Posted on by Jean Lee Cole

Club authors, team authors

Henrietta Szold
A young Henrietta Szold, at about the time she was a member of the WLCB.

Starting next week, members of the WLCB research team will be posting profiles of the various published authors who were members of the Club. We’ve been collecting their works and discovering that this was a pretty interesting group of women– more interesting, in fact, than the Club meeting minutes made them seem. While the minutes are fascinating in their own right, the varied and sometimes adventurous lives of the actual Club members made us realize that the Club’s desire to appear orderly and unified under the ideals of Southern womanhood imposed a staid– or at least studied– propriety on the entire group.

In this post, I actually want to celebrate the work of our own team members. Yesterday, the Maryland Historical Society published an article by Sydney on one Club member, “Miss Henrietta Szold: A Jewish Idealist in the WLCB.” Sydney encountered “Miss Szold” in the team’s work in the archives last summer. In her piece, she gives us a glimpse into her brief tenure into the Club in the early 1890s, and reflects on the importance of discovering her presence in the Club in the wake of racialized violence and anti-Semitism today.

And the publication of Sydney’s piece also gives me a chance to share with our new team members and followers of the blog the team’s first publication, which appeared last fall: Hunter’s evocative ruminations about the Club’s response– or lack of one– to one of the most momentous events in Baltimore history, the “Great Fire” of 1904.

Both of these essays were published in the Maryland Historical Society’s Underbelly blog, which claims to limn “the Deepest Corners of the Maryland Historical Society Library.” In future weeks and months, we’ll be seeking other ways to get our own works into print– here on this blog, on Wikipedia, in the book we will be publishing that will collect some of the Club members’ works, and who knows where else?

Posted on by Hunter Flynn

What we lost in the fire

This past week, I finished the transcriptions for a Club season I’d been greatly looking forward to: 1903-1904. The reason for my interest: the Baltimore fire of 1904, thought to be the third most devastating fire in United States history. (Dr. Cole already touched on it briefly in an earlier post.)

Amazingly, the Club met the very day after the fire ended: Tuesday, February 9th. The fire had hardly been under control for twenty-four hours. “Few members were present,” the recording secretary wrote. “But the president decided that the record of our meetings should be kept unbroken.” Only a portion of the program was therefore given.

Aftermath of the conflagration. This photograph could have been taken the very day the Club met.

But what shocks me about the minutes from this time period is that, save this one meeting, there is not a single other reference to the devastation in the season. Here’s what they do have to say about it, though:

In a few strong words, [Mrs. Wrenshall] alluded to the great financial loss, from which we must all suffer; but pointed out the comfort that was ours, in the dauntless spirit shown by the people. Especially, she thought, should we unite in thanks, to the press which had risen so wonderfully above the difficulties of the time, to give the public information and cheer. The magnitude of the loss Baltimore had sustained, was almost incredible. The city had been laid low; but we had been spared the worst and greatest agony, in that, there had been no sacrifice of human life, except in one instance. Had the fire begun on any day but Sunday, what horrors would have been added. There could be no shadow of doubt that much of the great misfortune, must be laid to the charge of building those high structures which helped to carry the force of the fire beyond all human reach.

That’s it—one paragraph. What interests me most in this account is the reference to the loss of life “in one instance.” I’m from Baltimore, sort of. My elementary and middle school allegedly owes its existence to the fire. But the narrative of the fire I’d grown up with held that not a single person perished in the fire.

So I did some poking around. In his volume, The Great Baltimore Fire, Peter B. Petersen notes that no one challenged this claim until 2003, when an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University by the name of James Collins, dug up a story in the February 17th issue of The Sun, entitled “One Life Lost in Fire.” The story reported that the charred remains of an African American man were pulled out of the basin—that is to say, the harbor. We don’t know his name.

The story slipped under the radar, and went practically unnoticed. Peterson theorizes, “Officials may not have deemed a single black life sufficient in 1904 to warrant undercutting the supposed—and astounding—lack of deaths related to the fire.” But not even Afro-American reported it.

And the women of the Club couldn’t have been referencing it either. The body was found a full week after their meeting. Whose death they were referencing is beyond me. It could have only been hearsay. But, more likely, this only supports my longstanding hunch that we lost more in the fire than we think.

Posted on by Jean Lee Cole

Fires, Science, Maps, & Pride

I was thinking about our conversation yesterday about the Great Fire of 1904 and thought I’d do some digging.

Enter our friend Wikipedia, which actually has quite a lot of good info about the fire (probably cross-checked by at least a few historians). The fire apparently started right about where Royal Farms Arena stands now, and spread east and south. I was incorrect about whether firefighters from other cities and states were called in– they were, and came by train! But many could not actually assist because their fire trucks (which were loaded on the trains, amazingly) could not hook up to the Baltimore fire hydrants– no national standards for couplings existed at the time.

Also, here’s a bit of history from the Baltimore Sun’s RetroBaltimore Tumblr of the Academy of Sciences building (105 W. Franklin St.), where the Club met for several years. In its present iteration, the Academy is known as the Maryland Science Center. Here’s a picture of the old building, which is no longer standing:

Academy of Sciences
Academy of Sciences building, 105 W. Franklin St.

And finally, as we put some of our walking tours together over the next few weeks, I’ve uploaded an 1890 map of Baltimore to our Google folder. You can use this in conjunction with a present-day Google map to see where things are … I was able to find Garden St.– it’s since been renamed Linden Ave., and 861 is no longer standing. But a street very much like it, Tyson St., a block over, still has its original houses, so we can include that on our walk next week. Or, you all can see if you can find it on a walk during your lunch break today or tomorrow. Here’s a snippet of the map showing Garden St.’s location (in the top left quadrant):

Incidentally, since most of you will be working in the archive tomorrow, you might want to pop over to the Baltimore Pride festival which will be taking place all afternoon & evening Saturday. The parade starts at 2 pm at Madison St. at Charles, just 2 1/2 blocks from MDHS. Or, you can come back for the block party from 4:30-9 at Charles & North. This is a true Baltimore event & tradition– don’t miss it!