Monthly Archives: June 2011

Old Mount Zion Lutheran Church, Feagaville, Maryland

This frame church, located on the Jefferson Pike just outside Frederick, Maryland, lost its tower and other features when it was converted into apartments about 1950.  Does it still exist?

According to the Feagaville Survey District document that was filed in 1980, the church was built in 1880. The building to the right was a stone schoolhouse built ca. 1840-1850; perhaps it had been whitewashed. The hand-drawn map accompanying the survey document locates the church just north of Feagaville Lane.

A newer, brick church, surrounded by its cemetery, thrives just a few miles away at Mount Zion and Mount Phillip roads.

The history of this church is confusing. The History of Frederick County, Maryland, Volume One, published in 1910, speaks of the church being built 1819, but says it was a stone structure. There is no mention of a frame structure. But, as mentioned above, the 1980 survey says this frame church was built in 1880. The History mentions a new stone church being built on the site in 1885 (p. 503)–but nothing about a brick church.

A contemporary photograph taken by Jody Brumage shows a stone above the new church door on Mount Phillip Road with the date 1885.

Stereoview of Christ Protestant Episcopal Church

This stereoview of Christ Protestant Episcopal Church, St. Paul and Chase streets, Baltimore, was probably published by William M. Chase in the 1870s. The view looks east from E. Chase Street, toward St. Paul Street.

Christ Church, organized in 1797, was the second Episcopal church in Baltimore. The congregation occupied a variety of locations before the present church building was constructed at a cost of $125,000 (Henry Elliot Shepherd, A History of Baltimore, Maryland, S. B. Nelson publisher, 1898, pp. 217-218).

E. Francis Baldwin and Bruce Price designed the Gothic Revival structure in the Mount Vernon area in 1869, when the new ecclesiastical architectural style was first being introduced into the U.S.  According to The Architecture of Baltimore: A Pictorial History, this particular church’s style was known as French or Norman Gothic:

Its details are elegantly restrained and carried out in rough-faced white marble–narrow lancet windows, carved stone trefoils, pointed-arch doorways and window lintels, stone columns with leafy medieval capitals, and carved stone rosettes. The massing is symmetrical with a tall main tower and secondary smaller towers and spires (199).

This beautiful and historic church structure has been occupied by an independent non-denominational African-American congregation since the mid-1990s. Today the church is called the New Refuge Deliverance Cathedral.

Christ Church is located three blocks directly north of Mount Vernon Place, and is part of a historic neighborhood rich in cultural and architectural landmarks such as the Washington Monument and the Walters Art Gallery.

The fashionable Mount Vernon neighborhood developed in the 1830s in the elegant streets and parks laid out around the Washington Monument by Charles and William Howard on their father’s former estate, Belvidere (Architecture of Baltimore, 118). The area remained the epicenter of wealthy and cultured Baltimore until the late nineteenth century.

View a contemporary photograph of Christ Church taken by the author of the Monument City blog.

Sunrise Near Baltimore, August 24 1907

In mid-August, 1907, an unknown photographer named Ferdinand W. Hahn–perhaps an amateur, perhaps a tourist from abroad–took a series of photographs documenting a trip to New York City, Norfolk, Virginia, and Washington, DC.

I came upon the prints on an internet auction site, and I couldn’t resist trying to track Hahn’s holiday.

Each print is dated and its location noted in black ink. The earliest, dated August 15th, 1907 to about August 20th, 1907, were taken at Sea Breeze Beach and Midland Beach on Staten Island, and Coney Island.

As the days of late August go by, there are photos of the North German Lloyd ocean liner Kronprinzessin Cecilie docked at Hoboken, New Jersey; Manhattan, the Brooklyn Bridge and New York harbor; battleships off Hampton Roads, Virginia; snaps of the Jamestown Exposition at Hampton Roads, and finally Washington, DC.

There the series ends.

I suspected Hahn was a passenger on the Kronzprinzessin Cecilie, but no one of that name is listed as a passenger of that ship when it arrived in New York on August 14, 1907.

Most are fairly commonplace vacation snaps. This one, along with another of the bay off Norfolk, stood out from the others.

I am not enough of a technician to confirm that it is a silver gelatin print. I only know that the rich warmth of color, the deeply shadowed sails outlined against the sky, the meandering track of the boat’s reflection in on the water’s surface, leave me breathless with  hushed anticipation of a Chesapeake Bay dawn.