites protestors appeared in court together claiming that Jim Crow laws violated their rights.

Today, the tennis courts are still a regularly visited spot in Druid Hill Park. However, the courts that were in use when the Young Progressives played their match in 1948 were removed in 1989. All that stands as a reminder of the old clay courts is the historical sign near the Rawlings Conservatory. The sign, entitled “Playing for Civil Rights,” is specifically dedicated to the events of June 11th, 1948, including a short explanation of the protest and why it happened. This is meant to ensure that the courage shown by the activists on that day will never be forgotten.

The research and writing of this article was funded by two grants: one from the Maryland Heritage Areas Authority and one from the Baltimore National Heritage Area.

Beechwood Drive (to the left of Rawlings Conservatory)

A giant carrot, a house made of cheese, and barnyard chickens were among the attractions that greeted visitors to the Baltimore Zoo’s new Children’s Zoo when it opened in Druid Hill Park in 1963. “Most children’s zoos are full of fairy tale stuff, like Humpty-Dumpty, Little Red Riding Hood, and Jack and the Beanstalk,” declared Arthur Watson, the Zoo’s director. “This one will be different. It will emphasize living things and nature.” And it did, along with its share of whimsy.

The Children’s Zoo was a combination petting zoo, storybook land, and barnyard intended to make every child’s “first introduction to animals a pleasant one,” said Watson. Young visitors could board Noah’s Ark (formerly a Chesapeake Bay fishing boat), climb into a tree house, ride a miniature train pulled by a replica 1863 C.P. Huntington locomotive, visit cows in a Pennsylvania Dutch milking barn, and wander in, out, and around other fantastical structures with animals everywhere. Chickens, ducks, and peacocks roamed freely while rabbits, sheep, goats, and donkeys stood within petting distance. More exotic fauna such as monkeys, parrots, and a baby tapir were also in residence but out of hand’s reach.

Interest in adding a barnyard feature to Druid Hill Park “to give city children a view of country life” had been floating around since 1937 when Baltimore City Councilman Jerome Sloman first proposed the idea. It took twenty-six years, and Watson’s unrelenting advocacy, to turn idea into reality. From the moment he was hired as the Zoo’s first professional director in 1948, Watson made it his mission to increase attendance. He believed that a children’s zoo was central to this mission and he eventually secured the necessary approvals and funding for construction. In the meantime, children’s zoos had become popular all around the country. Watson and his architect, Louis Cuoma, researched similar attractions to help conceptualize their own. Referring to his competition at other major zoos, Watson announced with typical bravado, “Let them compare our new [children’s zoo] with those and they’ll find that Baltimore has the best in the country.”

The site for the Children’s Zoo was carefully chosen to avoid tree removal and to be within walking distance of the main zoo. The milking barn was constructed on site but most of the fantastic structures and over-sized animals were created in the big, bright workshop of Adler Display Studios on Penn Street in southwest Baltimore. The zoo-within-a-zoo was enclosed to contain free-roaming children and animals, but also to allow the zoo to charge admission of fifteen cents for each child and twenty-five cents for adults. Watson rightly anticipated that ticket sales would soon cover the $250,000 cost of building the Children’s Zoo.

While seemingly modest, the price of admission for a family could add up at a time when the hourly minimum wage was only $1.25. The rest of the Zoo remained free but the Children’s Zoo’s pay-to-play policy sparked debate in the City’s op-ed pages. Some felt that the policy was exclusionary while others saw a need for the Zoo to generate revenue in order to grow and improve. Curiosity apparently outpaced criticism, with more than twenty-five thousand people visiting the Children’s Zoo in its first ten days. It would continue to attract the Zoo’s youngest visitors for just over two decades, until it was replaced in the 1980s by the expansive Maryland Wilderness exhibit, an ambitious new children’s zoo with a very different look and feel.

1876 Mansion House Drive, Baltimore, MD 21217

Of Fish and Sea Lions

At the edge of the Disc Golf Course in Druid Hill Park where the greens give way to weeds and woods, you might notice a set of stone steps that lead nowhere. Trace their path downward through the wild overgrowth and you can pick out remnants of a stone foundation wall and a rusted iron fence. This abandoned spot used to be a popular destination.

Under the vines and overgrowth are the Three Sisters Ponds, all now empty. There were originally five of these man-made basins, created in 1875 to stock trout, shad, and other local species bred in a nearby fish hatchery house. The picturesque little building, also completed in 1875, was designed by George A. Frederick, the same architect who designed Baltimore’s City Hall and several other Druid Hill Park landmarks. Early on, the building was described as “a two-story Gothic structure of blue stone, with white marble trimmings, the main building projecting from octagonal wings on either side.” By 1925, the building was abandoned and ultimately destroyed by vandals, who broke windows, stripped it of its bronze fittings, and set it on fire in 1940. The city demolished the charred ruins for safety reasons.

