H.L. Mencken(1880-1956) and his fellow journalist at the Baltimore Sun, Robert Preston Harriss(1902-1989) in a 1949 photograph taken by photographer John T. “Jack” Engeman. R.P. Harriss began his career as Mencken’s assistant in the 1920s and remained with the Sun for the next six decades. (Henry Louis Mencken and Robert Preston Harriss, 1949, Jack Engeman, Slide Collection – slide_engeman-00, MdHS.)

Sixty-eight years ago today, Baltimore journalist, Henry Louis Mencken turned 65. In his diary entry for that day, he took the opportunity to ruminate on his life up that point:

“My sixty-fifth birthday, and I am, as usual, in the midst of severe hay-fever. I began taking vaccines from Dr. Leslie N. Gay last Winter, but they have failed completely, and I have been very uncomfortable. Nevertheless, I have managed to keep at my desk, and my record of my magazine days has made some progress since I resumed it in the early Summer…

When I was 40 I had no expectation whatever of reaching 65, and in fact assumed as a matter of course that I’d be dead by then. My father died at 44 and my grandfather Mencken at 63. Perhaps I have lasted so long because my health has always been shaky: my constant aches and malaises have forced me to give some heed to my carcass. To be sure, I have always worked too hard, and taken too little exercise; moreover, I have eaten too much and maybe also drunk too much; but on the whole I have been careful. If I live long enough I hope to add an appendix to my magazine chronicle giving my medical history…

I often wonder, looking back over my years, whether I have got out of myself all that was there. In all probability I have. I got a bad start and have vacillated more than once between two careers… Meanwhile I am getting my records in order, and even if I die tomorrow they will be in pretty fair shape. There is, indeed, probably no trace in history of a writer who left more careful accounts of himself and his contemporaries. I have tried hard to tell the truth. At bottom, this is probably subjectively impossible, but I have at least made the effort.”(1)

Mencken did indeed leave a careful account of himself, bestowing to posterity his vast array of professional writings, along with his beloved home, a diary, his personal collection of books, and a wealth of correspondence. Being one of the most celebrated journalists of his time, he also left his familiar visage well documented on film. And while there are hundreds of black and white photographs of Mencken, there may only be a handful of color images of the famed Baltimorean.

Who, where, and when? H.L. Mencken and unidentified men.
(Henry Louis Mencken and unknown men, not dated, John T. “Jack” Engeman, slide collection, slide_engeman-0004, MdHS.)

In early August, while examining a partially inventoried collection of over 1000 slides that had been sitting long untouched in the photograph storage room, the library staff came across the color 35mm transparencies of H.L. Mencken featured here. There is scant information available on the collection other than that most of the images were snapped by John T. “Jack” Engeman (1900-1984) a Baltimore photographer who was known for his photographs of the architecture and cultural life of the city. Other than that, most of the slides have very little additional identification, organized very basically by subject. Of the eight photographs of Mencken found, only the image of R.P. Harriss and Mencken above is identified. The remaining slides are simply organized under the heading “Mencken.” The fact that some of the photos are extremely blurry does not help in the identification process either.

We have a theory of where and when these photos were taken, and who some of the people in them are, but we’d like to poll our readership. If anyone has any insights on the photos, please add your ideas to the Comments section at the bottom of the post. In the meantime, just enjoy some rarely seen photographs – both in color and black and white – of the Sage of Baltimore. (Damon Talbot)

Click on the slideshow below to see more color images of Mencken taken by Jack Engeman as well as some rarely seen black and white images of  him from the Maryland Historical Society’s collection.(scroll over the image for captions) 

H.L. Mencken with unidentified woman and girl

Henry Louis Mencken with unknown woman and girl, not dated, John T. "Jack" Engeman, slide collection, slide_engeman-0, MdHS.

H.L. Mencken greeting unidentified men

Henry Louis Mencken greeting unknown men, not dated, John T. "Jack" Engeman, slide collection, slide_engeman-0007, MdHS.

H.L. Mencken and unidentified men

Henry Louis Mencken and unknown men, not dated, John T. "Jack" Engeman, slide collection, slide_engeman-0004, MdHS.

H.L. Mencken and two unidentified men

Henry Louis Mencken and two unknown men, not dated, John T. "Jack" Engeman, slide collection, slide_engeman-0003, MdHS.

An x-ray photograph of the head of H.L. Mencken taken by roentgenologist Dr. Max Khan in 1921.

X-ray photograph of head of Mencken, 1921, PVF, z24.2556, MdHS.

The following two photographs of Mencken were taken by longtime Baltimore Sun photographer Robert Kniesche during an undated photo shoot. Kniesche took dozens of photographs of Mencken over the course of his career.

Henry Louis Mencken, not dated, Robert Kniesche, PP79.1812, MdHS.

Mencken sitting for his bust.

H.L. Mencken, not dated, Robert Kniesche, PP79.1828, MdHS.

Aside from the anniversary of Mencken’s birthday, the editors of underbelly have another reason to celebrate – tomorrow is the one year anniversary of this blog. On September 13 of last year our first post appeared, Maryland on Film@mdhs, promoting an event on October 13 exhibiting eight silent films from our collection. Since then we’ve been posting new content every Thursday, from tales of cockfighting in Baltimore County to the history of  Hampden’s plumbing. Thanks to all of the readers of the blog for tuning in.

Footnotes:

Fecher, Charles A., ed., The Diary of H.L. Mencken (New York: Alfred A. Knopf Publisher, 1989), 380-382.

Sources and further reading:

Arnett, Earl, “Photographer retains zest” The Baltimore Sun, August 21, 1974.

Fecher, Charles A., ed., The Diary of H.L. Mencken (New York: Alfred A. Knopf Publisher, 1989)

Goldberg, Isaac, The Man Mencken: A Biographical and Critical Study (New York: Simon & Shuster, Inc., 1925)

“John Engeman, photographer, dies,” The Baltimore Sun, August 12, 1984.

Obituary, “R.P. Harriss, Journalist, 87,” The New York Times, September 29, 1989.

Investigating a Ruin, Ocean City Storm, May 1962, A. Aubrey Bodine, Baltimore City Life Museum Collection, B498(4)M, MdHS.

“This is the worst disaster in the history of Maryland in my time,” declared Maryland Governor Millard Tawes in March of 1962 as he surveyed the remnants of Ocean City by helicopter following one of the most destructive storms to ever hit the eastern seaboard of the United States. The nor’easter that bombarded the Atlantic coast for five days beginning on March 5 – known variously as the Great Atlantic Storm of 1962, the Storm of the Century, the Five High Storm, the Great March Storm of 1962, and the Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962 – devastated beaches and communities from North Carolina to New York, and caused damage as far north as Maine.

The unexpected and unusually powerful storm was caused by the confluence of two intense pressure systems off the coast and a “spring tide,” which resulted in  record high tides, heavy rains, hurricane force winds, tidal surges, and massive flooding. On Long Beach Island, New Jersey more than 80 percent of the structures were damaged or entirely destroyed. Waves over 40 feet in height were recorded at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware and off New York City. The U.S. destroyer Monssen, which was being towed along the New Jersey coast, was run aground. Over the course of five days, the storm claimed more than 30 lives, left more than 1200 others injured, caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, and left countless homeless.

For the some 1500 residents of Ocean City, the storm was a nightmare. On the evening of March 5, residents were taking shelter from what they thought was a typical nor’easter, which generally move through an area fairly quickly. But this storm proved unique – it remained parked off the coast for some 36 hours.  By the end of Tuesday, the winds had picked up and the protective dunes had been washed away by the first of what would be five high tides over the duration of the storm. At the storm’s peak on March 7 – Ash Wednesday –  the high tides were nearly nine and a half feet above average low tide. (In comparison, the highest tides of the powerful hurricane that hit Ocean City in 1933 were just over seven feet.)

Along with the high tides came a continuous hard rain, 60 mile an hour winds, and 25 foot waves – Ocean City was soon torn apart. Cars were buried in up to five feet of sand. Houses were ripped away from their foundations and into the sea. Up to eight feet of sand was washed from the beaches in some areas. More than 350 businesses and residences were damaged, with 50 establishments completely leveled. Assateague Island, the slender 37 mile barrier island that stretches from the southern tip of Ocean City into Virginia, along with Chincoteague Island in Virgina, were completely submerged by the storm surges.

On March 7, the first of the National Guard units arrived on the scene to help with the rescue and cleanup operations and also to prevent the possibility of looting. They set up headquarters in the Ocean City Elementary School. The townspeople also rallied to help their neighbors reach safety. An ad hoc network of CB radio hobbyists helped coordinate rescue efforts, communicating with rescue volunteers and sending out messages to trapped residents directing them to hang white sheets from their windows as signals. Most of the residents were evacuated by Wednesday evening. Many of those whose houses were not entirely swept away returned home to find their furniture gone and their living rooms and kitchens completely submerged.

Despite the utter destruction, the town made a quick recovery through the determination and hardwork of residents, volunteers workers, and state and federal agencies. On Memorial Day, less than three months after the disaster, Ocean City was open for business.

