John Morris, pastor of First Lutheran Church in Baltimore, worried about the piety of the city's citizens. It was the mid-1800s and he thought he had found a way to affect the moral attitudes for generations.
The community and seminary he envisioned, Lutherville and the Lutheran Female Seminary, will be the subject of a walking tour offered Saturday, June 13, by Baltimore Heritage. The tour, A Seminary for Women and a Planned Community: A Walking Tour of Historic Lutherville, takes place from 10 a.m. to noon., beginning at St. Paul's Lutheran Church.
Lutherville began with the pastor's desire to build a school for young women, a boarding school in the country, but near the railroad. Educating young ladies, he decided, would improve families into the future.
"The mother was the moral backbone of the household," said Ralph Welsh, a Lutherville historian, who will lead the June 13 tour.
Morris's plans for a school for young women began with building a new neighborhood to surround it in 1852. To fund construction, he and his partners, Benjamin Kurtz and Morris's brother Charles Morris,decided to sell off lots. Morris bought the first lot and built a Victorian cottage he called Oak Grove. "It set the style for the whole village then," Welsh said.
"This is one of the first completely laid-out communities," Welsh said. The seminary and St. Paul's Church provided the focal points for the community. The houses between these two sites, along Francke and Morris and Seminary Avenue, were mostly summer cottages built by wealthy city families.
Families closed up their townhouses and moved children, servants and furnishings to Lutherville for the long hot summer. Men who worked in the city relied on the train to take them downtown.
"The railroad was very important to the whole thing," Welsh said.
Many of those homes retain their Victorian elegance. Morris's house became the teenage home of another Lutherville notable, filmmaker John Waters.
Welsh, a 30-plus-year resident of Lutherville, will begin the tour at St. Paul's Lutheran Church, 1609 Kurtz Ave., and then the group will wind their way through the leafy community with a stop inside College Manor, the site of the original Lutheran Female Seminary.
He has a collection of photographs taken in the early 1900s by a woman photographer. He plans to bring them and compare them with the properties as they stand today.
"And I have some very good stories," Welsh said. He will talk about village life, the Civil war and the neighborhood's personalities, including Waters and Divine, who also grew up in Lutherville.
"I've always been interested in local history," Welsh said. He said he began researching Lutherville before he built his house in the neighborhood. The historic aspects attracted him to the area. "It piqued my interest," he said.
Welsh, who has served as historian for the Lutherville Community Association several times, has offered walking tours of the area in the past. This time, he approached Baltimore Heritage with the idea of a walking tour.
"We have never done a tour of Lutherville," said Johns Hopkins, executive director of Baltimore Heritage. "This will be our first."
The nonprofit historic and architectural preservation organization offers more than 50 tours a year, according to Hopkins. Some are walking, others are by bus or bike. Some go through entire neighborhoods while a few take a look at a single location, he said.
Hopkins said participants could expect "a leisurely stroll with lots of stops." He advised comfortable shoes for the two-hour walk.
At College Manor, visitors will be greeted by Bunny Reynaud, who grew up on the property and is now president and director of nursing for the assisted living home, according to Judy Mace, director of admissions and marketing.
"Historically, she knows a lot," Mace said of Renaud. After the seminary building burned down, a college was built on the property and three generation have lived there as it was transformed from a college to its current use as an assisted living home, Mace said. Visitors will have an opportunity to see the first floor of the 1911 building, including the living room and dining room and the chapel, which is notable for its stained glass.
Welsh said the seminary stop will be at about at the two-hour mark, to give participants an opportunity to sit down and rest. "Then there will be a few other houses after that," he added. Welsh said he has offered similar tours in the past and they wound up being about three hours. The seminary stop will give participants an option of continuing on or stopping there.
The tour begins at 10 a.m. at St. Paul's, which is also the end point. To register for the tour, which costs $15 a person, go to baltimoreheritage.org/tours.