As African Americans in Baltimore sought to redefine themselves in the 1880s -- politically, geographically, socially -- the city’s black pastorate served as a vital source of leadership. None of this group stood taller or closer to the vanguard the Rev. Dr. Harvey Johnson.

Harvey Johnson was born in Fauquier County, Virginia on August 4, 1843 to Thomas and Harriett Johnson, enslaved persons on a local plantation. When freedom came during the course of the U.S. Civil War (1861 - 1865), the Johnsons, like other freedpeople, migrated to Alexandria, Virginia.

Johnson received his "calling" to preach, and enrolled at Washington, DC's Wayland Theological Seminary in 1868. Four years later he graduated, with honors, and began of brief period of stints working in the rural countryside of Maryland and Virginia under the auspices of the Home Mission Society. During that same year, 1872, Baltimore's Union Baptist Church sought a replacement for its late pastor Rev. William P. Thompson who died unexpectedly at the age of thirty-two. Union Baptist sent for young Rev. Johnson in November 1872. On April 17, 1877, Harvey Johnson married Amelia E. Hall, an Afro-Canadian born in Montreal (1858). Their marriage yielded three children, Harvey, Jr (born?), a daughter, Jessie E. (1878), and a son, Prentiss (1883).

Outside of her responsibility to family, Amelia Johnson made a name for herself in the juvenile and religious literature circles. Beginning in 1887, she began to publish a monthly literary magazine, The Joy, as an outlet for black writers, especially women, and as an inspirational resource for black youth. Filled with short-stories, poetry, and literary items of interest, The Joy was well received and praised. Amelia Johnson also published work in newspapers, both secular and church-affiliated. In fact, during the early 1890s, she penned a regular column, "Children's Corner," in the Baltimore Sower and Reaper. During that same period, Amelia Johnson had a full manuscript published by the American Baptist Publishing Society, one of the largest publishers of the time. According to her son, Harvey Johnson, Jr., Amelia was her husband's, "best friend, and his chief comfort, his guide in all his business matters...I still consider [their] union a perfect one."

In 1885, Reverend Harvey Johnson founded the Mutual United Brotherhood of Liberty of the United States of America (MUBL). The members of the MUBL pledged themselves, "to use all legal means within our power to procure and maintain our rights as citizens of this our common country." In mid-October 1885, the group held a three-day conference on the status of Black civil rights. Frederick Douglass addressed the conference.

Also in 1885, Johnson and the MUBL successfully engineered the admittance of Everett J. Waring to the Maryland Bar, concluding a fight begun by others in the 1870s. With the bar door opened, Johnson, the MUBL, and the small but growing coterie of black lawyers began an attack on inequalities. Black exclusion from jury boxes, the absence of black teachers from the city's public schools, the deteriorated condition of black public schools, and the infamous bastardy codes effecting black women, were the more visible of the fights taken on by the MUBL legal team.

Rev. Dr. Harvey Johnson then became involved in the Niagara Movement, the predecessor of the NAACP. In 1906, Johnson successfully challenged Maryland’s separate car law by filing suit and winning against the B&O Railroad, predating the Freedom Riders by about six decades.

Rev. Dr. Harvey Johnson served Union Baptist Church faithfully for more than fifty years, until his death in January 1923, one year after his wife Amelia. As aptly described in an obituary appearing in the Baltimore Afro American, Johnson's death marked the end of an era in leadership.

Today, the Johnson's former home is covered in formstone but appears to be occupied and in fair to good condition. This property is located within the Old West Baltimore National Register Historic District.��

1923 Druid Hill Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21217

639 N. Carey Street is the former residence of Dr. J.E.T. Camper. In 1942, Baltimore NAACP official Dr. J. E. T. Camper and Juanita Mitchell worked with the Citizens Committee for Justice (CCJ), to lead 2,000 people from 150 groups on a march on Annapolis pressuring the Governor to address the issue of police brutality in Baltimore. The protest followed the death of Thomas Broadus, a black enlisted soldier from Pittsburgh, after he was shot and killed by Baltimore police officer, Edward R. Bender.

639 N. Carey Street, Baltimore, MD 21217

The Final Home of Baltimore's First Black City Councilman

A neglected brick rowhouse at 1318 Druid Hill Avenue was once the residence of Baltimore’s first black City Councilman Harry S. Cummings.