The repercussions of the ’62 storm are still evident today. Like the 1933 hurricane, which refashioned Ocean City into a major Atlantic fishing port, the storm that hit in 1962 had far reaching consequences, ushering in a period of rapid expansion that turned the town into the vacation destination that today sees more than 8 million annual visitors. It also simultaneously led to an increased public awareness about the environment.

In 1964, the Citizens Committee for the Preservation of Assateague Island was formed to garner support for the establishment of Assateague Island as a National Park.
Flyer, Citizens Committee for the Preservation of Assateague Island Papers, MS 38, MdHS.

Prior to the storm, plans had been in place to build a private resort community on Assateague Island. In the 1950s, a group of investors from Baltimore and Washington, DC purchased a 15 mile stretch of the island with designs for a resort community to be called “Ocean Beach.” By the early 1960s, 5850 lots had been sold, although only 30 buildings were ever actually built, along with one paved road dubbed “Baltimore Boulevard.” The storm washed out most of the road and wiped out nearly all of the houses, and along with them, any further plans for development. In 1965, after three years of Congressional deliberations and renewed pressure by private developers to acquire the land, the U.S. Congress passed an act establishing the Maryland section of the island as the Assateague Island National Seashore.

On a lighter note, without the storm, a sequel to one of Maryland’s most celebrated children’s books may not have been written. In 1947, Wisconsin born author Marguerite Henry penned her Newbery Honored book, Misty of Chincoteague. The book relates the semi-fictional tale of Misty, a wild horse raised on Chincoteague Island by a local family, the Beebes. During the storm of 1962, the real Misty was forced to wait out the storm in the family’s kitchen after her barn was flooded. A few days after the storm, the horse gave birth to a foal, which the Beebes named Stormy. The following year, Marguerite Henry wrote  Stormy, Misty’s Foal, the third in a series of books about the wild horses of Assateague. (Damon Talbot)

Click on the slideshow below to see more photographs of the aftermath of the storm taken by A. Aubrey Bodine.

Guard in tilted house, Ocean City Storm, May 1962, A. Aubrey Bodine, Baltimore City Life Museum Collection, B498(4)N, MdHS.

Submerged Auto, Ocean City, March 6-7, 1962, A. Aubrey Bodine, Baltimore City Life Museum Collection, B498(2)G, MdHS.

Flattened Cottage, Ocean City Storm, May 1962, A. Aubrey Bodine, Baltimore City Life Museum Collection, B498(4)C, MdHS.

Interior Damage, Ocean City Storm, March 6-7, 1962, A. Aubrey Bodine, Baltimore City Life Museum Collection, B498(2)LL, MdHS.

House Upset, Ocean City Storm, May 1962, A. Aubrey Bodine, Baltimore City Life Museum Collection, B498(4)G, MdHS.

Crowd, Ocean City Storm, March 6-7, 1962, A. Aubrey Bodine, Baltimore City Life Museum Collection, B498(4)QQ, MdHS.

Guard by upended building, Ocean City Storm, May 1962, A. Aubrey Bodine, Baltimore City Life Museum Collection, B498(4)K, MdHS.

Emergency furniture, Ocean City Storm, March 6-7, 1962, A. Aubrey Bodine, Baltimore City Life Museum Collection, B498(2)T, MdHS.

Emergency Housing, Ocean City Storm, March 6-7, 1962, A. Aubrey Bodine, Baltimore City Life Museum Collection, B498(2)Y, MdHS.

Investigating a Ruin, Ocean City Storm, May 1962, A. Aubrey Bodine, Baltimore City Life Museum Collection, B498(4)M, MdHS.

Sources and Further Reading:

Avedissian, Eric, “The March Storm of 1962″, Ocean City Sentinel, February 29, 2012.

Citizens Committee for the Preservation of Assateague Island Papers, 1964-1965, MS 38, MdHS

Corddry, Mary, City on the Sand: Ocean City, Maryland, and the People Who Built It (Tidewater Publishers: Centreville, Md, 1991)

Dance, Scott, “50 years ago Ocean City was washing away,” The Baltimore Sun, March 5, 2012.

History of Misty of Chincoteague

National Park Service – History of Assateague

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – The Greatest Storms of the Century in the Greater Washington-Baltimore Region

http://www.erh.noaa.gov/lwx/Historic_Events/StormsOfCentury.html

Salvini, Emil R., “The Great Atlantic Storm of 1962,” NJTVOnline, March 6, 2012.

Samenow, Jason, “Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962: 50 Year Anniversary,” The Washington Post blog, March 6, 2012.

http://www.njtvonline.org/njtoday/2012/03/06/the-great-atlantic-storm-of-1962/

Baltimore Hotels Inns & Taverns Belvedere Hotel 1934 Interiors Barroom, Unknown photographer, SVF, MdHS.

The hotel was named after a mansion built by General John Eager Howard during the Revolutionary Period. Located at Calvert Street between Eager and Chase, it took its name from the great view of the river and the bay. The name itself comes from the Italian words for “beautiful sight.” It’s hard to imagine now what that must have looked like. The hotel, which sits west of the spot where the mansion stood until 1886, was completed in 1903 and cost $1.7 million. The bar opened on December 14, 1903. It was then known simply as the bar room or bar at the Belvedere and would not take the name Owl Bar until after World War II.

Despite still being chock full of dead animal heads, the bar is as cozy and charming as ever. The Owl Bar today. Photo taken from Truffles Catering web site.

Originally a men’s only establishment, the clientele ranged from high society gentlemen to workaday businessmen with some New York bookmakers peppered in. Barroom brawls were frequent and sometimes reported in the pages of The Sun. No one knows exactly when the owl theme or name set in, but legend has it that during the Prohibition Era the bar was a speakeasy where two prominently displayed ornamental owls served to tip off patrons. An eye blinked on each owl when liquor was available and the coast was clear of feds. One of the owls still sits on the bar today.

Imagine Robert Mitchum waiting to have a little talk with you in the barroom. He’s not happy that you’ve kept him waiting. Baltimore Hotels Belvedere Hotel Chase at Charles Street Bar, SVF, MdHS.

The photo above shows a room that has since been altered. Today the right side serves as a small dining room, while the left side has been walled in and made part of the kitchen. Notice the cigar counter at the back of the room. It’s since been replaced by a four-top table.

The entrance room of the bar as it appears today.

It’s hard to say if this was the bar’s entrance when this photo was taken in the early 20th century. But take a look at the cigar counter. Baltimore Hotels Belvedere Hotel Chase at Charles Street Barroom Detail, SVF, MdHS.

The dates on MdHS’s Vertical File photos are somewhat dubious. A couple of them are labeled 1934, yet could very well have been taken earlier. In Kristen Helberg’s book, The Belvedere and the Man Who Saved It, which is so far the definitive history of the hotel, the MdHS photo below on the left is labeled “The Bar Room, 1908.” We can find no clues in our records that explain how she determined the year.

Kristen Helberg’s book dates this photo ca. 1908, but the information in our Vertical File says 1934. Who knows why? Baltimore Hotels Inns & Taverns Belvedere Hotel 1934 Interiors Barroom 2, Unknown photographer, SVF, MdHS.

Baltimore Hotels Belvedere Hotel Chase at Charles Street Barroom 2, Photographer and date unknown, SVF, MdHS.

Regardless of the date discrepancies, the above photos work nicely with the modern day panoramic view below to illustrate the degree to which time has changed the main barroom.

“Owl Bar Pano, Belvedere Hotel, Baltimore.” Borrowed from the Scott McLeod’s Flickr page.

Here are some details of the old bar that may provide date clues, but will certainly leave you pining for the way things once looked. If there are any experts skilled at dating cash registers from black & white photographs, please contact MdHS.

A wise owl sits atop what seems to be a simulated woodgrain cash register. Not a good era for cash registers. Detail of Baltimore Hotels Inns & Taverns Belvedere Hotel 1934 Interiors Barroom, SVF, MdHS.

Now this is a classy register. Detail of Baltimore Hotels Inns & Taverns Belvedere Hotel 1934 Interiors Barroom 2, SVF, MdHS.

Where might the sleepy drunken chandelier gnomes have gone off to? Possibly the luckiest secondhand shop in Baltimore. Detail of Baltimore Hotels Belvedere Hotel Chase at Charles Street Barroom 2, SVF, MdHS.

Finally we leave you with a slideshow that you can call up on your smartphone while enjoying a cold one and a pizza sitting in the Owl Bar. Enjoy! (Joe Tropea)

SVF Baltimore Hotels Inns & Taverns Belvedere Hotel 1934 Interiors Barroom Unknown photographer, 1934 8 x 10 inch film negative Subject Vertical File Maryland Historical Society Special Collections Department

SVF Baltimore Hotels Inns & Taverns Belvedere Hotel 1934 Interiors Barroom 2 Unknown photographer, 1934 8 x 10 inch photo print Subject Vertical File Maryland Historical Society Special Collections Department

SVF Baltimore Hotels Belvedere Hotel Chase at Charles Street Barroom 2 Photographer and date unknown "Parker, Thomas, and Rice" (architects) listed on folder 9.5 x 7.5 inch photo print on linen Subject Vertical File Maryland Historical Society Special Collections Department

SVF Baltimore Hotels Belvedere Hotel Chase at Charles Street Barroom Photographer and date unknown "Parker, Thomas, and Rice" (architects) listed on folder 9.5 x 7.5 inch photo print on linen Subject Vertical File Maryland Historical Society Special Collections Department

SVF Baltimore Hotels Belvedere Hotel Chase at Charles Street Barroom Detail Corner showing cigar and cigarette counter Photographer and date unknown "Parker, Thomas, and Rice" (architects) listed on folder 9.5 x 7.5 inch photo print on linen Subject Vertical File Maryland Historical Society Special Collections Department

SVF Baltimore Hotels Inns & Taverns Belvedere Hotel Interior barroom Possibly Hughes Company, ca. 1910 "See glass negatives" 8 x 10 inch copy print Subject Vertical File Maryland Historical Society Special Collections Department

Sources:

Kristen Helberg, The Belvedere and the Man Who Saved It, Pumpkin Publications, 1986.

