"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

Formerly Baltimore's Oldest and Largest HIV and AIDS Service Provider

The Health Education Resource Organization (HERO) was founded in 1983 by Dr. Bernie Branson at the former Medical Arts Building on Read Street. Over the next two decades, HERO grew to become Baltimore's oldest and largest HIV and AIDS service provider and the first grassroots community based organization in Baltimore to help people with HIV and AIDS.

Dr. Branson was one of a number of physicians with offices at the 1927 building. What set Branson apart was that he was gay physician who cared for a large number of gay men as patients. Between 1978 and 1982, Bran served as the medical director for venereal disease clinic for gay men that later became the Chase-Brexton Medical Clinic. After a new and horrible disease began to strike some of his patients, Branson started hosting a small support group in the waiting room of his eighth-floor office.

Two years earlier, in 1981, the Centers for Disease Control had labeled this disease “GRID”—gay-related immune deficiency. With little known about the condition, the name contributed to the stigmatization of gay men with the condition and many health care providers refused to provide care to HIV-infected patients. By the end of 1981, there were 234 known cases across country. By 1987, there were over forty thousand people infected with HIV (the virus that causes AIDS) living in the U.S.

From its humble beginnings with a support group, a hotline, and a small grant from the Goldseker Foundation, HERO soon became a major provider of AIDS education and patient services in the state. In 1984, HERO held the first conference on AIDS in the Black community at the Baltimore Convention Center. The group's AIDS walks attracted 10,000 people at the height of their popularity, and the World Health Organization turned to HERO as a consultant as it worked to set up similar programs around the globe. The organization offered a variety of services: a buddy system that relied on support from hundreds of volunteers; a drop-in resource center; clinical, legal, educational, and counseling services; and even a place to do laundry and collect mail.

Branson left Baltimore in 1990 for a career at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. HERO had become an organization with a national and international reputation for exemplary care. Unfortunately, the organization closed in 2008 amid allegations of fiscal mismanagement, which impeded its ability to do effective fundraising. In 2009, the Medical Arts Building where HERO started was converted to apartments by builders Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse and architect Kann Partners. Despite the organization's sad demise, HERO should be remembered for the many valuable services that it offered to so many people.

Aaron Cahall, "," Baltimore Outloud, April 2019.

101 W. Read Street, Baltimore, MD 21201

Former Home to the Baltimore News and the Equitable Trust Company

The Munsey Building was erected by and named after the publisher, Frank Munsey, who had purchased the Baltimore News to add to his publishing empire. Though he wanted the paper, he did not like the five-year old building that housed it. So, he had a new one erected more to his liking. Completed in 1911, the newspaper's new offices were designed by the local architectural firm of Baldwin & Pennington, together with McKim, Mead & White of New York.

The Munsey Trust Company, which eventually became the Equitable Trust Company, opened on the ground floor in 1913. The paper was eventually bought by William Randolph Hearst, became the Baltimore News-American, and moved a few blocks away.

The building’s most recent purpose is to serve as loft apartments that are helping revitalize downtown Baltimore. The renovation of the Munsey included keeping the grand entrance way, with its marble floor, elevators, and grand front door, as well as cleaning and repairing the exterior. 91ĘÓƵ recognized the conversion with a preservation award in 2004.

7 N. Calvert Street, Baltimore, MD 21202

Built to house the Baltimore branch offices of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company following the Great Fire of 1904, this structure was an early commission of the architectural firm of Parker & Thomas (later Parker, Thomas & Rice), the preeminent architects of Baltimore’s Beaux Arts commercial & financial structures of the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the Pennsylvania Railroad vied with the locally owned Baltimore & Ohio Railroad for control of rights-of-way and development rights for lines in and out of the city. While the B&O was the older of the two competing railroads (founded in 1830), the Pennsylvania Railroad had surpassed the B&O in size, scope, and profitability by the 1870s.

Such was the nature of railroad competition in Baltimore that the two lines even maintained separate passenger terminals, with Mount Royal Station serving the B&O (and its dominance of lines running south) and the Pennsylvania maintaining a site between Charles and St. Paul Streets.

In 1900, under the leadership of Alexander Cassatt, brother of expatriate Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt, the Pennsylvania Railroad merged with the B&O, and the two companies shared a Board of Trustees. Partly in response to efforts in Washington to enact legislation prohibiting railroad monopolies, the Pennsylvania and B&O maintained separate corporate identities during this period, although the “union” of the two companies was celebrated by Cassatt’s pet project, Washington, DC’s monumental Beaux-Arts style Union Station (1902).

When the 1904 Fire destroyed the Second-Empire style B&O headquarters on the northwest corner of Baltimore and Calvert Streets, the corporate officers elected to rebuild a grand, 13-story Beaux-arts tower on a new site, two blocks to the west. The Pennsylvania, by contrast, retained its site and elected the relatively small, restrained building seen today. The interrelationship of the two companies and the coordination of their post-Fire building schemes is attested to by the fact that both the Pennsylvania Railroad building and the B&O tower on Charles Street were designed by the same architectural firm, Parker & Thomas. The modesty of the Pennsylvania’s building (in spite of the company’s essential domination of the B&O) is part and parcel of the effort to maintain distinct identities for the two merged companies.

By 1906—the time of the Baltimore post-Fire rebuilding of both the Pennsylvania and B&O buildings— Cassatt was dead, the Republicans had passed antitrust legislation and the two companies administratively pried themselves apart once again. Thus, what may have begun in 1905 as a somewhat disingenuous attempt to maintain the united railroad companies’ discrete corporate identities through the erection of two separate and stylistically and hierarchically distinct structures, became an accurate representation of corporate separation by the time the buildings were complete in 1906.

200 E. Baltimore Street, Baltimore, MD 21202

The Vickers Building represents a shift in downtown Baltimore architectural design that occurred directly after the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 and is one of the largest buildings to utilize brick as a primary material in the Central Business District. Most of the other buildings rebuilt in the area were made of stone. Masonry was popular after the Great Fire because of fireproofing concerns. Before the Great Fire, many buildings (including the old Vickers Building the new one replaced) were built in the ornate Second Empire style and featured sloping Mansard roofs and complex architectural details. This changed after the Great Fire. Architects took a more pragmatic approach to rebuilding the Central Business district and were pressured to create buildings that were cost-efficient, fire safe, and could be erected quickly. Because of all the national attention after the Fire, the city wanted to show the rest of the country its stability and they wanted to do it quickly. The permit for the Vickers Building was issued on May 19, 1904, only three months after the fire. Many of the building’s properties indicate fire-conscious planning: it’s made of brick; it has a flat roof because people believed spacious Mansard roof attics contributed to the spread of the Fire; and the bay windows recede into the building rather than protrude outwards. Not all ornamentation was eschewed from the construction of the Vickers Building. Stone lion heads adorn the topmost bay windows and a band of terra cotta runs along the street facing side of the roof. The interior is home to Werner’s Restaurant: a mainstay in the area since 1951.

Watch our on this building!

219-231 E. Redwood Street, Baltimore, MD 21202