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Maryland Historical Society
Library of Maryland History
201 W. Monument Street
Baltimore, MD 21201
Phone: 410-685-3750
Fax: 410-385-2105
E-mail: library @mdhs.org
Passano Historic Structures IndexThe origins of the Passano Historic Structures Index now housed in the Library of the Maryland Historical Society perhaps are best described in the August, 1950 issue “Maryland History Notes,” the MdHS newsletter:
... [the file contains] over 100,000 [3x5] cards which will constitute the Index to Historic Maryland Buildings compiled by the late Mrs. Eleanor Phillips Passano. For many years Mrs.Passano, the author of the invaluable Index to the Source Records of Maryland, labored collecting references to historic houses, public buildings and monuments. In her quest for material, Mrs. Passano examined prints, books, clippings and many other sources. Although incomplete and unarranged at her death [emphasis added] the amount of territory covered by her notes made her organization and arrangement of great general value to our library. Vhen the sorting is completed, the index will provide readily available references for thousands of historic buildings. The cards will be kept in a metal card filing case given to the Society, together with the index itself, by Mrs. Passano’s sons, Messrs. William M. and Edward B. Passano.The original system conceived by the MdHS was a single alphabetical index of the cards as Mrs. Passano had created them. In the early 1990s the Library staff broke this index into 26, (one for each Maryland county and Baltimore city), but while this certainly improved usability, it did not suffice to turn the Passano index into a popular destination for researchers. The main problem lay in the fact that Mrs. Passano had created the cards based on the names of buildings at the time she was working, and that many of these names bore little or no relation to the present day, rendering her cards next to useless. For instance, a house inhabited in 1935 by Mr.and Mrs. Francis P. O’Neill would have been labeled in Mrs. Passano’s system “O’Neill House” and filed under “O.”Unfortunately, the odds were good that by the year 2000 the house was no longer the home of the O’Neill family, so that a good working knowledge of the demography of Baltimore City, or the county in which the house was located 65 years earlier, was required to find Mrs. Passano’s card on that structure. The fault was especially glaring in the case of Baltimore city, where by 1935 almost all buildings had an actual street number. It occurred to the Library staff that a more useful organizational method would be to file all Baltimore buildings by their street number and it is this system, which has proven to be a good one in general, to which we have been converting the Baltimore city section of the Passano index since about 1996.
Early on, the question of to which street numbering system the file should be converted arose. As not everyone is aware, Baltimore’s current street numbering system dates back only to 1886; prior to that a whole different numbering system was used from 1855 through 1885, and another even more different from 1845 through 1855. It was decided to convert addresses (to the extent possible) to modern day (i.e. post 1886) addresses even when Mrs. Passano had given earlier numbers.
This has worked fairly well outside the “Burnt District,” (i.e. the section of downtown Baltimore where the ravages of the 1904 Fire led the civic authorities to widen what before the fire were especially narrow streets.) In doing so, land once used commercially was lost to the streets, and it became necessary to further refine the 1886 numbering system, thereby confusing the cards. Some entries dated from so early that it was impossible to assign “modern-day” street addresses to them with any hope of certainty, and these have been left as Mrs.Passano created them. Large estates best known by their names, e.g. “Belvedere,” “Brooklandwood,” and “Evergreen,” (and usually so large as to defy numbering), have been left in their original designation as well.
Otherwise, Mrs. Passano’s cards for Baltimore City have been converted into street numbers, and cards for other buildings not originally indexed by her added to the file under the same system. We continue to follow her practice of noting the sources of our information at the end of each card, and also have attempted to follow each address backwards and forwards through time to the extent that this has proven practicable. The file today is probably an even better source of information on images of Baltimore buildings than Mrs. Passano left it, and it is to be hoped that at some future date the improvements outlined above can be extended to the cards covering the rest of the state.
--Francis O'Neill, Senior Reference Librarian, MdHS Library
Note: Mrs. Eleanor Phillips Passano (1870-1949) was born Eleanor Phillips Issac. She married Edward Passano in 1900 at Trinity Church, Towson, Md.