Monument City Blog

The land for Saint Paul’s Lutheran Cemetery was purchased for $3000.00 by the 2nd Evangelical Lutheran Congregation of Baltimore on October 25, 1854. The obscure location is west of the Jones Falls across from the neighborhood of Hampden. In 1860 the countryside surrounding the 4.5 acre cemetery was purchased by City Council under the guidance of Mayor Thomas Swann and turned into Druid Hill Park, the third oldest landscaped public park in America.

In 1868 the 2nd Evangelical Lutheran Church divided into three separate congregations: Saint Paul Evangelical Lutheran, Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran and Martini Lutheran Church. An agreement was reached to jointly maintain the burial ground thereafter. One stipulation of the agreement was that no lot owners could bury blatant blasphemers. During this transitional period the City of Baltimore bought 2.25 acres reducing the cemetery’s size by half.

The burial site was severely vandalized in 1986 leaving many of the markers tipped over and broken. A pile of stones remains at the base of an old growth tree. Today Saint Paul’s Lutheran Cemetery is solely owned and operated by Martini Lutheran Church with the Friends of Druid Hill Park adding assistance. The two groups have made vast improvements to the yard. A stone-worker is repairing neglected memorials and someone is keeping the grass trimmed.

The peculiar family plot of Gottlieb Taubert lies unmarked in Saint Paul’s Lutheran Cemetery. Lincoln conspirator George Atzerodt is supposedly buried with the Tauberts, secretly interred here by his mother and father sometime after 1869. Victoria and John Atzerodt went to Washington to retrieve their son’s remains when President Andrew Johnson pardoned those involved with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. They brought their son to Baltimore.

Upon reviewing the cemetery’s burial records at the Maryland Historical Society Library I noticed that a Viktoria Asserat (Victoria Atzerodt) was placed to rest in the Taubert lot in 1886. It’s my belief that George Atzerodt is buried anomalously along with his mother in the Gottlieb Taubert family plot, Lot 90 near the center of Saint Paul’s Lutheran Cemetery in Druid Hill Park.

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Old Saint Paul’s Cemetery is located in west Baltimore and is bound by Redwood Street to the north, Lombard Street to the south and Martin Luther King Boulevard to the west. 2.8 acres of land was purchased in 1800 as a burial ground for Old Saint Paul’s growing congregation. The church, established in 1692, is one of 30 original parishes granted to the Colony of Maryland by the Church of England.

Several prominent American war veterans are interred at Old Saint Paul’s Cemetery. Revolutionary War hero and Maryland politician John Eager Howard is buried here in his family vault. Howard is famous for leading the 3rd Maryland Regiment during the Battle of Cowpens. He later served as 5th Governor of Maryland from 1788 to 1791.

George Armistead rests within the park’s boundaries. Commander of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812, Armistead died just four years after the epic Battle of Baltimore. His nephew Lewis Armistead became a Confederate Brigadier General during the American Civil War and was incredibly courageous at the Battle of Gettysburg, a battle which ultimately claimed his life. He lies next to his uncle near the cemetery’s center.

Francis Scott Key, author of the Star-Spangled Banner, was initially interred in the Howard family vault. His daughter Elizabeth was married to Charles Howard, the fourth and youngest son of John Eager Howard. Francis Key died at his daughter’s Mount Vernon home in 1843. His remains were moved to Mount Olivet Cemetery in Frederick, Maryland in 1866.

Jacob Small, Jr. is buried in Old Saint Paul’s Cemetery. Small fought in the Battle of North Point during the War of 1812 and later served as mayor of Baltimore. He designed the Aquila Randall Monument in 1817. The memorial still stands in Dundalk.

Other notable Marylanders at rest here are politicians Samuel Chase, James Carroll and George Howard. Chase signed the United States Declaration of Independence and eventually became an associate justice of the Supreme Court. His father, Reverend Thomas Chase, was the first pastor of Old Saint Paul’s Parish. James Carroll was a Congressman from Maryland and George Howard, 1st son of John Eager Howard, was the 22nd Governor of the state.

Robert Cary Long, Sr. was a self-taught American architect responsible for designing and building numerous structures throughout the City of Firsts. His Peale Museum and Davidge Hall remain. Long was a member of Old Saint Paul’s Parish and was the architect of its second church building which burned down in 1854. He sleeps within the park’s protective walls.
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An interesting aspect of historic cemeteries is the burial bell. In the past there was a legitimate fear of being buried alive. A bell atop a burial room with a string hanging below was one last insurance policy for the recently departed. Cemetery workers were employed around the clock to listen for the ringing of the dead. Rick Tomlinson, Verger for Old Saint Paul’s Parish and gatekeeper of its graveyard, pointed out a few burial bells while he graciously lead me around the grounds.

