Monument City Blog

This waiting station was part of Bedford Square Streetcar Line No. 11. Operated by the United Railways and Electric Company, the streetcar line was developed to supply Guilford residents with reliable and affordable access to the city. Built between 1913 and 1950, Guilford is a north Baltimore neighborhood designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, Jr. The 210 acre suburban tract is characterized by rolling hills, regal homes and classic landscaping. The historic community was serviced by trolley until 1947 when the progression towards automobiles finally overtook the interurban railway. The Bedford Square Station was converted to a bus stop and later a monument. Basically unchanged, the waiting shelter is in excellent condition. Across the street is the Simon Bolivar Bust.

Behind Druid Hill Park’s Conservatory & Botanic Gardens is a little used path that once lead to the Music Pavilion. The Promenade (conceptualized by the Olmsted Brothers) was a central feature of the city’s largest and best park, a place where patrons could gather and listen to music by either traveling acts or the park’s string band. The former yellow brick path, once lined with comfortable benches and well-maintained landscaping, is now a parking lot for the conservatory’s workers. The mall’s Moorish style pavilion was designed by George Aloysius Frederick and completed in 1865. The Gazebo eventually fell into disrepair and was torn down in 1961.

Rogers-Buchanan Burial Ground lies within the boundaries of Druid Hill Park across the street from the zoo’s Reptile House. This small north Baltimore cemetery was founded in the 1700s as a typical family estate graveyard.

The estate was acquired by Lord Baltimore in the late 1600s and being prized for its lumber, was sold many times to industrial colonialists. Nicholas Rogers came to own 200 acres of the forest-covered land. When Rogers died in 1709 he left the estate to his daughter Eleanor. Eleanor married George Buchanan, one of the seven commissioners responsible for establishing Baltimore City, and bore him ten children. When George Buchanan died in 1750, his son Lloyd took over the land, adding surrounding properties and enlarging the estate to 625 acres.

When Lloyd Buchanan’s life ended, Eleanor, his four year old daughter, inherited the property. Mrs. Buchanan married Colonel Nicholas Rogers IV, her first cousin once removed, in 1783. The Colonel, an American Revolutionary War participant, had an interest in architecture and worked on city projects with builder/architect Robert Cary Long. Rogers designed the the Assembly Room which stood adjacent to the old courthouse. The building burned down in 1873 in the Holliday Street Theatre fire. In a unique move for the time, his will articulated that his slaves be freed and given monthly salaries upon his passing. Rogers IV died in 1822, outliving his wife by ten years. Their son Lloyd Nicholas Rogers became master of Druid Hill.

Rumored to be a recluse, Lloyd apparently cut off ties with city officials and former family business partners. When Mayor Thomas Swann, along with City Council, wanted to build a turnpike through the Rogers-Buchanan estate, he refused and a lengthy battle ensued. Lloyd Nicholas Rogers died in 1860, just a month and a half after he unwillingly sold the family property. Thankfully the grand estate was turned into parkland.

Through the years the Rogers family modified the estate, adding rolling pathways and adventurous landscaping. Rogers IV made great improvements to the property by adding bays and indentations to the untamed forest. The half-acre graveyard was left in the possession of the Rogers family when the sale of the park was finalized. The burial ground’s last interment was Edmund Law Rogers in 1896.

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Moving a cemetery is a difficult thing for any development company to do.  Especially moving a 19th Century burial ground where the caskets have deteriorated and the headstones are non-existent or unreadable.  But apparently developing neighborhoods need shopping centers more than old cemeteries.  While researching Charm City’s former reservoir system I noticed a graveyard near Clifton Park that isn’t there today.  The city’s 1905 land records clearly show a Laurel Cemetery on the lot now occupied by the Belair Shopping Center.  Laurel Cemetery was founded in 1852 and was the first non-sectarian funerary grounds in Baltimore for blacks.  Numerous important figures were interred there including members of the local church and Civil War veterans.

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The site made perfect sense. It was on a hill, just outside the North Avenue city boundary, that had been used for decades as a burial ground for the free and slave servants of local landowners. Before long, Laurel Hill became the premiere cemetery for blacks in the area.

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The Rev. Daniel A. Payne, a senior bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and a frequent visitor to Abraham Lincoln’s White House, was buried there in 1893. Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist, eulogized the bishop at the cemetery. The seventh bishop of the A.M.E church, Alexander Wayman, who had spoken at Bishop Payne’s funeral, was himself buried at Laurel in 1895.

As the years passed Laurel became overgrown and neglected, its administrators eventually unable to afford regular maintenance.  In 1958 the city stepped in to purchase the land, and just four years later a company by the name of Two Guys built a store and parking lot, forever sealing the historic parcel.  In her journal, Agnes Callum, an Enoch Pratt librarian, published her assessment of the land takeover.

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Laurel was already more than 100 years old when a band of city law officials and real estate operators formed a corporation to buy the cemetery for themselves in 1958.

With the help of legislation initiated by Marvin Mandel, then leader of the city delegation to Annapolis and later governor, the corporation acquired title to the cemetery. They bought the prime site on Belair Road for $100 in an audacious and complex land-acquisition coup.

After buying the land for basically nothing the city turned around and valued the boneyard at close to a quarter million dollars.  When they sold the land an undertaker was hired to exhume and move the bodies to a new site located in Carroll County.  The question is whether or not they actually moved them.  Of the estimated five to seven thousand people buried at Laurel only eight to twelve bodies were removed intact.  These remains along with two to three hundred small boxes filled with anonymous bones and skulls were taken to Carroll County.  The rest were paved over.

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For many years after the cemetery’s removal, human bones would occasionally be found protruding from the hill behind the department store. The bones ended up as souvenirs in the collections of local citizens.

Three Sisters Ponds is situated in the northwest corner of Druid Hill Park. Originally made up of five separate bodies of water, Three Sisters is a network of man-made basins surrounded by strolling paths, elderly trees and a disc golf course. Originally part of the park’s fish hatchery, the ponds were once fed by the adjacent High Service Reservoir (now a baseball diamond). Three Sisters Ponds have been abandoned since the 1960s. The Rogers-Buchanan Burial Ground perches on a nearby hill just off of Greenspring Avenue.

The front pond is small and oval-shaped, its stone wall reinforced with concrete and wood. Structurally sound, it looks like it may hold water if filled. It appears to be the newest basin in the network.

Sea Lion Pond, a fenced-in former zoo installation that once housed two eared seals, is a few paces north. A stone formation sits at the center of the pool and an enclosed fountainhead behind a gated entrance occupies the southern end of the pond. The Friends of Druid Hill Park have been routinely cleaning the neglected area.

Directly above Sea Lion Pond is the largest of the Three Sisters, yet the most difficult to locate. Covered in copious layers of vines and brush, the hidden marsh is well over an acre in size and was known as Lily Pond. Its eastern portion, once on the other side of Three Sisters Lane, has been completely removed.

Further north is the what seems to be oldest basin in the complex, its walls made of uneven dark green rock. It has the appearance of an early 19th Century reservoir and looks very much like a smaller, older version of Druid Hill Lake. All four ponds empty into a rolling creek that leads to the Jones Falls.