At least one of the ponds stocked fish well into the twentieth century, but, in 1884, the center pond became a sea lion exhibit. The pond’s first occupant arrived by train from California in the middle of the night after an eight-day journey. The sea lion “slipped out upon the bank” of Pond No. 2, “gave a plunge headforemost, and was out of sight,” reported the Baltimore Sun. In 1896, Captain Cassells, superintendent of Druid Hill Park, declared that the sea lions were “the show attraction of the park, particularly to every child who comes here.” To give the sleek celebrities more space, the center pond was enlarged, merging five basins into three, but it would still prove to be only a temporary home for such large animals. In 1910, the sea lions relocated to a new exhibit on the main campus of the Zoo a short distance away.

Despite the loss of the sea lions, Three Sisters Ponds remained beautiful, well-tended, and popular for several more decades. The name “Three Sisters Ponds” dates to at least the 1920s. Its origin is unknown but may reference the Native American use of the term to describe three staple crops – corn, beans, and squash – traditionally grown in close proximity and for mutual benefit. One of the three became a casting pond where anglers could practice their sport inaugurated in 1928 for the Maryland Open Bait Casting Tournament. Another of the ponds, around the same time, became a favorite destination of the Baltimore Model Yacht Club. On weekends, those who sailed model yachts and those who enjoyed watching them flocked to the pond. In winter, ice skaters came.

As the decades passed and recreational use of Druid Hill Park changed, Three Sisters Ponds became a quieter spot. One police officer who occasionally patrolled the park in the late 1960s and early 1970s remembered the place fondly. “The ponds gave the occasional visitor like me a sense of privacy, escape, and personal oasis,” wrote Philip B.J. Reid, who later became an FBI agent. “Encircled by an array of multicolored plants and trees and well-manicured lawns and shrubs, and home to various species of birds and the occasional deer, the setting was beautiful, serene, and majestic.”

The City cut off water to the ponds in the 1960s and since then, nature has slowly reclaimed the site. A master plan for Druid Hill Park published in 1995 recommended their renovation, but nothing has happened there yet.

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1876 Mansion House Drive, Baltimore, MD 21217

Disc golfers playing on Druid Hill Park’s course sometimes toss their Frisbees accidentally over the Maryland Zoo’s perimeter fence. The discs land alongside a flat, understated red-brick building whose bland exterior contrasts with a fascinating interior. This is the Zoo’s Animal Hospital. Since 1984, it has been the hub of medical research and animal care for a wonderfully diverse array of wild patients, ranging from five-gram ruby-throated hummingbirds to five-hundred-pound lions.

Before the Animal Hospital was built, the Zoo’s veterinary staff worked out of a small sick ward in the basement of another Zoo building. Their move into the hospital afforded incredible new opportunities. The facility was equipped with a full surgical suite, an intensive care unit, separate wards for mammals, birds, and reptiles, as well as a quarantine ward, a veterinary laboratory, and a medical library. Today, the hospital also houses the Zoo’s Panamanian Golden Frog Conservation Center and its Animal Embassy, including an outdoor mews, where the program animals known as “Animal Ambassadors” live.

The Baltimore Zoological Society (BZS), a non-profit organization formed to support and ultimately manage the Zoo, first proposed an animal hospital in its 1976 Master Plan. It then took several years to secure the necessary funding. Dr. Torrey Brown, then Secretary of the State Department of Natural Resources and a board member of BZS, and Dr. John Strandberg, Director of Comparative Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, were instrumental in the effort. The Animal Hospital officially opened in January 1984 at a cost of $3.8 million that the State of Maryland funded with a grant.

From the beginning, the Zoo’s veterinary staff has worked closely with colleagues at Johns Hopkins University. They have also collaborated with veterinary and human medicine experts to add depth to the Zoo’s medical program. A local dentist who volunteered his services to the Zoo recalled that “while doing a root canal for one of the Zoo’s medical staff, I was asked if I wanted to help out.” He went from never doing a root canal on an animal before to adapting his own equipment to the task to eventually becoming a member of the American Association of Veterinary Dentists.

The Animal Hospital has seen its fair share of extraordinary patients, too. There was the male Kodiak bear that broke the x-ray table under his massive weight. And the tiny golden frog that visited the O.R. to have an even tinier tumor removed. A bald eagle, found injured along the Gunpowder River, was treated for broken bones in its shoulder. That same eagle was released soon thereafter by then-President Bill Clinton at a 1996 ceremony marking the down-listing of bald eagles from endangered to threatened. More recently, an African penguin got a new lease on life after successful cataract surgery.