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Elijah Bond was best known for filing the first United States patent for the Ouija board. Born in Harford County, MD in 1847, Bond became a successful lawyer in Baltimore City, starting his own practice in the 1870s. He filed the Ouija patent on behalf of the Kennard Novelty Company in 1891. Elijah Bond died in 1921 and was anonymously buried in his family’s plot at Green Mount Cemetery. Robert Murch, America’s foremost Ouija historian, after fifteen years of searching, located the ambiguous grave. Murch erected the Ouija-themed headstone in 2008. The cemetery’s mausoleum is nearby.

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.

In 1815, French-born architect Maximilian Godefroy completed the carriage gates at Westminster Hall and Burying Ground.  Godefroy designed the cemetery entrance in the Egyptian Revival style with its hourglass form symbolizing “time’s swift flight.” He earned $5000 for the work. Landing in America after fighting on the losing side of the French Revolution, Godefroy spent 15 years in Baltimore working in the architectural field. He designed the Battle Monument, First Unitarian Church and Saint Mary’s Chapel, all of which are still standing. Westminster Burying Ground is the final resting place of James McHenry, Samuel Smith and Edgar Allan Poe.

Green Mount Cemetery is home to over 68,000 graves. Established in 1838, the 68 rolling country acres located in northern Baltimore City is both intriguing and inviting. The historic park of the dead, built on the former site of merchant Robert Oliver’s estate, is filled with fine sculpture and monumental memorials. Among the towering obelisks and ancient markers are the graves of a few important Americans. There’s the Lincoln Assassin John Wilkes Booth and two of his co-conspirators, Michael O’Laughlen and Samuel Arnold. There’s the sideshow performer Johnny Eck and the poet Sidney Lanier. You can also visit Philanthropist Johns Hopkins or the founder of the American Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Thomas Wildey. It’s a fascinating journey through the past. The links below provide focused GPS information for these and other important graves at Green Mount.

John Wilkes Booth	Junius Brutus Booth	Samuel Arnold	Michael O’Laughlen
Asia Booth Clarke	Johnny Eck	Sidney Lanier	William Rinehart
Walter Lord	Aubrey Bodine	John Pendleton Kennedy	Betsy Bonaparte
Olivia Cushing Whitridge	Elijah Jefferson Bond	Severn Teackle Wallis	Johns Hopkins
John H. B. Latrobe	Benjamin Henry Latrobe II	Charles H. Latrobe	Ferdinand Latrobe
John Work Garrett	Robert Garrett II	Mary Elizabeth Garrett	Robert Goodloe Harper
William & Henry Walters	Ellen Walters	Thomas Wildey	James L. Ridgely
Hugh Sisson	William Prescott Smith	Moses Sheppard	Enoch Pratt
John E. Hurst	A. S. Abell	Edwin George Baetjer	James Swan Frick
William Steuart	Albert Ritchie	William Pinkney Whyte	Thomas Swann
Samuel Buckley	Ross Winans	Obed Hussey	Harriet Lane Johnston
Robert Oliver	Col. William Watson	Isaac R. Trimble	John A. Eppley

Baltimore’s Green Mount Cemetery is the final resting place of sideshow performer Johnny Eck.  Section R, grave 19 contains the remains of Johnny and his fraternal twin brother Robert.  The Ecks (or Eckhardts) were born in East Baltimore in the same house they eventually died in.  Traveling often, the brothers always returned to their family home, maintaining the quaint rowhouse even as the neighborhood around it slowly declined.  The house was purchased by an Eck enthusiast and is being converted to a museum.

Johnny was a true American icon, born with nothing below his torso, he transformed his inadequacy into a prosperous business.  He walked tightropes, performed magic, created models, acted in movies and drove his own modified car.  Johnny Eck died in 1991, followed four years later by his brother and lifelong companion, Robert.  This modest monument marks their permanent address.

John Wilkes Booth was born in Harford County, MD and made his stage debut at Baltimore’s Charles Street Theatre. The Booth family gravesite is located in Baltimore’s Green Mount Cemetery where John Wilkes rests under an unmarked stone. Small and unassuming, the marker sits at the corner of the family plot, dwarfed by the memorial obelisk at it’s center.

Buried here in February of 1869, four years after his death, John’s body went through a series of circumstances before ending up in Green Mount. Originally inhumed at the Old Penitentiary on the Washington Arsenal grounds, the body was placed in an Army blanket and lowered into a hole that was subsequently covered with a stone slab. Two years later it was exhumed and placed in a wooden box in a locked storeroom at the prison. The government was finally persuaded to release the remains to the Booth family in 1869 where it was viewed in Washington and then Baltimore, before finally being placed in Dogwood Plot #9.

This map can be obtained at the main entrance to Green Mount Cemetery. The diagram is numbered showing locations of numerous interesting graves and a list is provided with 78 corresponding names.