Grant Dispersed To Preserve Baltimore's Treasures

(WJZ) ... But the Constellation and the Torsk weren't the only ones receiving checks from the grant. The B & O Railroad Museum needed $9,000 to restore a vintage car. The city gave the same amount to the Frederick Douglass-Isaac Myers Maritime Park for repairs, too. The Great Blacks In Wax Museum received $5,000 for roof repairs. Continued

Photo "Composing Sticks" taken at the Baltimore Museum of Industry. Canon EOS 5D with 28-135mm IS lens

Keeping Houses, Not Building Them

(NY Times) Most female architects have heard the horror stories: Mies van der Rohe’s elevation to the pantheon of Modernist masters, as Lilly Reich dies in poverty and anonymity. Le Corbusier vandalizing House E-1027, Eileen Grey’s masterwork in the South of France. Robert Venturi’s acceptance of the 1991 Pritzker Prize as his wife and partner, Denise Scott Brown, went all but unrecognized. Continued

AMOCO

Woodbine, Pennsylvania

Canon EOS 30D & EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 IS lens

Country Churches: Herald of Hope Baptist

What a nice looking old building. And how frustrating that I can't find anything about it! It's in northern Harford County, Maryland and it looks to me like it was once a school before it was a church. That's all I know.

Canon EOS 30D & EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 IS lens

She must be somebody's baby

(Baltimore Examiner) - Preservationists want to know where the bodies are buried at the proposed Paca’s Meadow development.
A handful of neighbors and local historians are working to prove a historic cemetery exists somewhere on the Boyer property on Moores Mill Road outside Bel Air, so the developer will work around it rather than risk disturbing the graves when 75 town houses and 96 condos are built around the existing farmhouse. Continued

[Having worked in the construction industry, it has long been my impression that developers routinely flout the law by destroying historic cemeteries. It's a top to bottom problem, the boss encourages it and the equipment operator enthusiastically complies. As for archaeological survey teams contracted by developers, a friend of mine in that profession once told me, "They don't pay us to find things, they pay us not to find things." - Falmanac]

Old jobs

Muskrat Catcher

Cambridge, Maryland, 1946

Photographed by A. Aubrey Bodine MHS Library, Special Collections Department, Bodine Collection, B530a

Country Churches: Woodbine Believers Assembly

Woodbine, Pennsylvania

Photos by Kim Choate, Canon EOS 20D & EF-S 10-22 lens

The Legacy of Lynching on the Eastern Shore

(HSoCC Blog) - Sherrilyn Ifill, a professor at the University of Maryland and the author of On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st century, held an open discussion of lynching’s legacy on the Eastern Shore at Bethel A.M.E. Church in Chestertown, last week.
While facilitating the conversation on the long silence that followed these grim incidents, the Civil Rights attorney pointed out that that these terrible crimes did not bypass Kent County. Continued

Country Churches: Union Chapel

Union Chapel, Holtwood, Pa.

Canon EOS 30D & EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 IS lens

Baltimore’s architecture changes to reflect new millennium - slowly

(Baltimore Examiner) - New glass and steel spires have penetrated the skyline of Baltimore, marking a new look for a city that architects say is leaving behind its historic industrial look for the 21st century.
“I would say Baltimore’s architecture is defined mostly by its heritage, and we have a very rich heritage,” said Klaus Philipsen, president of design firm ArchPlan and a co-chair of the Urban Design Committee of the American Institute of Architects’ Baltimore chapter.
“People are sort of conservative in their approach to architecture here,” Philipsen said. “This is a very typical thing in Baltimore. People ... always say, ‘Where’s the brick?’ ”
But times are changing. Continued

Photo of the Brown Center at the Maryland Institute College of Art by anon, via Wikipedia

Old House # 20

Oh, the decrepitude!

York County, Pa.

Canon EOS 30D & EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 IS lens

Wesley Chapel Cemetery

Wesley Chapel is long gone, but the cemetery is still there. The church bell is also there and a very nice iron fence.