In addition to patient care, the Animal Hospital remains to this day an epicenter of important medical research, veterinary training, and ongoing wildlife conservation work that often involves partners such as the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

3300 Crows Nest Road, Baltimore, MD 21217

Life Inside These Walls

On August 5, 1948, Mayor Thomas D’Alessandro and other Baltimore City dignitaries came by motorcade to Druid Hill Park for the official opening of the Baltimore Zoo’s new Reptile House. They pulled up in front of a small, yellow-brick building a short distance from the Zoo’s main campus. A crowd of several hundred people gathered for the ceremony and then walked inside, eager for their first glimpse of the scaly and slick, slithering and hopping new residents.

They entered an oval room with a shallow, tile-lined pool at its center where small alligators and turtles swam. Set into the walls of the room were brightly lit tanks containing an eye-popping array of local and exotic snakes, lizards, and amphibians. Artists employed by the City’s Bureau of Parks had painted woodland, desert, or swamp scenes inside each tank to mimic the natural habitats of the occupants. The visitors moved from tank to tank, admiring the 250 animals ranging in size from a four-inch worm snake to a twelve-foot python. If any visitors looked up to see the murals of marine life decorating the arched walls, they might be reminded of the building’s fascinating past.

With funding from the federal Works Project Administration, this same building—a former pump house for a park reservoir that was later filled and turned into a softball field—had been converted ten years earlier into Baltimore’s first aquarium. It showcased Chesapeake Bay fish and several exotic species. There had even been talk of exhibiting a pair of penguins and a manatee from Florida, but neither event came to pass. Unfortunately, the aquarium was short-lived. Fred Saffron, one of its primary backers, recalled that in late 1941, “our biologist had to go into war work, and the park laborers took over. Within a month, the alligators and the terrapin were all that were living.” By the time Arthur Watson, newly hired director of the Baltimore Zoo, arrived on the scene in early 1948, the aquarium stood empty.

A lifelong snake enthusiast and a showman by nature, Watson smelled opportunity and was quick to act. “When we open, we’ll have one of the best collections of snakes in this country,” he promised. “We’ll be short only a cobra, mambo and python.” To make good on his promise, he sent his newly hired reptile curator—an eighteen-year-old named John E. Cooper—on a collecting expedition to the Ogeechee River in Georgia. Cooper returned with many specimens, and somehow Watson also found a python by opening day.

Within months, Cooper left the Zoo, on to future adventures as a biology teacher, naturalist, science writer, cave diver, and expert on crayfishes and cave fauna. His successor, the legendary Frank Groves, would oversee the Reptile House and its intriguing residents for the next forty-four years, until his retirement in 1992.

During his tenure, Groves published countless scientific papers, earned a national reputation as a serious herpetologist, and pioneered breeding programs for several species that had never been bred in captivity before. The Reptile House closed its doors permanently in 2004, but Groves’ interests in research, captive breeding, and education passed to his successors and became hallmarks of the Zoo’s amphibian and reptile program continuing to this day.

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Greenspring Avenue and Beechwood Drive, Baltimore, MD 21215

When the first official World’s Fair in the United States – the Centennial Exhibition – closed in Philadelphia in November 1876, the Maryland delegation chose not to abandon their state exhibit hall. Instead, the wooden building (described as “a cross between English Tudor and Swiss Chalet”) was disassembled piece by piece, transported to Baltimore, and then reassembled on a shady hillside in Druid Hill Park. The structure was well received in its new incarnation. “It is the opinion of those who have seen the building at Philadelphia, and since its re-erection here,” wrote a correspondent for The Sun on April 17, 1877, “that it is far prettier in the present situation than among so many other buildings at the centennial.”

The Maryland Building is one of only two buildings to survive the exhibition; the other is the Ohio Building. By recommendation of Baltimore’s Park Commission, it became a museum “of interest and attraction to the public” that housed “curiosities that have been gradually collecting in one of the basement rooms” of the adjacent Mansion House. The museum opened in April 1877 with Otto Lugger, a trained naturalist, in charge.

For the next many years, Professor Lugger presided over an increasingly eclectic collection that included the basement curiosities as well as assorted donations from eager citizens and the Maryland Academy of Sciences. Thus, visitors could browse “a handsome and increasing ornithological collection” in one room, costumes and ceramics in another room, and a center hall full of fire-fighting equipment (including an elaborately decorated hand pumper donated by General George Washington to the Friendship Fire Company of Alexandria, Virginia.)

When the Park Board granted use of the Maryland Building to the Natural History Society of Maryland in 1936, most of the curiosities were removed and distributed around town to the Baltimore Fire Department, the Fort McHenry Museum, and the Maryland Historical Society. In their place came exhibits dedicated to local flora, fauna, geology, and archaeology. Inside the walls of the old wooden building a new museum took shape, one that showcased rocks, minerals, and fossils; birds, butterflies, reptiles, and mammals; and, most amazingly, the thirty-foot-long reconstructed skeleton of a baby blue whale that had washed ashore in Crisfield, Maryland in 1876.

