Resources for locating maps and understanding the mapping of Baltimore City:
I. Useful base maps and street indexes include:
Historical Growth of Baltimore
bc_historical_growth_sc5458_4_134-0006.pdf (1.127 Mb)
This map was created in 1977 by the Department of Public Works and documents the growth in boundaries of the City. While the copy here is not the best, it is possible to zoom into block numbers and streets as they were in 1977. If anyone comes across a better copy of the map (they used to be distributed free by the Department of Public Works), please let me know at edpapenfuse@gmail.com
Base map for Baltimore: 1935
Stieff, 1935 map of Baltimore City (47.588 Mb)
Attached is a large pdf of a map showing the streets and wards of Baltimore in 1935. The map accompanied Frederick Stieff’s The Government of a Great American City (Baltimore: H. G. Roebuck & Son, 1935).
Baltimore City Council Districts, 2008
2008 Council Districts (731.648 Kb)
compiled by Rebecca Gunby, 1993 (once a digital file, but electronic version lost when BCA Archives computers were stolen prior to the move to Druid Hill.
Note: An Aperture Number such as {M____} refers to RG 12 S.1. An Aperture Number such as {1-11[1]} refers to MS 10.
II. Researchers should familiarize themselves with, and download Google Earth. Historical maps for Baltimore city can be ‘rubber sheeted’ on to Google Earth with considerable accuracy, especially the Sanborn Insurance maps.
The Library of Congress Geography and Map Divsion maintains an excellent, if not complete bibliography of the Sanborn Insurance maps on line and has begun to provide excellent images on line as well, although not yet of Baltimore. The Digital Sanborn Maps provided by the Pratt library is one of the most important mapping resources for the City for the first half of the 20th Century and will be enormously helpful for providing a sense of place for your case study.
The Pratt Library site is:
http://prattlibrary.org and the databases are listed at:
http://www.prattlibrary.org/findanswers/databases.aspx?by=name&value=all
Note that to access them, you will need a Pratt Library card or one from a county library that has reciprocity with Pratt (I assume they all do).
Good images of the maps for use with Google Earth can be found at the Enoch Pratt web site, and from my http://editonline.us web site where I have begun to compile an on line atlas of all mapping of the City: http://mdhistory.net/msaref07/html/index.html
This is an on-going publication which is intended over time to be a comprehensive on line Atlas of published and unpublished maps relating to the City of Baltimore. I have provided this to aid researchers in the history of Baltimore and consider the images in it copyrighted as well as any annotations. Feel free to use the Atlas for educational and personal use free of copyright restrictions, but if you should make reference to any of the plates, or wish to use them in a publication, please use the URL where you found the plate and the date you accessed it as your citation, and write me for permission to publish plates at edp@mdsa.net.
1) Baltimore City and County Atlases, 1876-1915 (in black and white unless otherwise indicated)
1876, Baltimore City, Hopkins Atlas (JHU copy), images 785/868,
1879, Baltimore City, Sanborn Insurance maps, Volume I, images 566/594
1880, Baltimore City, Sanborn Insurance maps, Volume II, images 597/625
1879/1880, Baltimore City, Sanborn Insurance maps (color plates), images 626/688
1885, Baltimore City, Bromley Atlas, Volume 1, North West Section, images 1/85
1886, Baltimore City, Bromley Atlas, Volume 2, North East Section, images 86/158
1889, Baltimore City, Thompson Atlas, 21/22 Wards, images 479/565
1889, Baltimore City, Thompson Atlas, 21/22 Wards (color plates), images 889/964
1896, Baltimore City, Bromley Atlas, images 159/262
1898, Baltimore County, Bromley Atlas, images 263/371
1906, Baltimore City, Bromley Atlas, images 372/478
1914, Baltimore City, Topographical Survey, images 689/7291915, Baltimore County, Bromley Atlas (Isekoff copy), images 730/784
1915, Baltimore County, Bromley Atlas (Whitney copy), images 869/888
3) Baltimore City Block maps, part 1, as of April 2005
4) Baltimore City Block maps, part 2, as of April 2005
III. Jim Gillispie of the Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University, is overseeing an excellent program to digitize maps and Aerial Photographs of Maryland with emphasis on the Baltimore region. See the web page at https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/handle/1774.2/32585
Gillispie, Jim, Govt. Pubs./Maps/Law Library, Head, Govt. Pubs./Maps/Law Library, 410/516-8360,
jeg@jhu.edu
Collections in this community
- Aerial Photography
- Baltimore City Sheet Maps
- Baltimore County Sheet Maps
- Baltimore Development Plans
- GIS Data
- Maryland Atlases
- Maryland Historical Topographic Maps (Scales 1:62,500; 1:31,680; 1:125,000)
- Maryland State Sheet Maps
- Other Maryland County Sheet Maps
Recent Submissions
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(New York: W. Williams, 1848)
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(Baltimore: Savings Bank of Baltimore, 1954)
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(Baltimore: Tourist Bureau Baltimore Association of Commerce, 1946)
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(Baltimore: Board of Municipal and Zoning Appeals, 1958)
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(Boston: Thomas & Andrews, 1812)
IV. placing court cases on the map of Baltimore City-a poor person’s GIS approach
http://mappingmaryland.net, provides a geographical overview of sample court cases relating to Baltimore City. You should be able to search on the address and locate a case or follow the hyperlinks that are provided below.