Monkton, Maryland

Photos by Kim Choate, Canon EOS20D

Photo of Baltimore's Washington Monument Fetches No Bid

(WBAL) No one bid on a rare photo of Baltimore's Washington Monument that dates to the 1840s.
At 11:30 a.m. Tuesday, Sotheby's auctioneer opened the bidding for the daguerreotype of the monument at $30,000. "Passed," the auctioneer announced shortly thereafter. Link

Country Churches: Episcopal Church of the Ascension

I love the belfry on this little church.

Scarboro, Maryland

Canon EOS 30D & EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 IS lens

Local speeders

Those tracks along the NCR trail up in York County aren't always empty, sometimes they are filled with track speeders, aka railroad motorcars. These little vehicles were used on railroads for track inspection & maintenance. The railroads don't use them much anymore, but they have become a hit with some railfans who purchase them to ride on local short lines & the such. I passed a few of them in Glen Rock, Pennsylvania last week and snapped some pictures.

For more info check out the Northern Central Railcar Association or the North American Railcar Operators Association.

Canon EOS 30D & EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 IS lens

anyone lived in a pretty how town

(Examiner) - Harford County is at risk of becoming an “Anytown, U.S.A.” cultural backwater of cookie-cutter developments, malls, chain stores and suburban movie multiplexes, says a new report.
... “Harford County is likely to face growing pressures to adopt cultural initiatives to combat the ‘geography of nowhere/Anytown, U.S.A.’ syndrome where contemporary urban and suburban growth lack a distinct sense of place,” Toronto-based consultant Janis Barlow wrote in the report. Link

Country Churches: Best preacher name ever

Union Chapel United Methodist Church, Monkton, Maryland

Canon EOS 30D & EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 IS lens

Harford County history gets its own TV show

See if you can spot this historically significant structure in the latest episode of Historic Harford.

Harford County has burst into the 2oth century with its own show about local history. It's called Historic Harford and airs on Comcast channel 21 & Clearview channel 7. It ain't bad either, as a matter of fact, it's pretty darn good.
The first show (that I saw) was about the U.S. Naval Training Center at Bainbridge (Cecil County), and the second one was about Harford County's "colored schools."
Each episode is replayed multiple times, so it shouldn't be hard to find a good TIVO time to record it. Highly recommended.
Now, if we could just get the Harford Historical Society to digitize its holdings and place them on the web, we could enter the 21st century. 2107 anyone?

Canon EOS 5D, EF 28-135 mm f/3.5-5.6 IS lens

Walters Mill: part 2

Forest Hill, Maryland
Canon EOS 30D & EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 IS lens

Walters Mill: part 1

There has been a mill at this location since 1775. Before it was Walters Mill, it was Greenspring Mill, and before that, it was Forwood's Mill. How much, if any, of the original building is incorporated into the present structure is unknown to me.
This is a working mill; it is not a park. Remember: If God wanted us to trespass, he wouldn't have given us zoom lenses.

Forest Hill, Maryland

Canon EOS 30D & EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 IS lens

Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century

"Dear Gentle Reader,
Many of the following pages have graphic and clear images of the masculine mustache in all its forms, both sublime and grotesque. My intent is not to shock or titillate, but merely to inform on the subject. The Nineteenth Century gave us many things, but above all it was a hotbed of facial hair experimentation and this is but a poor sampling of those many lost forms." Link

Via boingboing

Union of Brother and Sisters of Ford’s Asbury Lodge No. 1

Sign reads: Built for the African American Community in 1874 as a school for children in the Loreley area and as home to this “benevolent” society, founded in 1872. Beginning in the late 18th century, such mutual aid societies, often formed by church congregations, were part of a national humanitarian movement to provide emergency assistance to members in times of sickness, accident and death, and to benefit communities through social, commercial and political networks. (Maryland Historical Trust & Maryland State Highway Administration)

Loreley, Maryland

Canon EOS 30D & EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 IS lens