In the 1970s, after a 40-year run, the Natural History Society moved out of the Maryland Building so that the operating arm of the Zoo, the Baltimore Zoological Society (BZS), could move in. By this time, the Zoo had fenced in its campus and since the Maryland Building was on the inside of the fence, it made sense for it to become part of the Zoo. A 1978 renovation outfitted the building with offices and an auditorium, allowing it to function as both BZS headquarters and a public education space. Ever since, the Maryland Building has served as a busy work space for Zoo staff.

The Maryland Building underwent a second major renovation in 2009. With great care and attention paid to the structure’s historic restoration, it was given a new lease on life, and, in 2010, the project earned a prestigious Maryland Preservation Award from the Maryland Historical Trust.

1876 Mansion House Drive, Baltimore, MD 21217

Visiting any zoo in the world today, you expect to find it surrounded by a fence. It might seem difficult, then, to imagine that for nearly a century there was no fence around the Baltimore Zoo. The zoo was open to anyone who visited Druid Hill Park, anytime day or night.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after the Zoo’s founding in 1876, Druid Hill Park attracted residents of every race, age, and background. The park served as an oasis of natural beauty in the middle of an increasingly crowded industrial city. Visitors strolling through the park would happen upon a small zoo at its center.

By the mid-twentieth century, the Zoo had grown in size and automobile traffic within the park had increased. People could drive past several of the Zoo’s animal exhibits and sometimes stopped to picnic or just to observe the animals for a few minutes. This casual and carefree approach to visiting the Zoo by day, however, had a disturbing and destructive counterpoint by night. The local press reported all too frequently on grisly acts of vandalism against Zoo animals.

A 1968 report issued by the Baltimore Zoological Society, a friends group that supported the Zoo, noted that over the course of a single year, thirty-one animals were killed by vandals and another forty-nine killed by marauding packs of wild dogs. Stoning and poisoning were the most common causes of vandal-induced death, underscoring intentional cruelty. The Society advocated strongly for a perimeter fence and for charging admission to the Zoo, to protect the animals and to raise the revenue necessary to support their care.

The anticipation of these proposed changes sparked criticism in the op-ed pages of local newspapers. Some writers lamented the loss of unrestricted access to all parts of the park while others charged discrimination. One citizen complained in a letter The Baltimore Sun on July 8, 1970:

“First the animals were fenced in, now the public is fenced out. Once the turnstiles are in place and admission fees in force, the days of a casual stop at the zoo... will be over. A zoo visit becomes an organized expedition, money in hand, while penniless urchins are left outside to peer in at their financial betters.”

Despite criticism in the press, the Zoo completed its fence project in late 1970, erecting a nine-foot barrier around its three-mile perimeter. The Zoo also began to charge a fifty-cent admission fee to visitors over the age of fourteen. Vandalism and budget considerations prompted these moves, but by then the fence was also required by the U.S. Department of Agriculture under the Animal Welfare Act of 1966. In addition to the USDA, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums also now requires that all of its accredited members (including The Maryland Zoo) have secure perimeter fences to protect animals within a facility and to act as a secondary containment system.

While some may have felt inconvenienced by the Zoo’s new perimeter fence, the benefits were immediate and undeniable. Within one year of erecting the fence, the Zoo could afford to hire its first full-time veterinarian and reported not a single case of vandalism against its animals.

1876 Mansion House Drive, Baltimore, MD 21217

Before There Were Lawn Mowers

Put Druid Hill Park's tennis and basketball courts, roads, reservoir, conservatory, and zoo all aside for a moment. In essence, the park is 674 acres of forest and tree-shaded lawn, an oasis of green in the center of a busy city of brick and asphalt. Lawns bound and slope all over the park, but the one that has always reigned supreme is the one that cascades down the hill in front of the Mansion House toward the reservoir.

"Buttercups bloom and children play joyously amid the grasses and sunshine," waxed one Sun reporter poetically of the Mansion House lawn. Since the park's founding in 1860, the grassy hillside attracted thousands upon thousands of visitors for music concerts, Easter egg rolls, public rallies, patriotic celebrations, Boy Scout campouts, private picnics, golf and track practices, and quiet kite-flying afternoons. It has remained open, green, and welcoming—and trim—all the while.

Before anyone used lawnmowers, sheep trimmed the Mansion House lawn and other grassy spaces in Druid Hill Park. The newly elected governor of Maryland, Oden Bowie, supplied the park with its first flock of Southdown sheep in 1869 from his family farm. The sheep remained at work until the 1940s when they were sidelined by automobiles. (Apparently, with increased traffic inside the park, the sheep wandered in front of cars too often.)

Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of American landscape architecture, thought that sheep did a better job trimming grass than lawnmowers. Active in the latter half of the twentieth century, Olmsted designed many of America's most famous city parks (although not Druid Hill). Several of these also maintained flocks, including Central Park in New York, Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Franklin Park in Boston, and Washington Park in Chicago. Some wealthy estate owners kept sheep for the same purpose, including John D. Rockefeller, who replaced his fleet of lawnmowers with sheep in 1913 after doing a cost and quality analysis that favored the ruminants.

"What a beautifully peaceful thing it was to see the sheep moving out in the early morning and drifting homeward again at the end of the day," wrote Roland Mepham in 1966 of his turn-of-the-century childhood in Druid Hill Park. Mepham's father had been the park's blacksmith and wheelwright. Milton Stanley, a neighborhood kid who often visited the park, was amazed by their canine caretakers. "It seemed a near miracle to an inner city boy," the high school principal recalled in 1979, "that the shepherd dog could perform his job with such intelligence and expertise."

A handful of shepherds tended the sheep over the years. The longest-serving of these was George McCleary, affectionately known as "Mr. Mac." He was a fixture in Druid Hill Park for twenty years, from 1906 to 1926. Devoted to his collies and sheep, he also mentored many young park enthusiasts. Writing in The Sun in 1958, Malcolm Lowenstein recalled visiting the shepherd almost every afternoon after school and "practically living" at the park on weekends. Mr. Mac "was better than any teacher we had in school," he wrote. "His favorite subject was animals, and the good sense exhibited by so many of them. We all learned a great deal about animal and human nature from him."

When Mr. Mac turned seventy-eight, City law forced him to retire. The sheep continued on the job for another two decades but have long since disappeared from Druid Hill Park. They are replaced by tractor-sized lawn mowers whose weekly din is deafening, louder even than a seventeen-year swarm of cicadas. It really makes you think: there is something to be said for sheep and a shepherd, quietly trimming and teaching.

Maryland Zoo

1876 Mansion House Drive, Baltimore, MD 21217

Designed and built by George Frederick in 1870, the Moorish Tower remains an impressive sight for anyone visiting Druid Hill Park or driving on the Jones Falls Expressway. The structure stands over thirty feet tall with eighteen-inch wide solid marble walls. Inside, early visitors found a spiral iron staircase leading to an observation deck with an astonishing view of Jones Falls valley and the city beyond.

For decades, cyclists, pedestrians, and carriage riders enjoyed the tower as a place to rest and look out over the city. In 1910, visitors crowded into the tower, lined the walkway and covered the hillside to watch the dedication of the Union Soldiers and Sailors memorial. Later that same year, picnickers and families traveled to the Moorish Tower searching for the best vantage point to view an airship as it flew over Baltimore.

As time went on and the tower began to deteriorate, the Park commissioners debated dismantling the structure. Not only was the tower considered to be “in the way,” but the rusted iron staircase and crumbling walls were viewed as a safety hazard for those visitors hoping to still use it as an observation deck. Fortunately, the high cost of demolition and enduring affection for a local landmark encouraged the preservation of the Moorish Tower.

The city removed the rusted staircase, sealed off the entrance, and reinforced loose blocks and the base of the tower. The renewal of this iconic landmark has helped to encourage a broader revitalization of Druid Hill Park supported by residents, park advocates, and Baltimore City.

900 Druid Park Lake Drive, Baltimore, MD 21217

Memorial Pool Recalling Swimming during Segregation

Built in 1921, Pool No. 2 in Druid Hill Park served the recreational and competitive swimming needs of over 100,000 Black residents Baltimore. Pool No. 2 measured just 100’ x 105’ (half the size of whites-only Pool No. 1), but proved so popular that the swimmers had to be admitted in shifts. In 1953, a young Black boy swimming with friends in the Patapsco River accidentally drowned. The tragedy revealed the difficult circumstances for many Black residents looking for a place to swim in Baltimore. The boy lived near Clifton Park but swam in a dangerous river due to his exclusion from the park’s whites-only pool. In response, the NAACP started a new push to make all of Baltimore's municipal pools open to all races. When the City Parks Board refused to desegregate, the NAACP filed a lawsuit and eventually won on appeal.

On June 23, 1956, at the start of the summer season, Baltimore pools opened as desegregated facilities for the first time. Over 100 African Americans tested the waters in previously white-only Pool No. 1 but only a single white person swam in Pool. No. 2.

Pool No. 2 closed the next year and remained largely abandoned up until 1999. That year, Baltimore artist Joyce J. Scott won a commission to turn Pool No. 2 into a memorial. In creating her installation, Scott asked herself, “How do we make this area useful and beautiful, and harken back to the pool era?” The results combined architectural elements and aquatic symbolism with abstract, colorful painted designs on the pavement around the pool. The designs and interpretive signage have weathered in the years since but Pool No. 2 remained an important destination to explore the Civil Rights history of Druid Hill Park and Baltimore's pools.