In attempting to find the geographical context today of a case on a modern map, Baltimore City’s imap, http://maps.baltimorecity.gov/imap/Default.aspx
should prove helpful, but should be used with caution. Street name changes, renumbering schemes, and block number confusion between City and State over time may make it difficult to locate the site of a case or the residences of the litigants. Also, the imap service is not always accurate as to address. When first used to locate Poe’s grave, it placed Westminster Church a few blocks away from its actual location. I suspect this has been corrected by now, but accurate on-line mapping , as anyone who has used the various versions of Mapquest knows, may get you to the wrong place.
To illustrate finding the history of a property involved in a case, one of the more difficult examples was chosen, the location of the property at the heart of Maryland Port Administration v. QC Corp., 310 Md 379, 1987, thought to be once identified on maps as 3800 Hawkins Point Road.
In using imap to locate 3800 Hawkins Point Road, only the street name can be used, being careful to include road in the drop down box and not the address box. Even then, the closest you will come to 3800 is 3500 Hawkins Point Road. Still, the imap provides a current neighborhood view including census tract data, and other useful current information about that location, including 2006 aerial photography.
For any property in Maryland still on the tax rolls, you can also use http://mdlandrec.net (apply for a user name and password–it is free), but first you will need to obtain the block number in which the property of interest is located. For any current address that is on the tax rolls, you should be able to obtain a current block number from the State Department of Assessment and Taxation web site, but again caution needs to be exercised. The Court system which records deeds has been known to use block numbers that are different from those used on the tax rolls.
At the SDAT site, with a Hawkins Point Road property inquiry, the closest parcel still on the rolls (2008/11/4) is
3510 Hawkins Point Road, which is Ward - 25 Section - 09 Block - 7005 Lot - 017.
The complicating factor in attempting to locate the property at issue in this case, however, is that the state, meaning the Maryland Port Authority, owned the land and leased it to the QC corporation. That makes finding the real estate records relating to the property difficult. As the Court of Appeals pointed out in the case,
“2 It appears that M[aryland] P[ort] Authority is both the owner of the underlying fee and a sub-sublessee of its own property.” In addition the Court also pointed out that the land was not always in Baltimore City (not until 1919). ”1 In 1883, when the area was part of Anne Arundel County, the City of Baltimore established near Hawkins Point a quarantine station against contagious diseases brought toward the City by water. See
Baltimore City v. Fairfield Improvement Co., 87 Md. 352, 359, 39 A. 1081, 1082 (1898).” (http://www.msa.md.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc5300/sc5339/000209/000000/000025/restricted/msa_sc5458_000051_003519-5.pdf, pdf, pp. 1, 3).
Still, it is possible to find the applicable Baltimore City Block number by recourse to the Baltimore City Circuit Court Block maps. The one for Thoms Cove is on line at:
http://mdhistory.net/msaref07/bc_circuit_ct_block_maps01/html/bc_circuit_ct_block_maps01-0025.html
There you will find that the whole area involved in the Court case is recorded under block 7016.
