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.
Neither the gas light business nor the mastodon and other exhibits sold enough admission tickets to clear the debt incurred from building the Baltimore Museum, and in 1829 creditors forced the Peales to sell the building at auction. The City of Baltimore acquired and converted it into Baltimore’s first City Hall in 1830.
The two branches of the city council met in the two largest galleries on the second floor, while the large room on the third floor, with acoustics ideally suited to amplify the human voice, served as an "Assembly Hall" for public meetings.
When City Hall moved into its new building catty-corner across the street in 1875, the Peale Museum was converted into Male and Female Colored School No. 1 – one of the first public schools available to people of color in the State of Maryland. Initially a grammar school, the Peale Museum building housed the first school to offer a secondary curriculum to Blacks in Baltimore. The larger rooms were divided to create more classrooms; you can still see most of the dividing wall added in this period in the Moses Williams Center on the ground floor.
You can learn more about the school at The Peale in the “Education Will Be Our Pride” exhibit and listen to its audio tour in the Smartify app.
