Franklin Street Presbyterian Church and Parsonage

About this property

Franklin Street Presbyterian Church and Parsonage is a historic Presbyterian church located at 100 West Franklin Street at Cathedral Street, northwest corner in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. The church is a rectangular Tudor Gothic building dedicated in 1847, with an addition in 1865. The front features two 60 foot flanking octagonal towers are also crenelated and have louvered belfry openings and stained glass Gothic-arched windows. The manse / parsonage at the north end has similar matching walls of brick, heavy Tudor-Gothic window hoods, and battlements atop the roof and was built in 1857. This church was incorporated in 1844 by a group of men from the First Presbyterian Church then located at the northwest corner of East Fayette Street and North Street (now Guilford Avenue) in downtown (later relocated in 1854 to West Madison Street and Park Avenue in Mount Vernon-Belvedere neighborhood after selling their previous third church building of 1790-95 to the Federal Government which built a U.S. Courthouse there [to 1889, replaced again 1932] dedicated in 1860 by 16th President James Buchanan). They felt the need for a new church in that fast-growing northern section of the city formerly "Howard's Woods" of Col. John Eager Howard's (Revolutionary War commander of the famed "Maryland Line" regiment of the Continental Army) country estate "Belvidere" (mansion located at intersection of North Calvert and East Chase Streets, razed 1875) where the Washington Monument was erected with its four surrounding park squares just two blocks from their new building. Franklin Street Church was also located on "Cathedral Hill" in the southern part of the community bordering downtown Baltimore to the south and across the street from the old Baltimore Cathedral (Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary) of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore, erected 1806-1821 and designed by Benjamin Latrobe - first Catholic cathedral constructed in America. Later in 1882–1886, philanthropist Enoch Pratt founded his central library for the new Enoch Pratt Free Library then facing West Mulberry Street at Cathedral, a block further south which was replaced in 1931-33 by a new central library building facing Cathedral Street and encompassing the entire block and now directly across Franklin Street from the F.S.P.C. In 1973, the two historic downtown area congregations reunited to form The First and Franklin Street Presbyterian Church and was centered at the First Church site on West Madison and Park. The Franklin Street building was used by the merged congregation for a time and then sold to a fundamentalist independent Protestant congregation and later re-sold to the present "New Unity Church Ministries".

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

More in Baltimore County

Historic places, battles, and census history across Baltimore County.

More historic places in Maryland

Browse all historic places in Maryland.

Conflict records

Explore 19,000+ military engagements across American history.

Maryland history

Colonial settlement, territorial period, and statehood narrative.