Fred Rasmussen, “Here’s a Toast to the Great Hotel Bars,” The Baltimore Sun, March 26, 2005.

Chinese American Family at Dinner, March 1958, A. Aubrey Bodine, MdHS, B502-H.

The story of race in Baltimore has traditionally been presented as a black and white issue. Particularly in discussions about the Civil Rights Era, the focus has been on the interaction between these two racial groups, with Jewish residents representing an ethnic middle ground between them.

In researching this pivotal time period in the city’s history, I was surprised to come across a 1945 Baltimore Sun article in which NAACP represetative Juanita Jackson Mitchell stated that Chinese students “are permitted to enter Polytechnic Institute, where Negroes can’t enter.”(1) How could that be so? Some might point to the stereotypes that we are exposed to today, such as the image of the quiet, academically driven, Asian-American student. However, these stereotypes were less prevalent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many West Coast cities, most notably San Francisco, struggled with how to deal with large Chinese immigrant populations. School systems were in a particularly awkward position, as most municipalities only had provisions that addressed the segregation of “colored” or “negro” children. San Francisco’s first “Chinese School” was established in 1859, with subsequent state and city laws gradually curtailing the rights of the growing community. Asian-descended children were formally and informally segregated throughout the western states, as whites feared their exotic customs and supposed moral deficiencies. In 1882, President Chester Arthur signed the Exclusion Act, prohibiting Chinese workers from entering the country.(2)

These developments had little effect on Maryland’s tiny Asian, mostly Chinese, population. By 1900, the state’s Chinese inhabitants numbered less than 500, 426 of whom resided in Baltimore.(3) While visiting Baltimore’s public schools in 1911, Stanford University education professor Dr. Elwood P. Cubberly was surprised to encounter just a single Chinese child, whom he was told was “the only one in the schools of the city.” He remarked that “in San Francisco we have hundreds of these children and they present a most difficult problem.”(4) Fourteen years earlier, fifteen year old Hom Let had become the first Chinese student admitted to a Baltimore school.

Chinese immigrants began to arrive in Baltimore as early as the 1880s. The first “Chinatown” was centered around the 200 block of Marion Street, bound by Fayette Street to the south, Park Avenue to the east, Howard Street to the west, and Lexington Street to the north. Following World War I, it moved to the 300 block of Park Avenue.
Mrs. James Hom with abacus, March 1958, A. Aubrey Bodine, MdHS, B502-C.

Although hailed by The Baltimore Sun as “the first Chinese pupil to be entered in Baltimore’s Public Educational Institutions,” Hom Let’s acceptance into the Baltimore school system 1897 caused an immediate controversy.(5) The California-born boy was enrolled at Primary School Number 10 on Hollins Street—what is today James McHenry Elementary/Middle School in Old West Baltimore. According to the article, he was initially placed in the first grade, where the other boys “did not treat the new pupil as fairly as they should have done,” as they were intrigued by his “queer-looking silk trousers.” Hom Let’s admission sparked an almost immediate debate over where Chinese students would fall in the city’s binary racial environment. Several civic leaders commented on his status. Mayor Alcaeus Hooper, who did not object to his admission, cited “the intelligence of the race in mastering all studies.”(6) Others remarked that there was no specific ordinance to prevent the Chinese from attending white schools, but feared the abuse that Let might receive from his classmates. The newspaper account also included the opinions of Chinatown residents, who were happy with his placement as “negroes are seldom well liked by the Celestials [Chinese].” However there was no specific explanation as to how he was formally enrolled in the white school.

The issue would be officially addressed by the Baltimore city school board in March of 1898. School Commissioner John T. Foley proposed that a separate school be established for Chinese Baltimoreans, specifically for English language training. However when the plan was forwarded to the City Solicitor, he determined that any public school designation outside of “white” or “colored” was legally prohibited. The Solicitor further stated that “only the children or wards of naturalized Chinamen can attend the schools free of charge.”(7) By this time another Chinese student had joined Hom Let in the school system.(8)

The few Chinese children in Baltimore would continue to utilize the city’s white schools unmolested until 1913. That year, Benjamin Jew, a recent immigrant, was refused entry by the principal of the Number 5 Public School located at Broadway and Ashland Avenue. The principal had rejected the child specifically on “the ground that he was not white.” Benjamin was eventually accepted into the school after his Sunday school teacher—also an instructor at the public school—intervened on his behalf. Other church members also appealed to the Assistant Superintendent of Instruction Charles J. Koch. As to the child’s non-citizen status, Koch would ambiguously state that “I presume that he was sure of his ground.” Instead of further addressing that technicality, the School Board President declared that he would rather not venture an opinion as to the child’s right to attend a white school.”(9) Again it seems that local officials preferred to ignore the Chinese students’ tenuous position, barring a surge in their numbers or a public uproar from white Baltimoreans. An increase in the Chinese population became unlikely when the United States Congress further restricted immigration in 1924 by passing another Exclusion Act that permitted only the children of native born Americans to enter the country.(10)

In 1927, the federal government attempted to resolve the school issue after a Chinese family in Mississippi protested their daughter’s exclusion from the local white, public school. The Supreme Court ruled that the division was between the “pure white or Caucasian race on the one hand and the brown, yellow and black races on the other.”(11) The young Mississippi girl could either attend the colored school in Bolivar county or opt for a private option. It doesn’t appear that the verdict had any bearing on the situation in Baltimore, where the minority group’s status continued to be determined by the whims of the community or the local principal. In fact, the success of Chinese students in the city’s most prestigious public high schools soon became a subject to celebrate in the papers.

Poly Cracker, 1931, Yearbook, Baltimore Polytechnic Institute. Enoch Pratt Free Library: Maryland Department.

When Sec Ai Lew graduated from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute in 1931, an article in The Baltimore Sun stated that he was “called a brilliant student by members of the faculty, liked by all of his classmates.”(12) Lew had immigrated to the city when he was six years old, though his primary education experience is not discussed in the article. The Poly Cracker yearbook from that year similarly sung the young man’s praises, asserting that “when he came to America he did not know A from Z in English, but he now puts some of the native butter-and-egg men to shame with his grammatical accuracy.”(13) That same year the newspaper noted that Lillian Chin and Ruth Oy Lee graduated from Western High School, where each participated in multiple extra-curricular clubs just as their white classmates did.(14) Neither situation was presented as a controversy, but the Chinese students were a notable curiosity. Nor did The Baltimore Sun make any mention of their opportunities as compared to those for African-Americans in the city.

Polytechnic’s State Championship Soccer Team of 1931. Sec Ai Lew, bottom row, right.
Poly Cracker, Yearbook, 1931, Baltimore Polytechnic Institute. Enoch Pratt Free Library: Maryland Department.

As with other ethnic groups, Baltimore’s Chinese community experienced a boom during the 1940s as migrants sought to enjoy the war-time prosperity. For Leslie Chin, who emigrated from China at age ten, it meant a temporary hiatus from elementary school after his uncle pulled him out of school to work in the kitchen at “ChinaLand,” his restaurant at Eutaw and Fayette Streets. In an oral history interview conducted in 1977, Chin recalled that all the young men who would have held kitchen jobs were drafted into service, requiring school age children to fill the void. This was technically illegal, but, as Chin joked that “they had no way to find me … because I was hidden in the kitchen (laughs).”(15) He did not attend school again until after the war when he entered Baltimore City College in 1946. When asked about his experience with prejudice as a child, Chin said:

“I never had that feeling, but when I talked to other people, they had, yes (I) think prejudice is there and as I look into it, I can see. But from my personal experience, I know I didn’t, even when I finished school …When I (was) in school I had a lot of friends and I go to parties. The childhood experience with Hobines. I feel no discrimination.”

Greenbag, 1949, Yearbook, Baltimore City College. Enoch Pratt Free Library: Maryland Department.

Living with a German-American family, the Hobines, clearly affected Chin’s acculturation process and comfort level with white classmates. He did not seem shy in his pursuits in high school, participating in sports and serving in the school’s executive board and as a homeroom president.(16) It is likely relevant that City College, like Polytechnic and Western, was a selective college preparatory school which white students chose to attend. The experience for Chinese students might have been more openly hostile at a neighborhood institution, as it was for African-Americans that integrated the zoned schools of south and southeast Baltimore following the 1954 Brown vs. Board decision.