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Graham Coreil-Allen, January 8, 2014. What Weekly.

Druid Hill Park, Shop Road and Commissary Road, Baltimore, MD 21217

Glass Greenhouses for the histroic Druid Hill Conservatory

Established in 1888 as the Druid Hill Conservatory, the Howard P. Rawlings Conservatory has grown from the original Palm House and Orchid Room to include three greenhouses, two display pavilions, and outdoor gardens. In 1874, Baltimore's park commissioners proposed the establishment of a botanical conservatory in Druid Hill Park and directed George A. Frederick, the park architect, to design and make plans for the new building. Abbott Kenny, a member of the committee for the conservatory, traveled to Europe to visit the famous Kew Gardens of London, a model for the new design. The idea was abandoned for a decade but then revived in 1885. Construction soon began on a structure of iron and wood with a Palm House at its center. The Conservatory opened August 26, 1888, to a well-received audience of about three hundred visitors. Holding steady through the years, the affectionately named Baltimore Conservatory was closed to the public in 2002 for a major renovation. The newly redesigned production houses were to include a Mediterranean House, a Tropical House and Desert House. The conservatory re-opened September 24, 2004, and shortly thereafter its official name was changed by law to the Howard Peters Rawlings Conservatory & Botanic Gardens, in honor of the former Maryland House of Appropriations chair Pete Rawlings. The Conservatory is the second-oldest steel framed-and-glass building still in use in the United States.

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3100 Swann Drive, Baltimore, MD 21217

The Grove of Remembrance Pavilion has stood nestled amongst the trees on Beechwood Drive near the Maryland Zoo for nearly a century. Designed by architect E.L. Palmer, the rustic pavilion’s placement within the Grove of Remembrance is fitting. The grove was planted on October 8, 1919 to honor those who had died in World War I and the pavilion is a monument to First Lieutenant Merrill Rosenfeld, a prominent Baltimore attorney, killed while serving in the military during World War I. Lieutenant Rosenfeld was born in Baltimore in 1883 as the eldest son of Israel Rosenfeld and Rebecca Rosenfeld, née Stern, second generation German Jewish immigrants. Israel Rosenfeld owned a successful clothing retail business and achieved the rank of colonel serving as an aid-de-camp to Governor John Walter Smith. Merrill Rosenfeld was much like his father. He graduated from the Johns Hopkins University in 1904 and joined the Maryland Bar in 1906. He fought during the Mexican Revolution of 1910, earning the rank of top sergeant, and joined the 115th Infantry Regiment, 29th Infantry Division during World War I. Having attained the rank of first lieutenant, he was leading his men during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive when he died October 16, 1918. The U.S. government recognized his sacrifice by awarding him with a Distinguished Service Cross for “extraordinary heroism” and praised him for his “display…[of] the greatest bravery and heroism” before his death. He received further honors in 1919 when the Court of Appeals commissioned architects J.B. Noel Wyatt and William Nolting to build a bronze memorial honoring him and five other Baltimore attorneys who had died in the war and in 1921, when the Maryland Bar Association commissioned a similar memorial. When Israel Rosenfeld died on October 10, 1925, he left $10,000 for the pavilion’s construction in Druid Hill Park. Baltimore was a city with a history of tolerance towards the Jews, particularly those of German heritage, in the early 1900s. The Rosenfelds had thrived in this environment, and Israel wanted to ensure that Baltimoreans would remember his late son’s military achievements and sacrifice for years to come.

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Beechwood Drive, Baltimore, MD 21217

Dedicated in 1901, the Richard Wagner Bust was donated to the city by the United Singers of Baltimore who received the monument as the first prize trophy for the annual Sängerfeste choral competition.

The Wagner Bust is as German as any statute could be. Cast in bronze, mounted on a granite base, and situated on the lawn of the Rogers-Buchanan Mansion, the bust of German composer Richard Wagner was created by a German-born sculptor R.P. Golde based on a portrait by German painter Franz van Lenbach. Though the bust may seem out of place for visitors to Druid Hill Park today, the placement made perfect sense when the sculpture was created.

R.P. Golde was commissioned to create the bust as the first prize for Sängerfeste, an annual choral competition held that year in Brooklyn, New York, with five thousand performers attending. The United Singers of Baltimore won with their performance of D. Melamet’s “Scheiden” (“Parting”). The Singers, who believed that their victory and prize would add to Baltimore’s glory and beauty, donated the Wagner Bust to Druid Hill Park. The bust’s dedication ceremony was a grand affair. Thirty thousand spectators gathered in attendance on October 6, 1901, to watch L.H. Wieman, an agent representing the Baltimore branch of a national, Minneapolis-based flour company, present the bust to the City of Baltimore on behalf of the United Singers. The crowd watched as the Wagner Bust, draped in German and American flags and the singing societies’ banners, was unveiled. The ceremony and the bust’s placement on the mansion lawn served as an expression of Baltimore’s pride in its singers and the German immigrants pride in their heritage and their talent.

