Take a tour of the Peale, Baltimore's Community Museum and the oldest purpose-built museum in America. In this multi-stop tour, you'll hear from experts, historians, and curators who worked on and in the building during recent renovations.
Tour Stop 3
Jackson Gilman-Forlini: (00:00) So most of what you see in the buildings current state dates to the 1929 to 1930 restoration. Which dates through the Colonial Revival period. There was I think in interest in time in exploring these different landmarks for the purpose of building a national identity based in the colonial period, but then also this was seen at the local level as well. Baltimore decided to do similar things to what was going on at Colonial Williamsburg.
Jackson Gilman-Forlini: We have the Star Spangled Banner Flag House which was restored, I think in the same year, actually as the Peale museum, as was Fort McHenry. So what the architects did at the time, because there was very, very little integrity left to the Peale building, they actually took building materials from other houses that dated to the early 19th century that were actually being torn down. They salvage those building materials and then recycled them and installed them in the Peale. So that includes a lot of flooring, a lot of woodwork, doors, door hardware, all that you see on the first floor actually date to the Peale's earliest period, but we're not from that location specifically.
Jackson Gilman-Forlini: Also, the front facade, all the brick work that you see on the front facade was recycled from a townhouse on the corner of Saratoga and St. Paul, that was being torn down in 1930. Evidently the color and composition and profile of that brick max very closely the brick on the Peale, which had vastly deteriorated, so they replaced that.
Jackson Gilman-Forlini: There was a brief period there where the city had a vacant building on his hands and they were trying to figure out what to do with it. So they decided to try to turn into a conference center, it never really worked out.
Photo: Historic American Buildings Survey E. H. Pickering, Photographer, September, 1936. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA
