Take an audio tour of The Peale, Baltimore's Community Museum and the oldest museum building in the United States! Listen to WYPR's Aaron Henkin recount the fascinating stories that surround this historic building. Includes 16 stops.
Like his father, Rembrandt Peale included a skylit room in his Baltimore museum. One of the first rooms built in America with a skylight, the Latrobe Room makes the Peale Museum building architecturally unique. It is named in honor of Benjamin Henry Latrobe: architect and builder of the new republic, friend, patron and benefactor of the Peale family.
Both the Peales and Latrobe nurtured a vibrant civic culture for the young United States. It is that same intention that animated the renovation of the Peale Museum building in this century and its new purpose as Baltimore's Community Museum.
You can hear more about Latrobe and the Peales from historian Dr. Jean Baker, author of Building America: The Life of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, and Peale board member.
When City Hall was based in the Peale Museum building (1830-1875), the First Branch of City Council met in this room, while the Second met in the other large gallery on this floor facing Holliday Street, called the "Old Council Chamber" today recalling its former use. When the building was repurposed in 1878 to serve as Male and Female Colored School No. 1, this room and the one below it, now the Moses Williams Center, were each divided into two classrooms.
