St. Paul's Cemetery - Baltimore MD - Worldwide Cemeteries on Waymarking.com

Also known as Old St. Paul's Cemetery.

National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet

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, which is itself on the National Register. 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.

This new west wall was reconstructed as a mitigating measure (Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act) to minimize the adverse effects of the highway work on the cemetery. 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.

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 Gary 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 (National Register listed) 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.

Street address:
Redwood St. and Martin Luther King Blvd
Baltimore, MD United States
21201

City, Town, or Parish / State / Country: Baltimore, Maryland, USA Approximate number of graves: Over 200 Cemetery Status: Inactive Maintained Cemetery Website: [Web Link]

Visit Instructions:
Post an original, un-copywrited picture of the Cemetery into this Waymark gallery, along with any observations about the cemetery.

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Date Logged Log   09/11/2021 Don.Morfe visited it