St. Paul's Cemetery, Baltimore Maryland

Date added: October 27, 2024

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Maryland
Cemetery

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Old St. Paul's Cemetery is one of the two oldest cemeteries in Baltimore and one of the very few remaining examples of an important transitional stage in the development of cemeteries in the city. It bridges the gap between the churchyard burial ground of the eighteenth century and the rural cemetery movement of the 1830s. It is an important expression of the funerary arts of architecture, sculpture and landscaping in Baltimore in this conservative period just prior to the flowering of Gothic revival. St. Paul's provides an invaluable record of American material culture as it evolved in Baltimore through the nineteenth century, particularly the first five decades. Nowhere is there a better continuous record of Baltimore's material progress in these neglected decades than in St. Paul's. The graves at this cemetery represent people of transcendent importance in the development of Baltimore and Maryland. For many of them, their plot in Old St. Paul's is the only material tie still left in the city where they resided.

Old St. Paul's Cemetery was developed during the period in the state's history when Baltimore emerged as the most significant city in Maryland. Throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century. Baltimore was the state's cultural, financial, commercial, industrial, and social center. By the close of the nineteenth century, nearly half of the state's population lived in Baltimore. Almost everyone of great wealth lived or worked in Baltimore.

Old St. Paul's Burial Ground is one of the very few remaining examples of an important transitional stage in the development of cemeteries in Baltimore. It bridges the gap between the churchyard burial ground of the eighteenth century and the rural cemetery movement of the late 1830s. As such, it is the rare relic of those decades when burial grounds were being moved out from congested urban centers, but before the new concept of burial that led to Mt. Auburn and Greenmount, cemeteries in Baltimore was introduced. It had a close counterpart in Westminster Cemetery until that burial ground translated itself backward into eighteenth-century style by building a church over a portion of the cemetery. St. Paul's is an important relic of the funerary arts of architecture, sculpture and landscaping in a conservative period just prior to the flowering of Gothic revival.

The conservatism reflects currents of Baltimore and national history much broader than just the development of burial practices. As the seat of the most populous parish in Maryland, and as part of the formerly established church, St. Paul's cemetery reflects a major theme in this period, the resolution of the tension between the values of an old landed gentry and those of a new mercantile elite. Evidence of the resolution of this tension abounds in the cemetery, in patterns of burial, in clustering of lot owners, and in the family histories recorded on tombstones.

As a protected place, and in contrast to the streets outside its walls, the cemetery has retained clear evidence of the flow of changing styles throughout the years. Succeeding generations, rather than replacing old stones and tombs as they became dated stylistically simply added the new beside the old, giving an unbroken record of architectural and sculptural styles throughout these years. Nowhere is there a better continuous record of developments in significant parts of Baltimore's material culture in these decades than in St. Paul's plots.

Among those buried at St. Paul are countless civic officials at all levels, members and organizers of the first city council, state legislators, governors, senators, congressmen, heroes of the Revolution and the War of 1812, judges, including an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, philanthropists, founders of banks, public works, and railroads, and even a signer of the Declaration of Independence. And for many of these individuals, their plot in Old St. Paul's is the only material tie to them left in the city they helped to establish.

St. Paul's people range from Revolutionary War heroes to common soldiers, from U.S. senators, governors and judges to ordinary tradespeople and their families, from founders of railroads, banks and insurance companies and patrons of charitable, educational and cultural institutions to widows and orphans. They cover essentially the whole spectrum of those who established Baltimore as the country's second most important city in the first half of the nineteenth century. Some of the more notable among those buried there are:

Samuel Chase, 1741-1811, signer of the Declaration of Independence, Associate Justice, U.S. Supreme Court.

The Reverend William Thomas Chase, 1730-1780, third rector of St. Paul's and father of Samuel Chase.

John Eager Howard, 1752-1827, Revolutionary War hero, U.S. Senator and Governor of Maryland; and his son George Howard, 1798-1846, Governor of Maryland.

Daniel Dulany, the Younger, 1722-1797, Secretary and Attorney-General of Maryland before the Revolution. Known for handing down the legal opinion that the colonists, although British subjects, were not represented in Parliament and therefore under English common law not subject to taxation.

The Right Reverend James Kemp, d. 1827, Second Episcopal Bishop of Maryland and concurrently rector of St. Paul's.

James and William Hindeman, 1741-1830 and 1743-1822, brothers, who between them sat in a number of state offices, in the U.S. Senate and Congress.

George Armistead, 1780-1818, hero of the defense of Baltimore against the British in 1814.

General Lewis Addison Armistead, 1817-1863, served in Mexican-American War; wounded at Battle of Antietam and died at Gettysburg where men under his command made the farthest advance by any Confederate troop.

Isaac McKim, 1776-1838, merchant, patron of early clipper ships, member of Congress.

William McCreery, 1750-1814, merchant, member of U.S. Congress.