Harry S. Cummings, his wife Blanche Teresa Conklin and their two children Louise Virginia and Harry Sythe Cummings, Jr. moved to 1318 Druid Hill Avenue in 1911. The family hadn't moved far. They had moved to 1234 Druid Hill Avenue in 1898 and Cummings' sister continued to live in the house up through the 1950s. This house, later known as Freedom House for its' role as offices for the local chapter of the NAACP, was torn down by Bethel AME Church in November 2015.

The rowhouse at 1318 Druid Hill Avenue��was not only a family home but also a place for politics. Cummings campaigned and won re-election to the City Council in 1911 and 1915. In 1912, Cummings hosted the Seventeenth Ward Organization at his home where local Republicans met to endorse President William Howard Taft. Unfortunately, Cummings fell ill at age fifty-one and, on September 5, 1917, the Sun reported that Cummings was "critically ill at his home, 1318 Druid Hill Avenue, of a complication of diseases and a blood clot on the brain. It was said last night that he had not spoken since last Friday."

Cummings died on September 7, 1917, at his home. On Monday, September 10, thousands of people, both white and black, visited the Metropolitan M.E. Church on Orchard Street to see the “remains lay in state” and hundreds of people visited his home. Rev. Leonard Z. Johnson, the pastor of Madison Street Presbyterian Church, conducted a brief service at 1318 Druid Hill Avenue, remarking:

“This life is a token and a proof of Negro possibility in the sphere of life achievement, if given its chances to fulfil itself, and while such Negro possibility shows there shall none, of right reason, decry the Negro people and race and reuse right and a place of common human respect and equal opportunity of strong life in the citizen life of the nation.”

Blanche T. Cummings continued to live in the house up until her death on January 12, 1955, and the property remained in family ownership up until 2005. Despite the deteriorated condition of the building today, the backyard still holds a reminder of the Cummings family—a rare American Elm planted on Harry S. Cummings, Jr.’s seventh birthday. Neighbors hope to see the history of this home and memories of the��Cummings family preserved of for generations to come.

1318 Druid Hill Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21217

A Home for Civil Rights on Druid Hill Avenue

Juanita Jackson and Clarence Mitchell moved to 1324 Druid Hill Avenue in 1942, the same year Clarence started working at the Fair Employment Practices Commission set up by President Roosevelt to fight workplace discrimination during WWII. Visitors at the home included Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, and Marian Anderson. The couple raised five sons at the house and continued to live there until the end of their lives. Baltimore City stabilized the roof and rear wall of the building in 2013 but it remains vacant and in poor condition.

Watch our Five Minute Histories video for more on Juanita Jackson Mitchell!

1324 Druid Hill Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21217

Founded in 1871, the Baltimore Chapter of The American Institute of Architects is the third oldest in the country. AIABaltimore serves as the voice of the architecture profession in the Baltimore metropolitan area. The chapter consists of nearly 1,300 architects, emerging professionals, and allied industrial members united to demonstrate the value of architecture and design.

As a professional organization, the most important service the AIA provides is unifying the efforts of individuals and firms to improve the profession and the built environment. This is done at local, state and national levels through proactive legislation and public awareness campaigns. The AIA also provides timely and relevant continuing education to give the AIA Architect a competitive advantage in the market place. Finally, the AIA offers individuals the opportunity to network with other architects, elected officials, community leaders and allied professionals.

11 1/2 W. Chase Street, Baltimore, MD 21201

A "beautiful and decent residence" for a Civil Rights activist

1805 Madison Avenue was built around��1886, when the property was first advertised��in the��Baltimore Sun��as available to rent for��$35 per month.��In July 1888, Benjamin and Rosetta Rosenheim purchased the home and moved in with their two young children. ��Benjamin was a lawyer with an office at 19 East Fayette Street. When Rosetta needed help at home��in January 1889, the��Rosenheim household placed an advertisement in the��Sun seeking a “White Girl, from 15 to 17 years to nurse two children, aged 2 ½ and 4.”��Similar advertisements appeared again in June 1889 and March 1890 seeking a caretaker for the two children.��The family didn’t stay long, however, and��on May 29, 1893, Benjamin and Rosetta Rosenheim sold the home to Julia Gusdorff.

The home sold again in 1902��and��1914. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, many of the��German Jewish immigrants��who had occupied the Madison Avenue homes for the past couple decades began moving northwest into new neighborhoods like Park Circle northwest of Druid Hill Park. Replacing these residents were African Americans��home-owners and tenants. In 1923,��Keiffer Jackson, husband of the well known civil rights activist Lille Mae Carol Jackson, purchased 1805 Madison Avenue for $3200.

