Branches of Baltimore History

I’ve been tracing the cause and path of the Great Fire of 1904.  I had thought of creating a map of the area of the blaze, comparing pictures from then and now.  This great website has already done all of this and much more, plotting the stages of the fire as it rolled north, east, and south through downtown.  The event was apparently caused by an explosion at the Hurst Company building, the blast occurring at 10:55 on an otherwise peaceful Sunday morning.  Due to extreme winds and very narrow streets the flames were able to jump entire city blocks, leaving some areas untouched amidst the devastation.  10 buildings survived the fire including the Union Trust Company (or Jefferson Building) at the corner of Charles and Fayette Streets.  The structure’s windows had been blown out by nearby attempted preventative dynamiting, leaving the building vulnerable.  The inside burned completely out but the steel frame survived and the building is still in use today.  The picture below shows the old Post Office, City Hall and the Clarence Mitchell Courthouse just at the edge of the fire’s devastation zone.  A last and sudden change in the direction of the wind towards the south saved the historic buildings from destruction.

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A building stone is defined as any massive, dense rock suitable for use in construction. Whether igneous, metamorphic or sedimentary, a building stone is chosen for its properties of durability, attractiveness, and economy. A dimension stone is a building stone that is often quarried and prepared in blocks according to specifications. A decorative stone is a stone that can be quarried, cut or carved and is most highly valued for its pleasing appearance. It is more often used in interior construction for decoration and monuments than as standard building stone.

1. Interestingly, if you look at the Google Street View for the location of the Pope John Paul II memorial, you’ll see an empty space covered in grass. Evidently the area was indexed before the groundbreaking ceremony in April of 2008.
2. In addition to the statue of Cardinal Gibbons, Baltimore also has another marker dedicated to him in War Memorial Plaza. Additional information and coordinates available at HMdb. Baltimore’s HL Mencken wrote of Gibbons, “More presidents than one sought the counsel of Cardinal Gibbons: he was a man of the highest sagacity, a politician in the best sense, and there is no record that he ever led the Church into a bog or up a blind alley. He had Rome against him often, but he always won in the end, for he was always right.”

GPX is an XML file format for GPS data, as explained by Wikipedia:

It can be used to describe waypoints, tracks, and routes. The format is open and can be used without the need to pay licence fees. Its tags store location, elevation, and time and can in this way be used to interchange data between GPS devices and software packages. Such computer programs allow you for example to view your track, project your track on satellite images (in Google Earth), annotate maps, and tag photographs with the geolocation in the Exif metadata. [...] In GPX, a collection of points, with no sequential relationship (the county towns of England, say, or all Skyscrapers in New York), is deemed a collection of individual waypoints. An ordered collection of points may be expressed as a track or a route. Conceptually, tracks are a record of where a person has been, routes are suggestions about where they might go in the future.