Baltimore built a church on brick legs over its own graveyard, and the space underneath became the catacombs.
Westminster Hall and Burying Ground stands at 519 West Fayette Street, on the corner of North Greene, on the west side of downtown Baltimore. The graveyard was established in January 1787 by the First Presbyterian Church, on land bought by a committee of laymen including William Patterson, the merchant who gave his name to Patterson Park and whose daughter Elizabeth married Jerome Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon, in 1803. The seller was Colonel John Eager Howard, a former commander of the Maryland Line in the Continental Army.
Over the next sixty years the burying ground filled with Baltimore's dead, including veterans of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. Then in July 1852 Westminster Presbyterian Church was built directly over it, its brick piers straddling gravestones and burial vaults. The spaces those piers left behind are what Baltimoreans came to call the catacombs.
For years the explanation was that a new city ordinance had banned cemeteries without an adjoining religious structure. Research in the early 1980s by the historian Michael Franch found no such ordinance. The real motive was less tidy: the congregation wanted an expansion church to serve the growing West End, as new churches were going up all over a rapidly expanding city, and wanted to protect an old-fashioned 18th century burying ground that 19th century Baltimore no longer considered a fitting place to lie.
The congregation was disorganized in 1977 and the University of Maryland's School of Law took over the care of the building and the ground. The complex was declared a national historic district in 1974.
Most visitors come for Edgar Allan Poe, who is buried here. Every 19 January an unidentified man known as the Poe Toaster left a tribute at the grave; the tradition seemingly ended in 2009. Inside, the fully restored 1882 Johnson pipe organ has over 1,300 working pipes, most of them invisible from the floor.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
