Posted on by Jean Lee Cole

Wrap-up . . . and launch

So long, summer! Hello, fall!

The intrepid Summer 2017 Aperio team celebrated in style last Tuesday, commemorating the regular meeting day for the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore with a cold (but very classy) supper of relishes, salmon in aspic, a salad, chocolate and raspberry pie, and a cheese plate adorned with fresh figs and almonds. Chin-chin!

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What did we accomplish? Over 10 weeks this summer:

  • 1700 pages of minutes transcribed
  • 5 notebooks of membership dues and lists, covering the entire 30 years of club existence, deciphered and organized into a spreadsheet showing who belonged when and where they lived;
  • 650+ programs (of ~1000) transcribed and entered into spreadsheet;
  • Domiciles of members from 1890-1895 plotted onto a huge 7’ x 7’ map recreated from the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps;
  • 42 blog posts, ranging from a few hundred to 2000 words each
Big Ass Map
A partial map of Baltimore in 1901, affectionately known as the “Big Ass Map.” For scale, the red thing in the lower part of the image is a computer mouse, placed at the Washington Monument. All the little red-orange dots are locations of members’ residences. I had to cut the map in two (down Charles St.) in order to get it into my car (rolled up).

It’s quite a body of work. But I won’t lie– we were a bit dismayed when we realized how much work is left to be done.

For one thing, we need to organize and put into a reasonably readable form all of the transcriptions we compiled this summer. For another, we need to make these documents accessible to the spring 2018 class that will be reading, editing, and analyzing these documents. Luckily, Clara will be doing an independent study with me this fall to do just that!

But the biggest body of work is to transcribe the remaining minutes— about 2400 pages’ worth. Based on the rate at which the team members were able to transcribe this summer (3 of the 5 team members spent the majority of their time transcribing minutes, while two focused on programs and the membership logs), we have somewhere in the neighborhood of another 800 hours of transcription left to go. If we can divvy up this labor among more hands, it will go faster.

Luckily, Friends School has come to the rescue! During both the fall and spring semesters, history teacher Josh Carlin’s senior seminar will be joining the team, transcribing documents and (I hope) continuing to blog about their discoveries. Clara, Hunter, and I met Elizabeth, Alex, and Sanny at Friends School last week and they have already started transcribing. We’ve created a special transcription site (https://loyolanotredamelib.org/Aperio/WLCB/)where you can see what the minutes actually look like– as well as some of the finished transcriptions. We’ll be continuing to populate the site throughout the year with more things to transcribe and more completed transcriptions. And if you’d like to join us in this, let us know and we can add you to the team.

Hunter, Clara, & I met Sanny (pictured), Elizabeth, & Alex, our fall transcribers, at Friends School last week. They’re all in Josh Carlin’s senior seminar on archival transcription.

We are planning a crowd-transcription session at the Bmore Historic Unconference on Friday, Sept. 29. We’ll probably be there during at least the morning sessions if not all day. If you’re interested in Baltimore history, historic preservation, or museums, you should come. We’d love to see you there!

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!