Qualla: Druid Hill Park

Druid Hill Park: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Scott218, CC BY-SA 4.0. On July 11, 1948, an interracial group of players organized by the Young Progressives of Maryland walked onto the white-only courts at Druid Hill Park in northwest Baltimore and started a match. The Baltimore police arrested twenty-four of them. The incident was the subject of the last public column written by H.L. Mencken, the famously acerbic Baltimore Sun writer, who used the occasion to condemn the city's segregationist policies. The protestors' names are now carved into a marker next to the Rawlings Conservatory glasshouse along Druid Park Lake Drive. The 745-acre park where the protest happened was already nearly a century old at that point - one of the three oldest landscaped public parks in the United States, opened in 1860, the same decade as Frederick Law Olmsted's Central Park in New York and a few years before San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Druid Hill was here first; what changed slowly was who got to enjoy it.

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Image: Scott218 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Druid Hill Park: A One-Cent Park Tax

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lester Spence from Baltimore, USA, CC BY 2.0. The land had been part of an estate called Auchentorlie, owned by Dr. George Buchanan, one of the seven commissioners who established Baltimore Town in 1729. Buchanan's country estate northwest of the colonial town included 579 of the 745 acres that make up the park today. Colone...

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Image: Lester Spence from Baltimore, USA | CC BY 2.0

Druid Hill Park: The Reservoir at the Top of the Hill

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Baltimore Heritage from Baltimore, MD, USA, CC0. Druid Lake, built in 1863 in the southern end of the park, is one of the largest earthen-dammed lakes in the country. For more than 160 years it served as a reservoir for the Baltimore public water system. In 2024, that function ended; two large underground tanks at the western e...

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Image: Baltimore Heritage from Baltimore, MD, USA | CC0

Druid Hill Park: The Color Line at the Courts

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Baltimore Heritage from Baltimore, MD, USA, CC0. Druid Hill Park's recreational facilities were segregated from the day the park opened. By the early 1890s tennis had grown popular in Baltimore and Washington, and the American Tennis Association - founded specifically to develop Black tennis players in the face of exclusion fro...

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Image: Baltimore Heritage from Baltimore, MD, USA | CC0

Druid Hill Park: The Zoo and the Conservatory

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Scott218, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Maryland Zoo in Baltimore, originally the Baltimore City Zoo, opened in Druid Hill in 1876 - making it the third-oldest zoo in the United States, after Philadelphia's and Cincinnati's. The Mansion House, the original Rogers estate home built in 1801, became the zoo's administ...

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Image: Scott218 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Druid Hill Park: Dru Hill

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit en:User:Steelplug, Public domain. Locals call it Dru Hill - the Baltimorese contraction that gave its name to the R&B group of the same name, formed in Baltimore in 1992 and named for the park where the founding members grew up. The park survived the freeway era better than many urban parks. Interstate 83, the Jo...

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Image: en:User:Steelplug | Public domain