Lillie Mae Carroll and her husband Kieffer��Jackson never lived at 1805 Madison Avenue but rented the property to African American tenants from a wide range of backgrounds. In February 1928, Frank H. Berryman, the manager of William “K.O.” Smith and K.O. Martin, publicly sought to “arrange either local or out-of-town bouts for one or both of his fighters” noting managers could reach him at 1805 Madison Avenue.��Mrs. Lizzie Futz��lived��at the house in 1931��when she was quoted in the��Afro American��criticizing a move by the��Baltimore school superintendent to segregate white and black children on a recent field trip to Fort McHenry:

“I honestly think that the principal was unquestionably wrong in asking that the two groups be separated. There was no reason for the separation. School children of today get along better than their elders. It’s such segregation acts that breeds prejudice in the future.”

Born in Baltimore on April 29, 1922, Parren James Mitchell moved around as a child. Early on, his family lived on Stockton Street near Presstman Street just south of Saint Peter Claver Church which had stood��on North Fremont Avenue since��September 9, 1888.

He was seven years old when his family moved into��a new home at 712 Carrollton Avenue.��The new neighborhood had started life as an��elite suburb built between the 1870s and 1880s within a short walk of��Lafayette Square or��Harlem Park. Prior to the 1910s and 1920s, the population of the neighborhood was largely segregated white (although many African American households lived in smaller alley dwellings on the interior of the district’s large blocks). Segregation in the����was enforced through deed restrictions, local legislation and even physical attacks on black families that attempted to move into the neighborhood.

Parren Mitchell’s move to the house on Madison Avenue came at an important moment in the nation’s relationship to struggling cities in the wake of the riots in Baltimore and cities around the country in 1968. The home was a source of pride and provided Mitchell with a perspective on city life that few other representatives in Congress��could match.��In June 1974, during a discussion of “urban homesteading,” Parren Mitchell shared the success of the��city’s new homesteading program (established in 1973) seen from his own front stoop, remarking:

“Come to my house at��1805 Madison Avenue��in the heart of a ghetto in Baltimore��City and look at the home across the street which was sold for $1 under the Homestead Act. If you do you will see a beautiful and decent residence for a family.”

During hearings on the��, Mitchell repeated the offer:

“I will take part of my 5-minute time to extend an invitation to visit my home in Baltimore, Md. I live at 1805 Madison Avenue, which is deep in the bowels of the city. It is the ghetto. Four years ago, I purchased a home in the 1800 block of Madison Avenue at 1805, using conventional financing. I have rehabilitated the home, and I think it’s attractive enough for you to come to visit me on a Saturday morning in the 1800 block of Madison Avenue.”

The��renovation to the house cost $32,000 and combined��the first and second floor of the building with a new staircase returning the stories into a single unit. He rebuilt the third floor as a rental apartment, a configuration that remains in use at the building today.

The home may have been a source of pride and a sign of his strong commitment to Baltimore but it was also a site of conflict between Congressman Mitchell, the Baltimore City Police Department, and even the Ku Klux Klan. Between 1968 and 1974, before Mitchell’s move to 1805 Madison, the��Baltimore Police Department Inspectional Services Division (ISD) kept his home under twenty-four-hour surveillance, illegally bugged his home and office telephones for eight months, and placed paid informers in his congressional campaigns. Beginning in 1971, Mitchell began calling��for the resignation of Baltimore Police Commissioner��. When the ISD surveillance program (and its close ties to the FBI) were revealed, Congressman Mitchell extended his criticism to the ISD.

In 1977, Parren Mitchell and his neighbors secured Madison Park��designation by the Baltimore Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation��as a local historic district – the first in an��African American neighborhood.��The lead champion of the historic district was��Michael B. Lipscomb, an aide to Parren Mitchell and office manager at the Congressman’s Bloomingdale Road office.

Lipscomb was a resident in Madison Park and the vice-president of the Madison Park Improvement Association. In his testimony before CHAP, Lipscomb observed that the district was the “city’s first all black historic district,” continuing:

“I came here because I love the house. I love the size of the house, the rooms, the old architecture, the high ceilings, the 10-foot high solid wood doors, the marble fireplaces, the stained glass windows. To get a house built like this would be astronomically expensive.”