Even after World War II, Chinese-Americans never formed a numerically significant community in Baltimore City. Considering the blatant discrimination and violence that Chinese-Americans faced in California and other western states,  integration of the city’s white public school system was relatively painless for Maryland’s Chinese students, due in large part to their small numbers. While certainly a trying experience, the childish abuse that Hom Let received in 1897 could never rival the severe hostility that African-Americans would suffer through to attend the same schools. In Baltimore, whites viewed Chinese students as a novelty or curiosity rather than the threat that larger minority groups could represent.

Even as federal restrictions have been eased and immigrant populations have established a significant presence in most major cities, Baltimore has largely maintained its bipartite racial status. Today, black and white students make up nearly 94 percent of the city’s public school system. At the beginning of the 2012 school year, students of Asian descent numbered 888, or just over one percent.(17) Despite their limited presence, Chinese students raised interesting questions for the Baltimore City Public School System, perhaps foreshadowing both white and black reactions to mid-century desegregation efforts. (David Armenti)

David Armenti is the Student Research Center Coordinator at the Maryland Historical Society.

Footnotes:

(1) “NegroesRequestSchool Control: Seek Full Charge of Colored Education in City,” The Baltimore Sun, 16 February, 1945.

(2) Leslie Chin, History of Chinese-Americans in Baltimore (Baltimore: Greater Baltimore Chinese American Bicentennial Committee), Maryland Historical Society Library, PAM 12367.

(3) Historical Census Browser, University of Virginia Library, County-Level Results for 1900.

(4) “Investigating School System,” The Baltimore Sun, 10 March 1911.

(5) “Hom Let Goes to School,” The Baltimore Sun, 18 February, 1897.

(6) “Is He White or Colored?,” The Baltimore Sun, 19 February, 1897.

(7) “Cannot Teach the Chinese”, The Baltimore Sun, 22 March, 1898.

(8) “Harry Hom Let’s Progress”, The Baltimore Sun, 23 March, 1898.

(9) “Chinese Boy in Class”, The Baltimore Sun, 18 September, 1913.

(10) Leslie Chin, History of Chinese-Americans in Baltimore

(11) “Chinese Must Go To Colored Schools,” The Baltimore Afro-American, 26, 1927.

(12)“Chinese, Who Left Home At Age Of Six, Graduated From Poly,” The Baltimore Sun. 16 June 1931.

(13) Poly Cracker, 1931, Yearbook, Baltimore Polytechnic Institute. Enoch Pratt Free Library: Maryland Department.

(14) “Two Chinese Girls Receive Diplomas,” The Baltimore Sun, 19 June, 1931; Westward Ho, 1931,Yearbook,WesternHigh School. Enoch Pratt Free Library: Maryland Department.

(15) Leslie Chin, Interview by Stephen Knipp, Maryland Historical Society, OH 8223

(16) Greenbag, 1949, Yearbook, BaltimoreCityCollege. Enoch Pratt Free Library: Maryland Department.

(17) 2012 Maryland Report Card, Baltimore City, Demographics Data Summary, Enrollment.

Maryland’s most famous witch: The Blair Witch… on VHS. The Blair Witch Project & The Curse of the Blair Witch, Moving Image Collection, MdHS.

The perilous waters of the Atlantic Ocean condemned Maryland’s first witch. The Charity of London set sail for the New World in 1654 from England with her crew and small group of passengers looking to settle the new colony. Mary Lee was one such passenger, but she never set foot on Maryland’s shores.

Travelers knew that the trip across the ocean was a dangerous endeavor, but this crossing proved particularly hazardous. Choppy seas and violent winds plagued the Charity of London’s journey from the start. An attempt to make land in Bermuda had failed due to crosswinds, “and the Ship grew daily more leaky almost to desperation and the Chiefe Seamen often declared their Resolution of Leaving her if an opportunity offered it Self….”(1) The passengers and crew grew more agitated as the ship weakened and the weather refused to yield. Rumor took hold amongst the crew that a witch had conjured the storms. Father Francis Fitzherbert, a Jesuit traveling to Maryland aboard the Charity, recalled the sailors reasoning that the foul weather “was not on account of the violence of the ship or atmosphere, but the malevolence of witches.”(2)

The sailors decided that Mary Lee was that witch and petitioned the captain to put the woman on trial. The storms delayed the proceedings, so two seamen decided to take matters into their own hands. They seized Lee and searched her body for the Devil’s markings. They found a damning mark—a protruding teat from which the Devil and his familiars could supposedly feed—a well-known sign of witchcraft at the time. She was subsequently hanged and her corpse and belongings dumped overboard. The Charity landed in St. Mary’s City, Maryland worse for wear but in one piece and without a witch.

Accounts of witchcraft, such as the story of Mary Lee, were common in the 17th century. An anti-witch hysteria had recently swept across Europe, and the English crown enacted several statutes criminalizing sorcery. The Devil and black magic were real and present dangers in everyday life, and witches could summon that dark power with the mere mumbling of a curse.

These old world superstitions and religious convictions immigrated with the colonists. Witchcraft left an indelible mark on Maryland’s early court cases and became embedded in local folklore. Maryland never saw witch hunts on the scale of Salem, Massachusetts, but men and women alike were accused and convicted of witchcraft. Sources vary on the exact number of prosecutions, but only about 12 people were brought to trial over a hundred year period, compared to 19 executed in Salem in 1692 alone.

Text from Violl’s trial documents. Notice that she was “seduced by the devill wickedly & diabolically….” “Witchcraft, trials for, in Maryland. [manuscript] : Document, 1702/3 1712,” MS 2018, MdHS. (Click to enlarge.)

Accusations of witchcraft often arose from town disputes. These cases typically unfolded in the same manner. An argument would erupt between neighbors, and shortly thereafter one of the begrudged would fall mysteriously ill or his or her chickens would be suspiciously killed one night. Such is the story of the last witch ever tried in Maryland—Virtue Violl of Talbot County. Violl found herself on trial in 1715 in Annapolis after a quarrel with a fellow spinster, Elinor Moore. Moore accused Violl of cursing her tongue, which rendered her unable to speak. The jury however was not convinced of her guilt and acquitted her of all charges. Falsely accused witches were not without recompense. They could sue for defamation of character, and a few were awarded damages, which was often a few hundred pounds of tobacco.

Moll Dyer Rock, not dated. (not part of MdHS collection)

While few witches met their untimely end in Maryland, local folklore is rife with legends of evil sorceresses and superstitious antidotes for bewitchments. Glass bottles containing sharp objects, such as pins, and urine were buried under the entrance of a home to prevent a witch from entering the property or cursing its inhabitants. These so-called witch bottles have been unearthed in archaeological digs across the state. The urine “was the most important ingredient in witch bottles, as it is the agent with which the spell is turned back upon the witch.”(4) They were also buried upside down to reverse the black magic. Another trick to keep witches at bay was to place a broomstick across the threshold of a home’s entrance. A witch supposedly could not exit the dwelling without counting the broom’s bristles, thus revealing his or her identity.

Many tales of witches have surfaced over the years. Each county seems to have its own wicked woman who tortured the innocent townspeople and met a gruesome death for it. The legend of Moll Dyer out of Leonardtown in St. Mary’s County has endured the centuries. The details of Dyer’s story have changed and been embellished over time, but all accounts agree that in February of 1697 she was chased from her home by torch-bearing townsfolk. She fled into the woods where she froze to death after cursing the town. Dyer died kneeling upon a rock, which still bears the imprint of her hands and knees and can be viewed in front of Leondardtown’s circuit courthouse.

The dreaded book on display at MdHS. “The Blair Witch Cult,” blairwitch.com

No story about witchcraft in Maryland would be complete without mentioning the Blair Witch. The Blair Witch, Elly Kedward, terrorized the town of Blair, now Burkittsville, during the late 1700’s and was executed for her crimes. The following year, her accusers as well as many of the town’s children disappeared without explanation, and as a result the town was abandoned. Other weird happenings continue to plague the area and are attributed to the restless spirit of Kedward. The frightening occurrences culminated with the disappearance of three student filmmakers who visited the town to investigate the haunting. The footage found from their exploit was released as the film, The Blair Witch Project.

The legend of Kedward and the associated murders was, of course, pure fabrication. The Blair Witch Project holds a special place in our hearts here at the library, because of a connection, albeit false, to our collection. The film claimed that The Blair Witch Cult, a book published in 1809 which recounted the tale of the town doomed by Kedward’s curse, was held at MdHS and even featured in a exhibit. The movie’s website points out that the book was returned to private hands before the film was released but that didn’t stop curious moviegoers from inquiring about the dreaded book. Our wonderful reference librarian, Francis O’Neill,  fielded phone calls about the fictitious tome from all over the country and even from as far away as Belarus for many years after the movie came out. Each time, he would kindly and dutifully explain that book was entirely made up for the movie and never resided in our library. The movie itself is now a part of our growing Maryland-related film collection, along the films of John Waters and other local filmmakers. But please for Mr. O’Neill’s sanity, please don’t call about the Blair Witch! (Lara Westwood)

 Sources and Further Reading:

(1):Alison Games, Witchcraft in Early North America (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010) 133.

(2): William H. Cooke, “The Maryland Witch Trials.”

(3): Francis Neal Parke, “Witchcraft in Maryland,” Maryland Historical Magazine 31 (1936):283.