Baltimore was home to over forty thousand German immigrants at the start of the twentieth century. Monuments to German artists, philosophers, politicians, musicians, poets, and composers decorate the landscape of many major American cities. Memorials of composers were particularly popular in the era of immigrant monument-building, partly due to the importance of singing clubs in German-American communities.

The Wagner Bust points to the popularity of singing clubs in Baltimore, as does another sculpture by R.P. Golde, that of the composer Conradin Keutzer, located in Patterson Park and also won by the United Singers of Baltimore at the 1915 Sängerfeste.

Mansion House Drive, Druid Hill Park, Baltimore, MD 21217

On the west side of Druid Lake, opposite of the Moorish Tower, stands an imposing statue. At nearly thirty feet from the ground to the tip of the sword, the Wallace the Scot statue strikes an imposing figure. Bearing little resemblance to Mel Gibson’s “Braveheart,” the question remains of why a statue of a national Scottish hero is in Druid Hill Park. Beginning in 1905, the St. Andrew’s Society of Baltimore, or the Scottish Society, has used the Wallace the Scot statue as a site of pilgrimage. Gathering at the monument on St. Andrew’s Day, the anniversary of real William Wallace’s death, and the founding of their organization in 1806, members of the society wear traditional clothing (such as kilts or capes) and celebrate their heritage as Scottish Americans. By the 1850s, more than 100,000 Scottish immigrants were living in the United States and, between 1890 and 1910, this number grew to over a million. Successful Baltimore banker William Wallace Spence was proud of his heritage as a Scottish immigrant and claimed to be a distant descendant of William Wallace. Considering Wallace a personal hero as well as a national one, he shared how he admired Wallace’s character and saw him as a “champion of freedom whose memory not only Scotland, but all the world should honor." As the leader of the Scottish resistance against English rule, the original William Wallace spent most of his life battling with English forces for Scottish independence. His takeover of Stirling Castle is considered by many historians to be the first major victory for the Scottish resistance. Unfortunately, his victory was short lived and after a defeat at the Battle of Falkirk, Wallace was taken captive and executed in 1305. The statue itself is cast in bronze, a perfect replica of the famous William Wallace statue that stands on Abbey Craig in Scotland. Originally sculpted by D.W. Stevenson in 1881, Spence commissioned his replica at a large scale to make the figure seem more dramatic and imposing. The figure stands at an impressive fourteen feet tall, from his feet to the tip of his raised sword. The sculptor specifically chose the pose for its symbolic meaning—Wallace supposedly struck this pose at the Abbey Craig as he watched the army of Edward I gather before the Battle of Stirling Bridge. Stevenson also designed the pedestal upon which the Druid Hill Park statue now rests. The sixteen-foot tall granite base was carved of Maryland granite and is engraved with the inscription "William Wallace, Patriot and Martyr for Scottish Liberty, 1305."

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3100 Swann Drive, Baltimore, MD 21217

The Superintendent’s House in Druid Hill Park dates to 1872 and was designed by architect George Frederick (who also designed City Hall). It was built using local “Butler Stone” from Baltimore County and has wonderful Gothic decorations including decorative quoins and steep gables.

When the Parks and People Foundation acquired the building in 1995, it was in ruins. Multiple fires had destroyed the roof and almost all of the interior. Trees were even growing through the windows. The first step in the restoration process was to bring in a team of goats to chew through the Amazon-like vegetation so that human beings could actually get to the building.

The restoration was challenged by the decrepit state of the structure and lack of historic plans or records. Nonetheless, the project team did a remarkable job. They replaced stones; created a new roof and supporting structure; and, added back gutters, downspouts, chimneys, and the front porch. They even gave it an historically compatible set of paint colors.

The restored building is part of a new campus for Parks and People. It is helping revive the surrounding Auchentoroly Terrace neighborhood and tie this part of West Baltimore to Druid Hill Park.