Other residents in Madison Park were also��active in the city’s civic organizations, including John R. Burleigh, II, a resident of 1829 Madison Avenue and director of Baltimore’s Equal Opportunity program��and Delegate Lena K. Lee who��lived at 1818 Madison Avenue. Delegate Lee also supported the historic district designation, testifying:

“We have been working in this area since 1940 to clean it up and keep the intruders out, to keep it from being overrun by bars, sweatshops and storefront churches that stay a little while and then pack up and go. We want to make it purely residential by getting out all business.”

Parren Mitchell sold the property to Sarah Holley in 1986 and moved just a few blocks away to��1239 Druid Avenue. He remained at that location until 1993 when he returned to Harlem Park and lived at��828 North Carrollton Avenue where he remained until 2001. This property has been featured on 91��Ƶ of Lafayette Square and is now used as offices for the Upton Planning Council. Sarah Holley lived at the 1805 Madison Avenue��from 1986 through 1989��and,��since 1989, the property has been maintained as a rental property.

1805 Madison Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21217

With thousands of rowhouses in every shape, size, and style across the city, not every house stands out. But, 200 ½ East Montgomery Street has earned a rare distinction as the narrowest rowhouse in Baltimore—measuring less than nine feet wide! This mid-nineteenth century treasure was built before the Civil War by the owner of the adjoining house at 200 E. Montgomery Street. Despite its age and small size, the "Little House" features a stylish stained-glass transom and tight brickwork.

In 1974, 91��Ƶ honored Mr. and Mrs. John McNair, then owners of the house, at the sixth annual restoration awards in recognition of their work saving 200 and 200 ½ East Montgomery Street from neglect and decay. The couple brought a passion for old houses when they moved to Baltimore from New England and purchased 200 East Montgomery Street (a generous 22 feet wide) and the six-room house next door at 200 ½. The restoration included repointing masonry while matching the original color of the mortar, restoring the interior woodwork, and refinishing the original wood floors.

200 1/2 E. Montgomery Street, Baltimore, MD 21230

Born on November 2, 1921, William Donald Schaefer lived most of his life in a modest rowhouse on Edgewood Street. The only child of William Henry and Tululu Irene Schaefer, he attended Lyndhurst Elementary School, Baltimore City College and the University of Baltimore.

After serving in Europe during WWII, Schaefer made two unsuccessful attempts for a seat in the Maryland House of Representatives. In 1955, local political king-maker Irvin Kovens, nicknamed the "The Furniture Man" for his West Baltimore furniture store, and Phillip H. Goodman, founder of the Dandy Fifth Democratic Club, recruited Schaefer to run for the Fifth District Baltimore City Council seat. From this modest beginning, Schaefer went on to become Baltimore City Council President, then Mayor, and Governor of Maryland.

620 Edgewood Street, Baltimore, MD 21229

The 14 West Hamilton Street Club, a group of Baltimoreans who enjoy good company, lively conversation, and decent meals, formed in 1925. Young Princeton graduates in the city, eager to continue the traditions of the campus eating club, and several additional members of the venerable Baltimore Club who enjoyed special events with speakers joined forces that year and obtained quarters on this narrow old thoroughfare, which runs for just a few blocks east and west, above Franklin Street and south of Centre, a short distance from Mount Vernon Place. The club grew slowly but confidently. It kept few records and still prides itself on having no officers and as few rules as possible. First occupying a carriage house at 9 West Hamilton Street, then a townhouse at no. 16, the club in 1936 purchased no. 14—the center building of a set of five designed and built by Robert Cary Long, Sr., probably before 1820—and has been there ever since.