(4):Rebecca Morehouse, “Witch Bottle.”

“Witchcraft, trials for, in Maryland. [manuscript] : Document, 1702/3 1712,”  MS 2018, MdHS.

THEN: Flag seamstresses circa 1964. PP5 Women making replica of Star-Spangled Banner for New York World’s Fair, Box 2, MdHS.

NOW: Flag seamstresses circa today. Star-Spangled Banner Project, July 2013.

For the past few weeks, the MdHS campus has been teaming with dedicated volunteers working diligently on the Star-Spangled Banner Project. The project seeks to recreate Mary Pickersgill’s efforts to sew the 30 x 42 foot flag for Fort McHenry in a mere six weeks–all by hand. The replica will be flown at Fort McHenry during the Defenders Day celebration before visiting various locations around the state.

Little did we in the library realize that a similar endeavor was undertaken 50 years ago. In February 1964, over 100 stitchers and seamstresses began work making a replica flag to be displayed at the Maryland Pavilion of the 1964 World’s Fair in New York.  The exposition was scheduled to run April through October in 1964 and ’65, respectively. This flag project, overseen by the Star-Spangled Banner Flag House Association, was plagued with difficulties and soon became a PR nightmare. First, it was discovered that the Maryland Pavilion at the fair had no room for such a large banner. Officials worried that there might be no place large enough to display it. The commission appealed to the United States Pavilion at the fair who, after learning of the embarrassing publicity, agreed to take it without knowing whether its space could accommodate the flag either. The Maryland seamstresses began to doubt their flag would ever make the trip to New York.

But, Maryland officials truly wanted to fly their own flag at their own pavilion. The decision was made to erect a 75-foot pole in front of their pavilion and move the flag indoors—folded and encased—in the event of bad weather. A June 6 piece in The Baltimore Sun explained how the commission decided to decline the federal bail out “with appreciation.” The following day, which happened to be Flag Day and Maryland Day the the fair, Governor Tawes dedicated the replica at a brief ceremony. The ’64 flag currently resides at the Star-Spangled Banner Flag House at 844 East Pratt Street.

The Hutzer Photograph Collection, as with many of our collections, is chock full of such strange or incongruent, but delightful, discoveries. We expected to find pictures of the Hutzler family, the department store’s many locations, window and product displays—of which there are many. We did not expect to find this little time warp. But it’s not completely surprising that Hutzler’s would be involved in this type of project given their history of fabric and textile offerings. We must admit we can’t quite connect Hutzler’s with the project, so any information would much appreciated.

What’s stranger still is that we made this find at this moment in time. We’re happy to announce that the 2013 Star-Spangled Banner Project has run far more smoothly and seamlessly than its predecessor, so far. The project completed it Kickstarter campaign yesterday, raising over $10,000 in four weeks. Underbelly congratulates the 2013 stitchers and everyone involved.

THEN: These ladies didn’t know from Kickstarter. PP5 Replica of Star-Spangled Banner for New York World’s Fair, M.E. Warren Photograpy, ca. 1964, MdHS.

Now: Placing the stars. Star-Spangled Banner Project, July 2013.

*The Hutzler Photograph Collection is currently being reprocessed. The finding aid currently online, created in 2000, reflects only a small portion of the collection. Please check back in the coming months for a more accurate inventory list.

Sources

The Baltimore Sun, February 18, 1964: 6; April 30, 1964: 48; and June 6, 1964: 13.

One of Maryland’s most famous ice cream brands: Hendlers Creamery. Moses Advertising: Hendlers sign, Hughes Studio, 1955, PP30-225F-55, MdHS.

July in Maryland can be truly miserable. The temperature sizzles at over 100 degrees for days on end. Humidity weighs down the most ardent of breezes. Luckily for the sweaty masses, July is also National Ice Cream Month. So in honor of the vaunted occasion, here’s the scoop on the history of the frosty treat in Maryland.

Ice cream has always been a favorite summertime treat for Marylanders. Ice cream companies grew out of dairy businesses located across the state, and the country’s first ice cream factory was opened in Baltimore in 1851 by Jacob Fussell.

Fussell peddled dairy products in the city, but often found himself left with a surplus of cream.  Instead of letting the leftovers go to waste, he decided to make ice cream with it. He began to sell ice cream for 25 cents per quart, and Baltimoreans gobbled up his decadent yet inexpensive product. Ever the enterprising businessman, Fussell’s success inspired him to produce the sweet stuff on a commercial level. He founded the very first production facility at the intersection of Hillen and Exeter Streets in Baltimore and Maryland’s ice cream industry was born.*

One of Maryland’s most famous ice cream scions, Lionel Manuel Hendler, seized upon a similar opportunity when he founded Hendler Creamery Company in Baltimore. Hendler learned the dairy business from his father Isaac by working at the family-owned dairy store in East Baltimore, where he saw firsthand the popularity of ice cream. In 1905, at the young age of twenty, he decided to go into the ice cream business on his own and teamed with Louis Miller. The partners made the ice cream in the basement of Miller’s home and sold it to local stores. The product was a hit, and they soon moved production out of Miller’s house to a larger facility on Lloyd Street in East Baltimore. The business relationship between Hendler and Miller eventually fizzled, and in 1907, Hendler bought out Miller.

Hendler Creamery Co. building at 1100 East Baltimore Street. American Sugar Refinery, Domino Sugar tank truck, Hughes Company, 1955, PP30-144-51, MdHS.

Under Hendler’s tutelage, the ice cream company quickly outgrew the production capability at the Lloyd Street plant. In 1912, Hendler purchased a grand brick building at 1100 East Baltimore Street to serve as the company’s new headquarters. The Richardsonian Romanesque building, built in 1891, located near Baltimore’s Shot Tower, had many other lives before being converted into an ice cream factory. It had first been home to a powerhouse for the Baltimore City Passenger Railway Company, the oldest streetcar system in the city. When the streetcar company joined with the United Railways and Electric Company, it continued to operate as a powerhouse and trouble station.

The streetcar company eventually sold the building to the American Amusement Company, when the cable and pulley system that operated the streetcars was replaced with electricity. Architect Jackson C. Gott transformed the building into a lavish theater that could seat 2,000 people. The Convention Hall, as it came to be called, ran a variety of entertainments, including exhibitions, vaudeville acts, and theatrical performances. Carl Hagenbeck’s circus performed for a period of time at the Hall, spurring his rival Frank Bostock to bring his own show to the city as well.

The building changed hands several times over the next few years, though it remained a theater, operating under the names the Bijou Theatre, Baltimore Theatre, and the Princess Theatre. Vaudeville, operas, theatrical plays, silent films were all played and performed at the location. Its years as a Yiddish language theater, appealing to East Baltimore’s significant and growing Jewish population, proved the most successful, but even that was short lived. Only the Hendlers Creamery would stay in the building for more than just a few years. In fact, it served as an ice cream production plant until the 1980’s.

From its new headquarters on Baltimore Street, Hendlers ice cream grew into an iconic brand. Horse-drawn wagons delivered the frosty confection for many years until they were replaced by a fleet of trucks. After the switch, some of the horses remained loyal employees. Hendler’s son, Albert, recalled the return of one such horse, “We had sold some of our horses to Western Maryland Dairy. One afternoon in comes one of them pulling a wagon loaded with milk. It had come home. (1)”

Ice cream truck drawn by horse–Hendler Creamery, Hughes Company, 1941, PP30-54226, MdHS

Refrigerated delivery trucks further expanded the business. The trucks could be spotted crisscrossing the state, delivering ice cream to more and more stores. They were emblazoned with the slogans: “The Velvet Kind” and “Take home a brick.” The angelic, little kewpie became the symbol of the brand, and advertisements featured the chubby cherub enjoying a bowl of Hendler’s ice cream. The ice cream was virtually everywhere in Maryland, as it was distributed to over 400 stores at the company’s peak, which kept the production lines humming. The factory ran six days a week with vanilla ice cream being made almost everyday.

Vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry were production mainstays, but the creamery dabbled in more exotic flavors as well. Hutzler’s department store sold several varieties, including ginger and peppermint. For the Southern Hotel, Hendlers supplied a tomato sorbet which was served as a side dish rather than dessert. The eggnog ice cream produced each year at Christmastime, which  Hendler made with real rum, was a major hit. The factory also cranked out other holiday-themed products, such as an Independence Day treat made with vanilla, strawberry, and blueberry ice creams and a Mother’s Day cake topped with a silk screen of James McNeill Whistler’s portrait of his mother.

With all of the inventive flavors being churned out at his company, one would have expected Hendler himself to be a great lover of ice cream. But, this wasn’t the case, as his son Albert recounted: “As a child I remember Dad bringing home each day a couple of pints of ice cream of different flavors….Since he wasn’t a big ice cream eater, we’d do the tasting for him, and if a flavor wasn’t up to par we’d let him know in no uncertain terms. Someone was sure to catch hell the next day.(2)”

Hendler’s true passion lay in innovating and improving sanitation in the food production industry. The factory at Baltimore Street was fully automated. He invented and patented several machines that limited human contact with the product and developed one of the first air conditioning systems to keep the building cool. The delivery horses and their stable brought unwanted pests into the factory which forced him to close off the building. This caused the plant to be too hot in the summer, so he devised a system that cooled the place by pushing air through ducts, thus creating rudimentary air conditioning. He also used only tuberculosis-free or pasteurized milk from the earliest days of the business to prevent the passage of bovine tuberculosis through his product, which at the time was an uncommon practice.

