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 6
Jackson Gilman-Forlini (00:01)So there wasn't much left in the building for when I started in 2012 there were some... Actually it's funny that the city was using it as a place to store memorabilia from a former mayor's administration, Mayor Kurt Schmoke. All of his awards and diplomatic gifts that he had received as mayor were being archived in the basement. Many of which has now been removed and actually sent to the Baltimore City Archives for proper storage.
Jackson Gilman-Forlini: I did learn that in terms of the buildings earliest period, there was in the 1970s, an excavation of a portion of the basement to create additional storage space down there. There was an archeological excavation done, or archeological survey done of that ground as part of that project.
Jackson Gilman-Forlini: Those artifacts still exist. They are now at the Maryland Archeological Conservation Lab in Calvert County, Maryland. They were conserved, and I was able to go through some of them a few months ago. There's some interesting stuff. There's a lot of pottery. Also, there's a sword, like ceremonial sabre that had been thrown in there. I guess they'd been using the basement as something of a garbage dump. So there's a cool size of material culture that came out of that, that's still available for research if anyone would want to go through it.