The club continues, as originally it did, to draw members from journalism, architecture, medicine, the law, the arts, and scholarship. Founding and early members included, as examples, a juvenile court judge and head of Baltimore social services, Thomas J. S. Waxter; Dr. I. Ridgeway Trimble, a Baltimore native and Johns Hopkins Medical School graduate; the Haverford College star athlete and Harvard-trained member of the Baltimore bar, James Carey III; D. K. Este Fisher, a prominent Baltimore architect; former judge of the Maryland Court of Appeals William L. Henderson; a Cornell University graduate and physician, William F. Rienhoff Jr.; Hamilton Owens, editor of the Evening Sun; the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Sun cartoonist Edmund Duffy and other newspaper editors and writers, among them John W. Owens, Gerald W. Johnson, Frederic C. Nelson, Louis Azrael, William Manchester, and Robin Harriss; the Johns Hopkins research scientist and amateur musician Raymond Pearl; a Peabody concert pianist, Frank Bibb; George Boas, a distinguished Johns Hopkins University philosopher; Sidney Painter, renowned Johns Hopkins medievalist; a University of Maryland Law School dean, Robert H. Freeman; the writer/historian Hulbert Footner; Wilbur H. Hunter, director of the Peale Museum; John Dos Passos and Ogden Nash; and a succession of heads of the Johns Hopkins Medical School—Lewis Weed, Alan M. Chesney, Thomas B. Turner (who celebrated his one-hundredth birthday at the club in 2002), and Philip Bard. Gilbert Chinard, a student of French history and culture at Johns Hopkins, expounded on the delights of French cooking before taking a faculty position at Princeton. The editorial page editor and food critic at the Sunpapers, Philip M. Wagner, established Boordy Vineyards, the first successful vineyard in modern-day Maryland. William W. Woollcott, a free spirit and wit who worked for the family chemical company, once observed, "Here I am, the only businessman in the club, surrounded by parasites." In all, members have shared intellectual curiosity, irreverence, and a devotion to those fine things that deans of liberal arts colleges remind us to cherish—truth, justice, and beauty.

At mid-twentieth century, a Sunpapers columnist and early club member, Francis F. Beirne, published a volume entitled The Amiable Baltimoreans, in which he sketched a portrait of the club. Early in World War II, he reported, a member had explained to a guest that, at Hamilton Street, anyone was entitled to say anything he wanted and talk for as long as he wished, although no one had to listen. The visitor, Lord Lothian, announced that he knew of such a place at home—the House of Lords.

H. H. Walker Lewis, lawyer and anointed club scribe, wrote a delightful history of the club on its fiftieth anniversary in 1975. Not long afterward the club departed long practice and admitted women. To capture the story of that decision and the searching it inspired, Bradford McE. Jacobs, an Evening Sun editorial page editor, contributed a mock-heroic codicil to Walker’s history entitled "A Chronicle of a Certain Episode Which Occurred at Fourteen West Hamilton Street."

14 W. Hamilton Street, Baltimore, MD 21201

The Duchess of Windsor, born Bessie Wallis Warfield, moved into the three-story brownstone at 212 East Biddle Street with her mother in 1908. It was the first home they could call their own as they were dependent on the charity of wealthier relatives ever since Wallis’s father died shortly after her birth 12 years earlier. Little did she know that one of the three bedrooms would be for the man her mother planned to marry, John Freeman Rason. Wallis was crushed. She had envisioned a life of independence with her mother, free from relying on the financial help of others. Wallis threatened to run away, but reluctantly came to terms with her mother's decision.

The marriage was held in the parlor of their home on June 20, 1908. The climax of the wedding came when Wallis, perhaps out of spite, snuck off to the kitchen and dug her hands into the cake in search of the good-luck tokens hidden inside. When her mother and stepfather came into the kitchen and saw the ruined cake, they stood speechless. Suddenly, Mr. Rasin laughed, picked Wallis up, and twirled her in the air. This act of forgiveness touched the young Wallis, and she never gave her stepfather any more trouble.

Unfortunately, John Freeman Rasin died suddenly in 1913. Without the financial security of her stepfather, Wallis and Alice had to move out. They moved to a small apartment building called Earl's Court, at the corner of Preston and St. Paul streets.

Wallis went through two failed marriages before meeting Edward, Prince of Wales in 1931. In 1936, Edward became King Edward VIII of England, but abdicated the throne on December 10 of the same year to marry Wallis. Edward and Wallis were married on June 3, 1937, and remained so until Edward's death in 1972. Wallis died in Paris on April 24, 1986.

In 1937, Wallis' old home at 212 East Biddle Street was turned into a museum, but it was not a commercial success. The biggest hit of the museum was the bathtub. According to the museum's tour guide, Mrs. W.W. Matthews, nine out of ten visitors sat in the house's bathtub for good luck, including a bride and groom who sat in the tub while Mrs. Matthews took their picture.

King, Greg. The Duchess of Windsor: The Uncommon Life of Wallis Simpson. New York: Citadel Press, 2003.

206 E. Biddle Street, Baltimore, MD 21202

In August 1933, F. Scott Fitzgerald moved with his family to 1307 Park Avenue. Fitzgerald had been forced out of his previous home in Towson due to a house fire attributed to his mentally ill wife, Zelda. Their rowhouse, a ten minute walk from the monument of Fitzgerald's famous distant-cousin, Francis Scott Key, quickly became a place of turmoil, and was the last place where he and Zelda lived together.

