Five Minute Histories: The Peale Museum

Hello, everybody. This is Johns Hopkins with Baltimore Heritage, and it's Monday, May 11th, and we are charging into week seven of our Daily Histories videos, and today we're going to go down to the Peel Museum. But before we do that, I thought I'd try to answer a question that a number of you have sent in. When we first started these videos, I asked for your patience because our experience with doing videos was zero, and our budget for this project was zero. Those two things haven't changed, but some of you have asked how we do it, and I don't want to give away too many of our studio secrets, because I know George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are out there listening to our videos, watching them, looking for secrets, but I will share that our camera crew consists of one person, my 15-year-old daughter, Leah. Our audiovisual equipment consists entirely of her iPhone, and this grand panoramic view that you see of my living room is made possible because we have salvaged a partially broken tripod from our basement, propped it on top of two footstools that are stacked on top of each other, and rubber banded my daughter's phone to it. So there you go with our secrets. All right, on to the Peel Museum, but before we get there, let's talk about Rembrandt Peel and his family. Rembrandt Peel was the son of Charles Wilson Peel, who was born in Maryland but went to Philadelphia in the 1770s. He was an artist, a portrait artist, and a patriot, and he went to Philadelphia and painted pictures of some of our founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and John Hancock, and especially George Washington. He was the first portrait painter to paint Washington, and he did it more than 60 times over his lifetime. He was also a naturalist, and he started a museum in Philadelphia before our own, we're getting to that, but before our own, he started the Philadelphia American Museum, and in it he had all sorts of paintings, but he was also a naturalist. He, in 1801, founded the United States' first natural history exploration. They went out and shot a bunch of animals and taxidermed them and brought them back, collecting specimens. He also had a bunch of kids, and his kids have really unbelievable names, all named after famous artists. There was Titian Peel, Rubens Peel, there was, and of course, our own Rembrandt Peel. No pressure there, dad, to become an artist, and kind of amazingly, I believe most or all of them did become very well-known artists. So Rembrandt came down from Philadelphia in 1814, a little before that, but by 1814 he came to Baltimore and opened the Peel Museum, and the Peel Museum was first called Peel's Baltimore Museum and Gallery of Paintings. It is the oldest purpose-built museum in the country. It was built as a museum, and I believe it's the second oldest purpose-built museum in the world. There's one older in London, and if you're saying, hey, wait, what about all of those unbelievably old museums in Italy, say, well, they are older than our own 1814 Peel Museum, but they were built as the mansions for the palaces for the Medici or whatever. They were not built as museums. So Peel opens his museum in 1814, literally as the British are bombing Fort McHenry and trying to invade Baltimore. Somewhat ironically, during the bombardment, he brings his family to the museum, and he thinks that if the British get through, he's going to plead with them that, no, no, this isn't really a public museum. This is my house. See, here's my family. So ironically, his fallback position was to claim it wasn't a museum. But we held out, of course, in the war, and Peel opens his museum, and he's got all sorts of stuff in there. My friend and local historian Wayne Schaumburg calls the Peel a combination of an art gallery, a natural history museum, and a circus sideshow, and I think he might be right. There were portraits that his father and he painted of the founding fathers. Imagine an age when you certainly would not have seen George Washington. Maybe if you'd seen a likeness of him, it might have been a sketch in some sort of broadside, but imagine going to the Peel Museum and having an enormous four by six color portrait of George that you can take a look at your local hero. So he had paintings. He had natural history exhibits. He too, like his father, was a taxidermist, so he went out and got all sorts of stuff. He had a skeleton of a mastodon. That's pretty cool. And then he also had just weird stuff like bottles of the equivalent of the two-headed snakes that we have now. And for a nickel, you could go in and you could see all this wonderfully varied exhibits. But Peel had a problem because although he was doing okay getting his nickels, getting people in the door, he could only do it during the day because no amount of candlelight was going to be able to illuminate the wonderful portraits or the oddities that he had well enough. But he learned about this crazy thing called manufactured gas that was happening in Britain, and I believe his brother Rubens in Philadelphia was experimenting with. And he got a patent and he built a manufactured gas plant in his backyard. The British, I think, were building them hundreds of yards away from human habitation. Peel decided he could do it in his backyard. Miraculously, nothing bad happened. But he built one in his backyard and he illuminated the galleries of the Peel Museum. It was said that people would stand outside at night looking at the incredible bright light that was coming from his rooms. And he founded a company called the Baltimore Gas Company, which later went on to do all sorts of stuff. And today we know it as BG&E. And in fact, the Baltimore Gas Company, the BG&E precursor, built the first gas lights to illuminate a street in the United States. If you go down to Baltimore Street, essentially where the block is today, Baltimore and Holiday Streets, and don't look at the block stuff, but look at the northwest corner and you can see a replica of one of the first gas lights in the country to illuminate a street. All right, I think the Peel Museum went through a number of things. It was Baltimore City Hall for a while. It was the primary colored school number one for a while. And we're going to get to all that. In fact, on May 20th, our friends Nancy Proctor and David London of the Peel are going to walk us through a virtual tour. They're restoring the building and we're going to walk through with them and learn a lot more. But I'm going to close with one final story. In 1830, just before the Peel became City Hall, there was one final exhibit that they did. And it was, they went over, Rembrandt went over to a woman named Louisa Armistead, the widow of George Armistead, who commanded at Fort McHenry and who famously ordered the oversized flag to fly there during the War of 1812 bombardment. And they asked to borrow her flag. And so the Star-Spangled Banner flag, our national flag, its first public appearance was at the Peel Museum. It was on display there. So the next time when we're allowed, go down to the natural, I'm sorry, the American History Museum at the Smithsonian in Washington and look at that fantastic flag that is the centerpiece of the museum and have a little bit of Baltimore pride to know that it not only was made here and flown here, its first public exhibit was here at the Peel Museum as well. All right, thanks everybody and we'll see you tomorrow.