Lauraville Historic District

About this property

Lauraville is a neighborhood in northeast Baltimore, Maryland. The neighborhood is bounded on the east by Harford Road, on the north by Echodale Avenue, on the south by Argonne Drive and Herring Run Park, and on the west side by Morgan Park and Morgan State University, with East Cold Spring Lane passing through the center of Lauraville. Lauraville is named for the daughter of John Henry Keene, who was a local property owner and businessman active after the American Civil War. Soon after the Civil War, Lauraville became an official village, with its own post office, and as a result its present name. Local residents who had lobbied for a local mail service were confronted by the Post Office's requirement for a village name as a mail destination. At a local meeting, chief supporter for the village post office, John Henry Keene, a local property owner who also operated a planing mill and lumber yard on the site of today's Bond Lumber, suggested that the community be named after his daughter Laura. Apparently that was acceptable to all present, for the area has been Lauraville since. Until Hamilton got its own post office, the Lauraville post office which was located in William Emmel's confectionery store on the west side of Harford Road, south of Southern Avenue, handled all of the mail service along Harford Road, between the Herring Run, and Parkville. In the last decades of the 19th century Lauraville became thoroughly self-sufficient. Blacksmiths and carpenters practiced their trades along Harford Road, and virtually any necessity could be bought locally for the house or farm. Truck farms covered the area and a wide variety of locally raised produce, as well as fresh meat, poultry, and dairy products were available. Weber's Park, a brewery, with adjoining picnic grounds and beer garden operated for many years along Harford Road in the Southern end of Lauraville, about opposite today's Overland Avenue. A fire station for the volunteer fire company was also built, on the site of the present modern engine house. In the early 1870s the Hall Springs Passenger Railway opened its limited horse-drawn passenger service on the Harford Road between the Hall Springs Hotel and a car barn south of 25th Street, where connections could be made for downtown Baltimore. While never wildly successful, the line operated continuously until it was electrified and extended north to Hamilton Avenue in the 1890s, and eventually absorbed into the United Railways and Electric Company street railway system. This growth and improvement of the Harford Road transit service coincided with the rapid development of Lauraville as a residential suburban community. First commuter transit, then automobile travel, made communities like Lauraville increasingly accessible to the Baltimore Downtown.

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.

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