Fitzgerald couldn't get back on his feet at his new home. His first published novel in ten years, "Tender Is the Night," tanked after its April 1934 release, selling only 13,000 copies to mixed reviews, and left Fitzgerald under immense financial strain. Everyone in the house was affected. Zelda and Fitzgerald's daughter, Francis Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald, acted as a go-between for their landlord, forced to constantly ask her father for rent money.

Zelda, who spent her weekdays hospitalized at Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Towson, had a brief period of wellness during the first few months at 1307 Park Avenue and was allowed to go home and take painting classes at the Maryland Institute College of Art. However, her mental illness soon worsened and she was moved to the expensive Craig House sanitarium in New York, only to return to Sheppard Pratt in May 1934 in worse shape than ever.

While Zelda was in the hospital, Fitzgerald's dependency on alcohol grew. Writer H.L. Mencken, a friend of Fitzgerald who lived nearby in Mt. Vernon at the time, wrote in his journal in 1934: "The case of F. Scott Fitzgerald has become distressing. He is a boozing in a wild manner and has become a nuisance."

Along with crippling alcoholism, Fitzgerald suffered insomnia and night terrors. He also became increasingly political, reading Marx and befriending Marxist literary critic, V.F. Calverton, who frequented the Fitzgerald home and who Zelda referred to as the "community communist."

After a turbulent two years, Fitzgerald and Scottie moved out of their rowhouse at 1307 Park Avenue into the Cambridge Arms Apartments across from Johns Hopkins University where Fitzgerald's career continued to worsen. His controversial three-part essay in Esquire, known as "The Crack Up," sullied his reputation in the eyes of his editor and agent.

In April 1936, Fitzgerald transferred Zelda to Highland Hospital in North Carolina and gave up his Cambridge Arms apartment the following summer due to rent trouble. After a brief stint at the Stafford Hotel in Mt. Vernon, he moved to Hollywood to write movies and became further estranged from his wife; she living in mental hospitals on the East Coast, and he living with his lover Sheilah Graham, a gossip columnist, in Hollywood.

Fitzgerald's Bolton Hill home at 1307 Park Avenue is now dedicated with a blue plaque in his honor, and remains a private residence.

Rudacille, Deborah.����Baltimore Style Magazine.19. Dec. 2009

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21217

During the War of 1812, Fell Street ran down a narrow stretch of land, with valuable water on both sides. William Price, who owned a shipyard at the east end of Thames, lived on Fell Street at 912 (built by 1802) and owned 903 to 907 (built 1779 -1781). One of the city's largest slaveholders with 25 enslaved workers, Price also employed 100 men at his shipyard. He built a dozen letter of marque schooners (more than any other ship builder in Baltimore) and also invests in three cruises.

In 1814, Price's tenants at 903-907 Fell Street included Peter Weary, a wood measurer, and widow Sarah Day. Price’s son and partner, John, lives at 913 Fell (built ca.1790). In the spring of 1813, Price helped to move 56 heavy cannon from his warehouse to Fort McHenry and nearby batteries. Salvaged from a French warship, the 10,000-pound cannon are loaned to Baltimore by the French Consul—they later played a crucial role in the fort's defense.

Another Fell Street resident who played a role in the War of 1812 is George Stiles who became General Sam Smith’s most trusted aide. Stiles owned substantial property in Fell's Point, including 910 Fell (built ca. 1810). A skilled sea captain, Stiles was a risk taker who acquired four letter of marque schooners. His Nonesuch received the nation’s first commission in 1812. The much admired Stiles, whom Niles’ Weekly Register called the savior of Baltimore was later elected mayor in 1816.

Farther down, at 931 Fell (built ca.1790), was the home of Elizabeth Steele, widow of shipbuilder John Steele, a carefully restored example of the fine townhouses that once dominated this street.

903-907 Fell Street, Baltimore, MD 21231

A novelist, playwright, poet, and essayist, Gertrude Stein is remembered as a literary innovator who fearlessly experimented with language in the early twentieth century. Today, Gertrude Stein is still renowned as a magnet for those who would profoundly change art and literature. In 1892, at age 18, newly-orphaned Gertrude and her brother Leo moved to Baltimore. Her experiences in Baltimore paved the way for her later successes, as she wrote in her biting 1925 piece "Business in Baltimore": "Once upon a time, Baltimore was necessary."