Hendler discovered that success has a price when he and his family became a target of criminals. Several extortion attempts were made to scare Hendler out of some of his fortune. On one occasion he received a note which threatened, “We will not try to kidnap you or your son; a few bullets from a passing automobile into your or your son’s car is one way of paying our unsatisfactory business debts. It will also serve as an example in our remaining business matters with our clients in Baltimore and Washington….(3)”

Most of these attempts were thwarted, but in 1932 three men succeeded in kidnapping young Albert. The kidnappers planned to extort $30,000 for his safe return. Hyman Goldfinger, Samuel Max Lipsizt, and Harry Surasky snatched Albert after a school dance at Johns Hopkins University, where he was a junior. Albert was blindfolded and driven to a house in Anne Arundel County, where the kidnappers questioned him about the possibility of securing a ransom for his release. Albert’s noncommittal answers gave the men cause for worry that they would not get any money after all. They began to argue about their next move. Goldfinger suggested that they kill the young man, convinced that their identities had been compromised, but the others didn’t want to escalate the situation. Surasky recalled the event at his trial: “[Goldfinger] insisted at first on choking him and then he took out his gun and wanted to blow his brains out. He already had his gun right near Hendler’s temple.”(4) They eventually decided to free Albert, so they dropped him off at the Hanover Street bridge. They took all the money he had in his pockets, but then reconsidered and gave him back a dollar for cab fare to get home.

Albert returned home shaken but relatively unharmed. He decided against reporting the incident to the police or his family. The kidnappers could have stopped there, but they decided to push their luck once again. Lipstiz sent a note demanding that Hendler send $7,500 to an address in New York City. Hendler agreed to do so but could not wire the cash, because of the Good Friday holiday. A second letter arrived with same stipulation, but the police were already on the case. He was apprehended, which led to arrest of his cohorts, all of which were sentenced to lengthy prison sentences.

These events did not derail the Hendler family or the ice cream business. The Hendler Creamery Company continued to grow, and in 1929, the Borden Company purchased the company. It continued to operate under the Hendlers Creamery name until the late 1960′s. Hendlers, and later Borden’s, ice cream became household staples, known for its thick and creamy texture and wide variety of flavors.

*Some suggest that Fussell actually founded the first ice cream factory in Seven Valleys, Pennsylvania. This does not appear to be true, because the York County town did not yet exist when Fussell began his business. He purchased milk from the local dairy farmers, which he had shipped to Baltimore via railroad. Fussell did own some land in the area, but he never built on the site.

Sources and Further Reading:

(1), (2): Albert Hendler and Amalie Ascher, “Ice Cream Days: Even Before Albert Hendler Started Working at the Plant, He Got a Taste of the Business at Home,” Baltimore Sun, July 26, 1981.

(3): Frederick M. Rasmussen, “Exhibit recalls Hendler kidnapping of 1933: Hopkins student and son of Baltimore creamery owner was freed unharmed after a day,” Baltimore Sun, June 20, 2013.

(4): “Suraksy Found Guilty in Hendler Plot,” Baltimore Sun, May 23, 1933.

Mary Bellis, “The History of Streetcars-Cable Cars.”

Edward N. Dodge, ed., “Hendler, L. Manuel,” in Encyclopedia of American Biography, Vol. XXXIII (New York: The American Historical Company, Inc., 1965), 403-405.

Charles Glatfelter, “Seven Valleys ice cream claims melt under scrutiny,” York Daily Record/York Sunday News, August 17, 2012.

Robert K. Headley, Motion Picture Exhibition in Baltimore (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2006), 247-248.

Brennan Jensen, “I Scream, You Scream,” City Paper, April 29, 1998.

Jewish Museum of Maryland, Hendler’s Creamery Collection, MS 147.

Maryland Historical Trust, Hendler Creamery.

Gilbert Sandler, “Hendler’s: The Man, the Legend, the Ice Cream,” in Jewish Baltimore (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 87-89.

Temperance song written by Brother J. E. Snodgrass, M. D., tavern owner. Broadside, July 4, 1845, MdHS.

The American Temperance Society, organized in 1828, counted ten thousand groups within four years and reported upwards of 500,000 members. The Baltimore Temperance Society – the first in Maryland – organized in late 1829, and by the eve of the Civil War dozens of groups and thousands of people supported the promise of a sober republic, most visibly in Fourth of July activities such as parades and picnics.

Songs, stories, and poems in male-centered temperance literature salute the brotherly camaraderie, sobriety, and cold water—and uniformly condemn intemperance. Longtime temperance gadfly, Joseph Snodgrass* wrote a song for the Sons of Temperance “to be sung at their great jubilee in Baltimore, July 4, 1845.” This stanza from the Pledge Glee illustrates the austere character of the songs:

Temperance men, particularly the Sons, expressed a vibrantly patriotic identity, rich in the symbolism and rhetoric of American independence, one that they felt logically included freedom from alcohol. Many had rejected the habits and examples of the hard drinking Revolutionary generation, who sought companionship and exchanged radical ideas in taverns. Many in this younger generation declared independence from the tyranny of “King Alcohol” and from a masculine identity linked with drinking “ardent spirits” and wanted to create a patriotic identity of their own.

Are you ready to take the Pledge for genuine sobriety? Detail of Brother J.E. Snodgrass’s Temperance song.

Sons of Temperance officers and members, adorned themselves with patriotic regalia, “for a subordinate division, a white linen collar, with a rosette of red, white, and blue, with two white tassels suspended from the rosette.” Patriotism in antebellum America served as a civic religion for those who idealized the Founding Fathers and the still-new United States. “Residents of the young republic consecrated the state’s origin and made a fetish of the union that resulted.” This era saw the rise of the country’s state historical societies, a plethora of romantic paintings of the heroes, battles, and monuments of the Revolution, and a distinct American identity. Yet the meaning of patriotism varied between political and religious groups, all of whom incorporated their agendas and positions into grand public displays, particularly on the Fourth of July.

Liberation from the liquid tyrant made good copy in print and oratory, “Our fathers on that day threw off the shackles of British tyranny—their sons should scorn to permit themselves to be bound by the servile chains of intemperance.” Red, white, and blue regalia adorned proud breasts at public gatherings such as Fourth of July celebrations. On July 8, 1843, one older commentator noted that the “singularly striking” difference in recent Fourth of July celebrations and those of a “few years past [is] drinking.” In those bygone years, only those hearty enough to endure the “fatigue of a march and the danger of a carouse” participated in the honors paid to the day. “Now,” he noted, “children by the thousands, male and female, take the lead and learn . . . the lessons of sobriety and patriotism.” Yet in the not-so-distant-past, he recalled, only men who drank were considered patriotic. And this reflectively smug observer took care to mention the men who might drink throughout the year yet “take care not to disgrace the 4th.” In these few short sentences, the writer clearly articulated a changing expression of masculinity and pointedly mocked those who claimed genuine sobriety. Regardless of critics such as this one, the Fourth of July remained a popular public holiday for members of Maryland’s temperance societies.

King Alcohol and his Prime Minister by John Warner Barber, engraver. Date unknown, Library of Congress.

In Baltimore, Members of the Asbury Total Abstinence Society, the Old Wesley Temperance Sabbath School Society, and other “Temperance societies of Color” met at Mechanic’s Hall in Old Town and proceeded to Moschach’s Woods on the Bel Air Road, about three miles from the city. They spent the day singing with a choir, made up of singers from “different colored churches,” they prayed under the leadership of their president, Reverend Thomas Watkins, listened to addresses on the merits of total abstinence, and enjoyed a “delightful” dinner. There is no mention of patriotic rhetoric or pageantry as Baltimore’s free black community did not acknowledge white America’s liberty, choosing instead to commemorate Haitian independence on January 1st. This Fourth of July picnic spoke clearly of the group’s declaration of independence from alcohol.

In 1849, Sons across Maryland celebrated Independence Day. In addition to the Baltimore divisions gathering at Ryder’s Grove, where members sang a temperance song to the tune of “Oh Susannah!,” Sons gathered in Westminster, Carroll County, and processed to the Union Church where they opened the day’s festivities with a prayer, read the Declaration of Independence, and sang the “Ode to the Order.” Elkton Sons attracted 3,000 people to their parade, including members of the Northeast, Principio, and Susquehanna divisions. They too began the day with a prayer and a reading of the great document.