2100 Liberty Heights Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21217

Rogers Buchanan Cemetery is hardly famous. Few visitors to the park even know where the cemetery is. Fewer still know the surprising stories of the men and women interred behind the wrought iron fence. But for those who know the history, the cemetery is at the heart of the history of Druid Hill Park as the final home to the family that built Auchentrolie as a country estate and sold it to the city in 1860 establishing in park. The earliest burial in the small plot belongs to the man who first created Auchentrolie—George Buchanan. George Buchanan immigrated from Scotland in 1723 and became one of the city’s founding Commissioners in 1729. Through his marriage to Eleanor Rogers, George acquired 250 acres of the whimsically named “Hab Nab at a Venture” that his father-in-law Nicholas Rogers II purchased in 1716. Still not content, George Buchanan expanded to property to 625 acres and named it “Auchentrolie” After his death in 1750, he was buried in the small family plot and left the estate to his son Lloyd Buchanan. Lloyd, his children, and his grandchildren all lived on the estate and were buried in the cemetery, among them a Revolutionary War veteran who served at Valley Forge with George Washington, a Confederate spy and saboteur, and a cantankerous slave-owner who created the “Druid Hill Peach.” When Druid Hill Park was sold to Baltimore for a park in 1860, Lloyd Rogers made only one stipulation—that any living members of his family could be buried at their cemetery in Druid Hill and that the city would maintain the cemetery in perpetuity.

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Rogers-Buchanan Cemetery, Greenspring Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21217

In 1863, the Baltimore City Council approved a $300,000 loan to construct a billion gallon capacity reservoir in the newly established Druid Hill Park. Though the new city waterworks project from Lake Roland to the Mount Royal Reservoir on the Jones Falls had just been completed, it had become apparent that the city’s water problems were far from solved.

Having an abundance of natural springs and deep ravines, Druid Park seemed to be the perfect site for a new reservoir. In addition to providing suitable drinking water, this reservoir was also meant to enhance the beauty of the newly created park, accompanying its ancient oak trees bearing noble names such as “The Sentinel,” “King of the Forrest,” and “Tent Oak.”

A deep ravine formed by a stream that traveled southeast from the boat lake toward the Jones Falls was selected as the site for the new reservoir. Civil engineer Robert Martin developed plans and constructed a giant wall of mud that became the largest earthen dam in America (at that time). Steam excavators were used for the first time in the city to move 500,000 cubic yards of earth. The dam itself consisted of a water tight clay core, or puddle wall, surrounded by steep banks of soil, and was supported by a stone wall laid in cement running the entire length of the dam. Earthen banks were laid in thin layers and pressed by horse drawn rollers.

When completed in 1871, the dam supported a reservoir that covered 55 acres, reached a depth of 94 feet (averaging 30 feet), and sat at an elevation 217 feet above mid-tide. Towering over the surrounding park at a height of 119 feet, the dam was 750 feet long, with a width of 600 feet at the base tapering up to 60 feet at the top.

The resulting body of water had been known during the first half of its construction as Lake Chapman, after Unionist Mayor and head of the Water Board at the time, John Lee Chapman (1811-1880). Since much of Chapman’s tenure as mayor was characterized by the bitter partisan feuding of the Civil War period, it came as little surprise when his Democratic successor, Robert T. Banks (1822-1901), and the City Council voted unanimously to change the name to Druid Lake just four months after he left office in early 1868.

Over 140 years later the dam still holds strong, and in 1971 it was named a National Historic Civil Engineering landmark by the American Society of Civil Engineers.

 underbelly, Eben Dennis

3001 East Drive, Baltimore, MD 21217

The Mansion House, built by Revolutionary War Colonel Nicholas Rogers, has stood in what is now Druid Hill Park since 1801. The house is the third to stand in this location. Originally a castle known as “Auchentorolie,” built by Rogers’ ancestors, occupied the hill but had burned sometime during the war. Rogers studied architecture in Scotland and most likely became familiar with Druids’ love of nature and hilltops and selected the name “Druid Hill” for his estate.

The house was initially planned to be a summer home but during its construction the family home at Baltimore and Light Streets burned and it was decided to use the Druid Hill house year-round. The Mansion remained in the Rogers family until the mid-1800s, when Rogers’ grandson sold the house and lot to Baltimore City for $121,000 in cash and $363,000 in City of Baltimore stock. One stipulation of the sale was that the family burial plot remain property of the family, and the plot is still in place today in the park.

The Mansion House has seen many rebirths. In 1863, during the park movement in Baltimore City, the house was greatly modified. Under the direction of John H. B. Latrobe, it was turned into a pavilion and updated in the Victorian style. By 1935, the porches were enclosed and the house became a restaurant. In the 1940s, the building was used as a day school for the Young Men and Women’s Hebrew Association.

The Zoo, which had begun developing around the mansion beginning in 1867, used the building as its bird house from the 1950s until its restoration in 1978. The restoration efforts took the house back to its 1860s design. Just last year, the Mansion underwent its most recent restoration and repair work, including much needed wood restoration and structural shoring. The building today houses the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore’s administrative offices and event rental space.

 (PDF), The Maryland Zoo

1876 Mansion House Drive, Baltimore, MD 21217