Robert Cary Long, Sr., 1770-1833, Baltimore architect of Davidge Hall and other historic buildings.

Edward Biddle, member of Congress and Speaker of the Assembly of Pennsylvania.

Influential Baltimore merchants and philanthropists, Daniel Bowly, 1745-1807, George Hoffman, 1767-1834, William Hollins, 1755-1810, Archibald Campbell, 1747-1805, Richard Curzon, 1726-1805, John Dorsey, 1735-1810, John Donnell, 1752-1827, FW. Brune, 1776-1860, William Goodwin, died 1809, John Merryman, 1736-1814, and Nicholas Rogers, 1753-1822.

First burial place of Tench Tilghman, aide-de-camp to General Washington, who carried news of the British surrender to Congress; and Francis Scott Key, author of the Star Spangled Banner. Key, who died in Baltimore, was buried first in the Howard vault and moved later to Frederick, Maryland. Tilghman was buried in the cemetery for more than a century; his family removed his remains and his marker at the time when vandalism in St. Paul's was particularly severe.

The cemetery contains thousands of burials associated with St. Paul's parish, and it includes reburials from the parish's two earlier cemeteries as well as reburials from the cemetery's western section which was destroyed by road construction. Only a small portion of these burials remain marked today.

Site Description

Old St. Paul's Cemetery, a 2.4 acre walled cemetery in Baltimore City, bounded by Lombard and Redwood Streets, Martin Luther King Boulevard, and the University of Maryland professional campus on the east, belongs to Old St. Paul's Church, at Charles and Saratoga Streets. Laid out ca. 1799, it is the third burial ground of the parish. It exemplifies the movement at the beginning of the nineteenth century to transfer the burial ground out of the churchyard to a 'suburban' location. Some of the bodies from the original cemetery and all of those from the second one were transferred into this cemetery by 1811. Its boundaries remained the same from 1799 until 1974 when four-tenths of an acre on the western side of the cemetery was sold by the St. Paul's vestry to the City of Baltimore for the construction of Martin Luther King Boulevard. This was the least used section of the cemetery, and the markers and remains were relocated to the east.

The present walls apparently exist as they were originally built, except that to the west where the wall was destroyed by the highway work and a close copy of the original rebuilt in 1976. The east, south, and west walls are of stone capped with granite; the north wall is of red brick laid in common bond with a corbelled ledge and recessed panels divided by brick pilasters. The gate, of unknown date, is of wrought iron. A small portion of the east wall has fallen into the cemetery, and the north brick wall is now in dangerous condition.

St. Paul's was laid out in a grid pattern of paths intersecting at right angles, with the graves arranged in an east-west fashion, which is very typical of cemeteries of this date. The only entrance gate is located to the north on Redwood Street. From it a carriage drive runs in a straight line south to the wall along Lombard Street. This and a central east-west path divide the cemetery into four quadrants. The burial ground is divided into a series of rectangular bays, with narrow walkways provided between them. The plots are usually twenty-four feet in depth and their widths are multiples of eight feet.

Aesthetically, the most important monuments are the vaults. They range from several late Federal style brick ones, which are unique in Baltimore, to some two dozen neo-classical mound crypts. Most share a common feature, their structural form. An underground burial chamber was topped by a brick barrel vault springing six to eight feet from the ground line. Each end of the vault was closed by a facade, plain at the rear, decorated at the front. The barrel vault was covered with soil and grass, and when viewed from the north or south, the cemetery seems to contain many small grassy hillocks.

The one marble "designer" vault in the cemetery, that of John Eager Howard, deserves close study as the probable product of a recognized architect of the period, possibly Robert Mills or Robert Cary Long. Most of the individual markers in the cemetery are rather conservative tablets, ground slabs or raised slabs on brick supports.

The cemetery is essentially a white, Christian one, and was one of ten such Baltimore cemeteries in 1800, of which St. Paul's and Westminster survive. There is apparently one family of converted Jews in St. Paul's but rumors that slaves were buried in the walkways is not substantiated by written records. The earliest interments were in the southeastern quadrant of the cemetery, which was for half a century the most fashionable burial place in Baltimore. Here are the Howard, Hollingsworth, Hindeman, Hoffman, Bowly, Curzon, Merryman, Rogers, and Dorsey lots. Twenty-seven of the fifty plot owners there gave their names to Baltimore streets or to sections of the city. Another fashionable avenue developed to the west and is lined with a dozen or so family vaults. Between are hundreds of smaller plots, and a portion in the extreme west (no longer within the cemetery) was reserved for charity lots. Burials in the cemetery certainly numbered in the thousands, although the number of extant markers today is only a few hundred. St. Paul's Register, for example, cites 456 burials in the 1830s; but Green Mount Cemetery, which opened in that decade, drained off the younger generations and in the 1920s, only twenty-two were buried in St. Paul's and seventeen were transferred out to other locations. The last known burial was in the early 1940s. It is essentially an early nineteenth century burial ground.