"Dr. B" and the Elkridge Heritage Society

The handsome Victorian on Elkridge’s Main Street now known as the Brumbaugh House was built around 1870 and began serving as a doctor's office in the nineteenth century. The home’s most famous resident, Dr. Benjamin Bruce Brumbaugh, started his own sixty-year-long career working and living at the house in 1919. Dr. Brumbaugh served thousands of Elkridge residents over the decades and the house continues to tell his story today. Since 1985, the Elkridge Heritage Society has operated the house as a small museum to share the long history of medical care in their community.

Born on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Brumbaugh graduated from the University of Maryland Medical School with degrees in both pharmacy and medicine. When the United States entered World War I, Brumbaugh enlisted as a doctor for the U.S. Army. He was stationed at Fort Meade in Anne Arundel County where three infantry divisions trained before deployment to Europe. Brumbaugh tended to many of the 400,000 servicemen who passed through Fort Meade during the war.

After his discharge the military at the war’s end in 1918, a former advisor from the University of Maryland shared the news that Elkridge needed a temporary doctor. The town’s regular practitioner Dr. Ericson had suffered a stroke and was unable to work. When his predecessor passed away two months later, Dr. Brumbaugh took over the practice permanently.

For nearly fifty years, Brumbaugh worked alongside his wife, Miriam Smith, who was herself a doctor’s daughter up until her death in 1958. Over much of that time, Dr. Brumbaugh charged just $2 for an office visit or ​$3 for a house call. Over the years, Dr. Brumbaugh (or Dr. B as many of his patients called him) became something of a local celebrity with an office full of patients from the early morning to late evening. He did not raised his fees until 1969—but then it only went up by a dollar. In a 1970 Sun interview, Brumbaugh explained:

“I’d rather treat them for free of charge than have them think I’m overcharging. I was never out for the almighty dollar. I work just to keep alive, not for what I can get out of it.”

That same year, the community recognized his fifty years of service to the Elkridge community. Nearly four hundred neighbors and long-time patients pooled $3,900 in donations to buy the doctor a brand-new Mercury sedan. Howard County even changed the name of a road off Main Street to Brumbaugh Street in his honor.

Dr. Brumbaugh served three generations of Elkridge residents and continued working until he was ninety years old. By one resident’s estimation, he brought “thousands” of Elkridge babies into the world. Dr. Brumbaugh never kept count but reportedly delivered ten children for one family alone. There are many area residents who still proudly call themselves “Brumbaugh Babies.”

The year after Dr. Brumbaugh’s death in 1985, the Elkridge Heritage Society and local Rotary Club bought the home to preserve the doctor’s office and waiting room. A group of volunteer residents helped turn the second floor into an apartment to help pay the mortgage on the new local history museum. Fortunately, their efforts have preserved Doctor B’s story for residents and visitors to continue to appreciate today.

5825 Main Street, Elkridge MD 21075

Chase Brexton Health Care was founded in 1978 as a gay men's STD screening clinic. The clinic operated as program of the Gay and Lesbian Community Center of Baltimore from 1978 until 1989. In 1989, Chase Brexton became an independent healthcare provider retaining its ties to the LGBT community and greatly expanding its health care services. As an acknowledgement of their origins, the new organization took the name Chase Brexton because the GLCCB was located at the intersection of Chase and Brexton Streets.

After operating many years at Cathedral and Eager Streets, Chase Brexton Health Services purchased the Monumental Life Building at 1111 North Charles Street in 2012 and by the end of 2013 had transformed the buildings from offices into a new health clinic. The work included repairing the limestone exterior, even keeping and repairing the signature gold lettering spelling out “MONUMENTAL LIFE.” Original marble walls and floors were restored and imitation gold leaf ceiling was refinished using the original methods. An original wood-paneled 1928 board room was fully restored after having been subdivided into offices.

The move enabled Chase Brexton to continue to expand its services to the broader community while maintaining its long standing ties to the LGBT community in the Mount Vernon neighborhood. An iconic Mount Vernon Building had not only found a new owner, but found a new life and promises to serve as a great asset for years to come.

1111 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21201

From Sick Sailors to the Hopkins Homewood Campus

The former U.S. Marine Hospital on Wyman Park Drive near the Johns Hopkins University Homewood campus was built in 1934—but the Marine Hospital Service itself dated back over a century earlier.

In 1798, President John Adams signed "An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen" that supported the creation of Marine Hospitals in major American ports from Boston to Baltimore. Following the Civil War, a scandal broke out over the mismanagement of the Marine Hospital Fund (supported by a tax on the wages of all U.S. sailors). In 1870, the U.S. Congress responded to the controversy by converting the loose network of hospitals into a more centrally-managed bureau within the Department of Treasury.

Early on the Baltimore Marine Hospital was located in Curtis Bay on the same site later developed at the Bethlehem Fairfield Shipyard. The Maryland Hospital of U.S. Marine Hospital Service also maintained dedicated wards at St. Joseph’s Hospital at Caroline and Hoffman Streets before the construction of a new hospital complex on Remington Avenue around 1885. A 1901 directory of Baltimore charities invited sailors in need of medical care to apply for admission at the surgeon’s office located at the Baltimore Custom House, explaining:

Only those who have served as sailors on an American registered vessel for at least 60 days prior to application are strictly eligible, but any bona fide sailor taken sick or injured in the line of duty will receive attention.

In 1934, the old building was replaced by a modern 290-bed facility making Baltimore's hospital the second largest marine hospital in the country. In the 1950s, the hospital began serving a more general population, including both people enlisted in the military and local residents, as the United States Public Health Services Hospital.

In October 1981, the federal government closed all of the U.S. Public Health Service hospitals across the country. Baltimore's old Marine Hospital was taken over by a group known as the Wyman Park Health System and continued to treat many of the patients who had been going there for decades. In 1987, the group merged with Johns Hopkins University. One result of the merger was the creation of a new primary care organization, the Johns Hopkins Community Physicians, that has continued to provide outpatient medical services from the lower levels of the building today.

In 2008, the university considered plans for demolishing and replacing the building. Fortunately, in January 2019, the university announced plans to preserve and renovate the building for continued use by students and faculty.

3100 Wyman Park Drive, Baltimore, MD 21211

Up near the top of this handsome Neoclassical brick building at the corner of Fayette and Paca Streets is a stone entablature reading "1801 Baltimore General Dispensary 1911"—a visible reminder of this building's important past.

Doors opened at the Baltimore General Dispensary on Fayette Street in February 1912 and is the only surviving building designed for Baltimore's oldest charity,

The Baltimore General Dispensary was formed in 1801 on West Lexington Street to provide medical care to Baltimore's poor residents. In its first year, the dispensary saw a little over 200 patients. Before official incorporation in 1808, over 6,000 Baltimore residents had sought help from the charity.

A second dispensary joined the first in 1826 and by the late nineteenth century the charity had established fifteen additional locations many affiliated with local hospitals. While the building is no longer owned by the group, the charitable work of the Baltimore Dispensary continues through a grant-making foundation providing funds to area hospitals for medicine in their outpatient departments.

Considered a model of its kind, this building featured a large dispensary center on the first floor; however, due to the racial segregation enforced in many local institutions at that time, the dispensary was separated for black and white patients. The rooms on the second floor for surgical and medical aid, including physical exams given by doctors, allowed the charity's poor patients a rare measure of privacy.

500 W. Fayette Street, Baltimore, MD 21201