And 1862, the second summer of the Civil War, went by in much the same way as the previous year. Federal troops stationed in and around the city maintained control of a relatively quiet population, yet Baltimoreans celebrated the Fourth of July much as they had in the past, with picnics, excursions to the Eastern Shore, speeches, and fireworks. Thousands gathered at the Washington Monument, an “orderly” crowd, for a speech and a blessing. The largest number of people picnicked at “the great resort of the day,” Druid Hill Park, and “enjoyed plenty of pure water from its numerous springs.” Another group of families, “principally Germans,” had a picnic near Bel Air Road where “some were intoxicated, but with no disturbing results.” The reporter of this story linked drunkenness with ethnicity as had temperance reformers, and the majority of native-born citizens, from the earliest days of the reform’s activity. Those native-born picnickers, at Druid Hill Park this Fourth of July, drank only water, of course. (Dr. Patricia Dockman Anderson)

*In an ironic twist, Snodgrass owned and operated a tavern for about ten years. He inherited the business from his father but refused to continue to sell alcohol at the establishment. The business inevitably suffered, and he eventually sold the tavern. (http://www.eapoe.org/people/snodgrje.htm)

Dr. Patricia Dockman Anderson specializes in U.S and Maryland History, Nineteenth Century; Social and Cultural History; Catholic History; and Civil War Civilians. She has served as a member of the History Advisory Council for the Women’s Industrial Exchange, the Baltimore History Writers Group, and the Maryland War of 1812 Bicentennial Commission. Dr. Anderson is the Director of Publications and Library Services for the Maryland Historical Society, editor of the Maryland Historical Magazine, and a professor at Towson University.

There are two stories behind the creation of John Moale’s drawing of Baltimore Town. One version is that sometime in the late eighteenth century, Moale (ca. 1731-1798) sat down and sketched from memory the Baltimore of his youth. The other account has the amateur artist sitting on the future Federal Hill and sketching the town from life in 1752.
Baltimore Town in 1752, by John Moale, MdHS museum collection, 1845.1.1.

Sitting down in a field or on a city bench, pulling out a sketch pad, and drawing a building or cityscape is today a lost practice, largely left to artists. In an era when you can access a digital map of the entire world, and then zoom in on practically any building on earth, a sketch of a house, or even a printed map of city, may seem almost primitive. The watercolor to the right, which could easily be mistaken for a child’s drawing, is actually the earliest existing depiction of Baltimore when it was still just a tiny backwater town. Merchant and land developer John Moale’s unfinished sketch is a document of 1752 Baltimore, then known as Baltimore Town, that although rendered in “shocking disregard…of the laws of perspective,” gives a sense of the architecture of eighteenth century Baltimore now almost entirely lost. While there are surviving examples of houses from the mid to late 1700s still standing in the city (and photographic examples of many now gone), none of the structures depicted in Moale’s “original and homely draft” remain.(1)

In 1752, Baltimore Town was a “small, straggling village,” of roughly 200 inhabitants who lived, worshiped, and drank in 25 houses, one church, two taverns, and a brewery.(2) The drawing captures the young town just prior to a boom period marking the beginning of 200 years of uninterrupted population growth that wouldn’t come to an end until 1950. In the 1750s the town’s commercial and residential possibilities began to attract a diverse group of immigrants. German and Scotch-Irish businessmen from Pennsylvania, French-Acadians exiled from Nova Scotia in 1755, and other immigrant groups traveled to the waterfront community in the hopes of starting a new life. By 1760 there were over 1200 inhabitants. Fourteen years later, on the eve of the Revolution, the population consisted of nearly 6,000 people living in some 560 residences.

Most of these dwellings were simple wooden structures, between one and two stories in height. The most common homes found in eighteenth century Baltimore were three or four bay-wide structures with gambrel roofs and dormers. Only four of the 25 houses pictured in John Moale’s original sketch were brick; in 1741, Irish immigrant Edwin Fottrell, using bricks imported from England, began construction on the first. The Fottrell house – the largest residence in 1752 Baltimore Town – was erected at what is today the northwest corner of Fayette and Calvert Streets.(3) Fottrell returned to his homeland sometime before 1755, leaving the residence unfinished and in a state of disrepair.

Edwin Fottrell house. Baltimore in 1752, 1817 engraving by William Strickland based on a 1752 sketch by John Moale, MdHS, H16.

St. Peter the Apostle Church, constructed 1843, 11-13 South Poppleton Street, June 2013

The deserted home lay vacant for only a short time as it was soon occupied by a group of newly arrived French-Acadian refugees whose ship had appeared unexpectedly in the harbor. The refugees – part of a larger group of 900 that had arrived in Annapolis following their expulsion from Nova Scotia by British authorities – were soon being called on by Reverend John Ashton, the resident Catholic priest of Carroll Manor. Ashton visited Baltimore Town once a month to provide church services for the few Catholics living there. The Reverend and his congregation, consisting of some 40 members -  including a few of the Acadians – took for their place of worship one of the lower rooms of the Fottrell house; one of their first tasks consisted of “expelling the hogs which had habitually nested there.”(4)

From these squalid beginnings emerged Baltimore’s first Catholic Church. In 1770 the congregation began construction on St. Peter’s Church, at the corner of Saratoga and Charles Streets. Although the original building was torn down in 1841, a new church was built two years later that still stands at the corner of Hollins and Poppleton Street in West Baltimore. Edward Fottrell’s house, on the other hand,  had a much shorter life span. In 1780 the State of Maryland seized the residence and property, which was then in the possession of Fottrell’s heirs, divided up the land into six lots and sold them off at auction.

John Moale’s sketch of Baltimore Town provided the basis for a number of prints in the first half of the nineteenth century that proved to be very popular. Moale provided no identifications of the structures that he sketched out – the later reproductions have filled in many of the details left out by the amateur artist. Probably the most widely known as well as the most artistically rendered is an 1817 engraving by architect William Strickland. Some notable additions are the two ships visible in the harbor. The larger vessel is the “Phillip and Charles,” owned by William Rogers who also operated of one of the town’s two taverns. Docked on the left side of the harbor is the Sloop “Baltimore,” built in 1746 and owned by Captain Darby Lux, a two-time commissioner of Baltimore Town. The ship was the first Baltimore owned vessel to be sailed from the port. Lux’s house on Light Street is also identified in the print. The main thoroughfare, visible in the center of the engraving, is Calvert Street. Baltimore in 1752, 1817 engraving by William Strickland based on a 1752 sketch by John Moale, MdHS, H16.

The first and fourth St. Paul’s Protestant Episcopal Church.
(top) The first, built 1739, razed in 1786; Baltimore in 1752, 1817 engraving by William Strickland based on a 1752 sketch by John Moale, MdHS, H16, (detail)
(bottom) The fourth, built in 1854, 233 N. Charles Street, June 2013.

The most prominent structure in Moales’ original sketch, although it appears unfinished, is St. Paul’s Protestant Episcopal Church, Baltimore’s first church of any denomination. Completed in 1739, it was built atop Saratoga Street Hill, the highest point in town. By 1780, the building had become too small to accommodate its rapidly growing congregation, and a new church was built on another section of the large parcel of land bound by Lexington, Saratoga, Charles and St. Paul Streets, purchased by the church when the town was first established in 1729. The original church was put to use as a school until being demolished in 1786.

One feature of the early town that does not appear in either Moale’s sketch or the later reproductions was a wooden fence erected around the town in 1750. According to historian Thomas Scharf, the fence was built to protect the town from hostile tribes of Native Americans. Many sources have repeated this tale, although it appears the townsfolk had a far more mundane reason for erecting the fence that encircled the town “as completely as the walls enclosed a medieval fortress.”(5) It was instead devised as a barrier against the herds of swine, flocks of sheep, and gaggles of geese that roamed freely throughout the town. The hogs did serve some purpose, acting as an early sanitation department, as well as providing a source of food for the poorer members of the community. But these benefits were apparently soon outweighed by their penchant for destroying property, creating ruts in the roads, endangering children and causing general mayhem.

The fence however had a brief existence – residents soon began removing sections of it for firewood. One of the persons accused of pilfering timber was Thomas Chase, the rector of St. Paul’s Church. By November of 1752 most of the fence was gone. Whether John Moale intended to add the fence to his unfinished drawing or whether he sought to keep the image of the dilapidated enclosure from the historical record when he sat down to put pen to paper will probably never be known.

In 1796, Baltimore Town – which in 1773 had merged with Jones Town and Fell’s Point – incorporated to form the City of Baltimore. Only a handful of the buildings that existed prior to the merger of the three neighboring communities survived into the late nineteenth century. The last building visible in John Moale’s sketch to fall by the wayside was apparently Kaminsky’s inn, located at 106-110 Mercer Street, at the northwest corner of Mercer and Grant Streets. An 1885 Baltimore Sun article described the tavern as being:

“built in 1750 of wood, two stories and an attic, with dormer windows. The first story was plastered outside and the upper part weather-boarded. A lone flight of stairs from the outside led up to the second story. The building presented the appearance of an old-fashioned German hostelry. It was the grand hotel of the city. Washington, Lafayette and other revolutionary heroes stopped there.”(6)

Baltimore Town’s last remaining building finally met its demise in the early 1870s when it was razed to make way for three iron-front buildings at 101-105 East Redwood Street. These buildings were in turn destroyed some 30 years later when the Great Fire of 1904 swept through downtown Baltimore. A dozen years passed before another edifice, the Sun Life Insurance Company Building, was erected.(7)

In 2000, the site of one of Baltimore’s first two inns made a return to its roots when the Sun Life Building and its companion on the block – the former headquarters of the Merchant and Miners Transportation Company – were demolished to make way for a Residence Inn Marriott. While it lacks the charms of its predecessor, with laundry dangling from its windows (see photo below), it does make up for it in girth, rooming capacity, and general unattractiveness. (Damon Talbot)

Progression of a city block.
(Top left) Kaminsky’s Inn. Baltimore in 1752, 1817 engraving by William Strickland based on a 1752 sketch by John Moale, MdHS, H16, (detail)
(Top right) Kaminsky’s Inn, ca 1875, MdHS, CC 2821. The Tavern was originally two stories; a third story was added at some point in the nineteenth century to adjust to alterations in the street level.
(Bottom right) Sun Life Insurance Building, 109 East Redwood Street, about to be demolished, ca 2000; the building next to it is the partially demolished former Headquarters of the Merchant and Miners Company.(photograph not from MdHS’s collection)
(Bottom left) Marriott Residence Inn, 17 Light Street, June 2013.