BC block book map detail for Block 7016
With this block number, you then can turn to the block books and find as complete a record of the ownership of the property in question as was recorded by the Clerk of Court for Baltimore City. Note that leases and sub-leases may not be found among the deeds recorded at the Court. All State Property is supposed to be recorded at the State Archives through files transferred by the Maryland Department of General Services according to the Annotated Code of Maryland. What that means is that leases of the Maryland Port Authority ultimately should be recorded at the Archives.
While using mdlandrec.net to access the block books is much simpler and more efficient than going to the courthouse, patience is required. Downloading time is slow because of the size of the images necessary to provide legibility. For example, just to access and download the block book pages for 7016 for 1918-1925 over a DSL line requires about a 10 minute wait. (BALTIMORE CITY SUPERIOR COURT (Block Book, New Annex) 6979-7065, 1918-1925 [MSA CE 10-36] beginning at: f. 0096). Note that once you have a block number you can determine what block books to search by using the block search feature in mdlandrec.net, which will return the following:
The following block books contain Block No. 7016
|
Dates |
Blocks(s) |
Accession No. |
|---|---|---|
|
1918-1925 |
006979-007065 |
|
|
1926-1939 |
006811-007026 |
|
|
1940-1946 |
006981-007065 |
|
|
1947-1953 |
006981-007070 |
|
|
1954-1959 |
006981-007066 |
|
|
1960-1966 |
006981-007066 |
|
|
1967-1976 |
006981-007066 |
|
|
1977-1988 |
006551-007090 |
The effort to trace the history of the property in question may indeed prove worthwhile. As an example, the pages of the block book for 1967-1976 related to block 7016 are attached to this html in a pdf derived from the on-line images. Clearly this is a block of public and private land owners who would be affected by toxic wastes dumped anywhere in the vicinity.
Md Port Admin v. QC Corp
1.1 waste dumping; site at 3800 Hawkins Point Rd, Baltimore; 6th district, 25th ward
Mangum v. State’s Attorney
2.1 Deep Throat case; North Cinema at 7 E. North Ave., Baltimore; 3rd district, 12th ward
Murray v. Curlett (1962)
school prayer case
3.1 William J. Murray III attended Woodbourne Junior High School, 900 Woodbourne Ave. (now Chinquapin Middle School) 3rd district, 27th ward
3.2 Madalyn E. Murray lived at 1526 Winford Rd. (1961 directory) 3rd district, 27th ward
Braverman v. Bar Association (1956)
4.1 Maurice L. Braverman’s home address during trial (c. 1952-1956): 3817 Lewin Ave (1956 directory) 5th district, 28th ward
4.2 Office Mercantile Bank Building, 201-207 E. Baltimore (1956 directory) 1st district, 4th ward
Schwab v. Coleman
5.1 Simon Schwab: home 3808 Glen Ave(1942 directory) 5th district, 27th ward
5.2 Shearith Israel Congregation 5813 Park Heights (1942 directory) 5th district, 27th ward
Ghinger v. Pearson
6.1 Craven P. Pearson: home West Augustine Ave., Elkridge (1930 Census)
6.2 Horace E. Wennagle: home 24 Mallowhill Ave (1929 directory) 5th district, 28th ward
6.3 John J. Ghingher, Bank Commissioner of Maryland: MD Bank Comm in Union Trust Building (1933 Md Manual) Baltimore and St. Paul (1930 directory) 1st district, 4th ward
Taylor v. M & CC
Back River sewage plant
7.1 Nettie (Taylor) Mitchell owned property called Mitchell’s Back River Park at Eastern Ave. and Back River; see 1915 BA Bromley, pl. 43
http://mdhistory.net/msaref07/bc_ba_atlases_1876_1915/html/bc_ba_atlases_1876_1915-0772.html
1930 census lists her living on River Neck Rd.
Legal description of property in BA land recs.
Hotel: WPC 378, p. 488
Store: WPC 413, p. 368
House: WPC 388, p. 165
V. Secondary sources re: the mapping of Baltimore City:
In addition to the Maryland State Archives Atlas of Historical Maps of Maryland (2003), available only in print, see:
Smith, Dawn Beitler. Index to the Map of the City and County of Balitmore, 1850, by J. C. Sidney and P. J. Browne, n. d. (searchable pdf derived from uncopyrighted typescript printed by Family Line Publications, Westminster, Maryland).