The siblings lived briefly with their Aunt Fanny Bachrach in Baltimore before moving to Massachusetts for college. In 1897, the duo truly settled in Baltimore, living at 215 East Biddle Street, marked by the traditional Baltimorean marble front steps. The unique environment of Mount Vernon introduced Stein to a variety of people and perspectives that would influence both her literature and her life.

The Steins' five-bedroom rowhome was luxurious, dictating a certain lifestyle. Like their neighbors, the Steins kept servants. Through her familiarity with the neighborhood servants, who generally were African American women, along with her experience caring for African American patients during clinical rotations, Gertrude developed an understanding of "black language rhythms" and a knack for reaistic characterization of African Americans, both of which later appeared in her writing.

Like their servants, Biddle Street residents also influenced Stein. The gossip that filled the parlors of Biddle Street and the affairs that occurred in the bedrooms above reappeared in several of Stein's works. For instance, Wallis Simpson of 212 East Biddle Street, future Duchess of Windsor, inspired Ida, while Stein's own relationship with May Bookstaver and the ensuing love triangle created by Bookstaver's lover, Mabel Haynes, provided the plot for the novel Q.E.D.��as well as the story "Melanctha."

Life in Baltimore influenced more than just Stein's literature. Her experiences, particularly while studying medicine at Johns Hopkins University, prompted her lifelong habit of challenging societal standards. She learned to smoke cigars, confronted sexist professors (thereby earning the nickname "old battle ax"), took up boxing, rejected feminine stereotypes and instead "went flopping around...big and floppy and sandaled and not caring a damn," as one male classmate remembered.

Stein left Baltimore in 1903 after leaving Hopkins following her third year of medical school. However, despite her 39-year absence, Stein claimed Baltimore as her "place of domicile" in her will, as, in her words, she was "born longer [in Baltimore] because after all everybody has to come from somewhere."

Watch our on Stein!

Poetry Foundation. 2011.

Sander, Kathleen Water.����Hopkins��Medical News. Spring/Summer (2002).

Rudacille, Deborah.����Baltimore��Style. (November 2008).

215 E. Biddle Street, Baltimore, MD 21202

In 1819, wealthy French merchant Louis Pascault, the Marquis de Poleon, constructed a row of eight houses on Lexington Street that now remain as the one of the earliest examples of the Baltimore rowhouse. Born in France, Pascault later moved to the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now known as Haiti). By the late 1780s, nearly 500,000 enslaved Africans labored at plantations on the island producing nearly half of the world's sugar and more than half of the world's coffee. In 1791, free blacks and enslaved people rose in revolt and Pascault joined thousands of white refugees fleeing the island for cities in the United States.

Pascault settled at Chatsworth, a large country mansion on Saratoga Street between Pine and Green, and profited from the quickly growing city's booming trade. After the city expanded in 1816, Pascault, together with carpenter and master builder Rezin Wight and merchant William Lorman, commissioned William F. Small to design this elegant row of Federal style houses adjacent to his estate. The dwellings soon attracted a host of wealthy residents, earning the row the distinction of being highlighted in an 1833 guidebook to Baltimore - the only row noted on the map.

The row soon became home to some of Baltimore's wealthiest families and remained a prestigious address for decades. Columbus O'Donnell, who was president of Baltimore's Gas and Light Company in the mid-nineteenth century and a director of the B & O Railroad (1839-1847) lived here with his wife, Eleanor, who was Louis Pascault's daughter. O'Donnell's mother, Sarah Chew Elliott O'Donnell, whose portrait hangs in Washington's National Gallery, lived in this row during the early 1820s. Her husband and Columbus' father, was John O'Donnell, a wealthy merchant and politician who had a momentous impact on Baltimore's international trade, particularly with China and Asia as a whole, and the man for whom Baltimore's O'Donnell Square is named.

By the 1970s, the iconic homes fell into disrepair. Using funds procured under the College Housing Loan Program, the University of Maryland, Baltimore, purchased the row in 1978 and renovated the historic buildings, transforming them into offices and student housing.

651 W. Lexington Street, Baltimore, MD 21201

Woodrow Wilson came to this house as a Ph.D. candidate at the Johns Hopkins University. From Eutaw Place he went on to become president of Princeton University, the governor of New Jersey and eventually President of the United States of America.

1210 Eutaw Place, Baltimore, MD 21217