Footnotes:

(1) Scharf, J. Thomas, The Chronicles of Baltimore: Being a Complete History of “Baltimore Town” and Baltimore City (Baltimore: Turnbull Brothers, 1874), 48; Mayer, Brantz, Baltimore: Past and present with biographical sketches of its most prominent men (Baltimore: Richardson and Bennett: 1871)

(2) Scharf, Thomas J., History of Baltimore City and County (Baltimore: Regional Publishing Company, 1971), 58.

(3) Baltimore in 1752, 1817 engraving by William Strickland based on a 1752 sketch by John Moale, MdHS, H16.

(4) Scharf, J. Thomas, The Chronicles of Baltimore, 66.

(5) Stockett, Letitia, Baltimore: A Not Too Serious History (Baltimore: Grace Gore Norman, 1936), 45.

(6) “A Leaf from the Past,” The Baltimore Sun, December 5, 1885

(7) The Sun Life Insurance Company building was designed by Louis Levi, the first Jewish member of the Baltimore chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

Sources and further reading:

Beirne, Francis F., St. Paul’s Parish, Baltimore: A Chronicle of the MotherChurch (Baltimore: Horn-Shafer Company, 1967)

Clark, Dennis Rankin, Baltimore, 1729-1829: The Genesis of a Community (Washington D.C., 1976)

Griffith, Thomas W., Annals of Baltimore (Baltimore: Printed by William Wooddy, 1824)

Gunts, Edward “Residents may rise at Redwood and Light,” The Baltimore Sun, November 29, 2004.

Gunts, Edward “Turning Point for Downtown,” The Baltimore Sun, August 13, 2000.

Hall, Clayton Colman, ed., Baltimore: Its History and Its People (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1912)

Hayward, Mary Ellen & Frank R. Shivers Jr., ed., The Architecture of Baltimore: An Illustrated History (Baltimore: JohnsHopkinsUniversity Press, 2004)

Jones, Carleton, Lost Baltimore: A Portfolio of Vanished Buildings (Baltimore: Maclay & Associates., 1982)

Kelly, Jacques, “Redwood Street preservation move grows”, The Baltimore Sun, September 30, 2000.

Kelly, Jacques, The Voice of this Calling: St. Paul’s Parish – Baltimore, Maryland, 1692-1992 (Baltimore: The Vestry of St. Paul’s Parish, 1993)

“A Leaf from the Past,” The Baltimore Sun, December 5, 1885

MarylandState Archives, Archives of Maryland (Biographical Series) John Moale

Mayer, Brantz, Baltimore: Past and present with biographical sketches of its most prominent men (Baltimore: Richardson and Bennett: 1871)

The Passano-O’Neill Files: Light Street (7-11); Mercer Street (106-110); Charles Street (231 North); Calvert Street (100-102 North)

Rice, Laura, Maryland History in Prints, 1743-1900 (Baltimore: The Press at the Maryland Historical Society, 2002)

Scharf, J. Thomas, The Chronicles of Baltimore: Being a Complete History of “Baltimore Town” and Baltimore City (Baltimore: Turnbull Brothers, 1874)

Scharf, J. Thomas, History of Baltimore City and County (Philadelphia: Louis H. Everts, 1881)

Stockett, Letitia, Baltimore: A Not Too Serious History (Baltimore: Grace Gore Norman, 1936)

On Sunday April 7, 2013, more than 120 long-time Baltimore residents, many dressed in their Sunday best, filled the auditorium of the Maryland Historical Society to help rediscover Baltimore’s African-American history. The event, Revisiting Our Past: Identifying Paul Henderson’s Photographs of the African-American Community in Maryland, ca. 1935-1965, was co-hosted by MdHS and the Pierians Baltimore Chapter. The two groups collaborated to identify the scores of unnamed people and events in photographs taken by Paul Henderson who worked for the Baltimore Afro-American. I was lucky enough to be there as a volunteer.

Attendee Anne C. Taylor identified A. Jack Thomas who was the director of the music department at Morgan College. He was reportedly one of the first African-American bandleaders in the Army and the first to conduct the BSO. HEN.08.06-034, Paul Henderson, MdHS.

Members of the Pierians, an organization “dedicated to the purpose of promoting and encouraging the study and enjoyment of the fine arts,” took the lead in the preservation of their community’s history. Last summer, they approached Jennifer Ferretti, former curator of photographs at MdHS, who had curated an exhibition of Henderson’s Civil Rights Era photographs and in doing so, drew much deserved attention to the collection. The Pierians told Ferretti they were sure they could identify people and places in the photos. The photographs had long languished at MdHS and their previous home in the Baltimore City Life Museum. But even before the Pierians’ offer, Ferretti had invested significant time into organizing, printing, and compiling the 6,000 negatives and prints so they could be presented to the community in an accessible manner. The project was well worth it. Scores of volunteers, staff members, and community members turned out to put names to faces and stories to still images, investing the photographs with deeper meaning.

Though the exact number of identifications has not been calculated, the number of people, places, and events that were recognized is upwards of a few dozen. Participants found and identified a host of lesser known faces alongside the more famous entertainers, politicians, and civil rights activists that Henderson captured with his camera. Concise descriptions abound: “Graduation class from Apex Beauty School,”  “Thurgood Marshall,” “A. Jack Thomas, First African Amer. Conductor of Baltimore Symphony Orch.,” “Dr. Frederick Dedmond, Language Professor at Morgan State,” “Mrs. Ada K. Jenkins—My former Piano teacher.” The experience was exhilarating for participants as they found photographs of themselves, their loved ones, and role models from decades ago. Most were seeing the photographs for the first time in a long while; many for the first time ever. Yvonne Lansey let out a joyous cry when she found herself and her sister in a photograph of their class at the Garnett School #103. In the photo, taken on Halloween, the two girls were dressed in costumes made by their mother.

A Halloween costume party at the Garnett School #103 as identified by Yvonne Lansey. HEN.00.A2.221, Paul Henderson, MdHS.

Participants also identified (and described) places that held memories and meaning for the community as a whole, including The Little School, “a private school for African-American children in West Baltimore,” and many now closed businesses on Pennsylvania Avenue. They also named sites we might prefer to forget, like the Druid Hill Park Black Tennis Courts and the Black Swimming Pool.

The value of this research is profound, for historians as well as for community members. Participants shared personal anecdotes about the photos that will provide researchers with otherwise hard-to-get historical insight. For example, some informants could list the present-day names of institutions alongside their historical names. Further, personal anecdotes are rare in official historical archives, but they provide a sense of community attachment that cannot easily be identified in images or formal documents. On one identification form, Betty Williams identified the members of a wedding party and noted,  “I was her only bridesmaid.” Finally, and perhaps more importantly, community participation empowers historical communities to participate in the process interpreting their own past.

Professor Frederick Dedmond was identified by attendees of the April 7 event as well as his former students who saw this photo at City Hall. HEN.03.02-053, Paul Henderson, MdHS.

The visual record is important, but often overlooked by historians of the twentieth-century. Having photographs to accompany written documents can bring readers closer to the topic at hand. But even more importantly, as some scholars have noted, the visual record also carries the potential to revise established histories in significant ways. Activist and scholar Kathleen Neal Cleaver wrote about the Civil Rights Movement:

“The visual record always documents the presence of women, but in the printed record, texts of academic accounts women’s participation tends to fade.”

Henderson’s photographic documentation of the world-famous as well as the unknown suggests that he was attuned to the importance of the visual record for capturing multiple stories. For social movement histories as well as for cultural, community, and political histories, visual records tell an important story that can corroborate written histories, but also tell new stories. Thanks to the dedication of MdHS employees and volunteers, and the experiences, memories, and interest of those who have taken part (and will continue to take part) in the identification of Henderson’s photos, we can look forward to a future filled with new stories about Baltimore’s past. (Amy Zanoni)

Amy Zanoni completed an MA in History from UMBC in May 2013. Her MA thesis, a place-based history of Baltimore’s second-wave feminist movement, investigated the ideas and political activism of feminists and other social movement actors in Baltimore in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Amy will continue her historical research as she pursues a PhD at Rutgers University starting in the fall of 2013. 

Sources:

Kathleen Neal Cleaver, “Racism, Civil Rights, and Feminism,” in Adrien Katherine Wing, ed., Critical Race Feminism: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 36, in Williams, “Black Women and Black Power,” OAH Magazine of History (July 2008): 22.

For more information and to see more work by Paul Henderson please visit the Paul Henderson Photograph blog. To browse MdHS’s inventory lists of Henderson’s photographs please click here.