Faded Hints of the Past Series: Border State Savings Bank

North-facing, Backside of
4 Park Avenue,
Photographed: 11 Sept 2013

   I realized that evidence from Baltimore's history is slipping away in front of our very eyes - we go about our business and daily lives not realizing that those remaining ties to the past are unraveling by the day.   A new investigative series of the Charm City History blog will be known as "Faded Hints of the Past" which will capture the slightest remnants of markers, fading painted (or ghost) ads , cornerstones, doorplates, or any other descriptor that provide small clues that offer a small window into a piece of Baltimore's past.

(Photo credit: Google street view)

   We begin with a building situated at 100 Park Avenue, the downtown Baltimore corner of W. Fayette Street.  While standing on Marion Street and next to the old SS Kresge building, one can look south upon the back side of its plain, exterior brick wall.  Almost obscured by the elements from numerous years, one can barely make out the white background, dark letter painted painted ghost ad on the north-facing, backside, of this late 19th-century four-story brick building - it reads "BORDER STATE SAVINGS BANK".

   Currently, occupied by the Barenburg Eye Associates, we set out to determine whether this ghost ad clue had anything to do with the beautifully architected corner building with a victorian-styled roof, adorned with a single conical dome, upon which it is painted.

Border State Savings Bank ad, 1892,
announcing an impending relocation.

  As it turns out, a single legal notice appeared in the "Special Notices" section of the Baltimore Sun on July 17, 1875 announces to its readers:  "Save Your Money in the Border State Savings Institute of Baltimore City.  This institution, incorporated during the year 1874 for the purpose of a SAVINGS BANK for the receipt of deposits of money and allowing interest on the same, has opened an office at No. 646 West Baltimore Street."  [The location is currently occupied by the buildings of the University of Maryland School of Dentistry]

  Shortly after its incorporation, it moved to a three-story brick building at the southeast corner of S. Poppleton and W. Baltimore Streets which was demolished and replaced by a building that is part of the University of Maryland, BioPark campus.  By 1892, according to an ad in the Directory of Charitable and Beneficient Organizations, the Border State Savings Bank was preparing for a move further west in Baltimore.

1907 Advertisment
(Courtesy: MD State Archives)

Henry F. Brauns
(Photo Courtesy:
BaltimoreArchitecture.org)

  The American Architect and Building News (Apr-Jun 1892) announced that an architect had been chosen for the location of the Border State Savings Bank's first owned-building.  Henry F. Brauns (1845-1917) who, according to a biography on the BaltimoreArchitecture.org website, was a Baltimore-based architect responsible for numerous building in the city. His   Prior to this building, he architected the William Knabe & Company piano factory building (1869) which was once at the present SW corner of M&T Stadium, and the G.W. Gail & Ax Co. tabacco warehouse (1871) at the NE corner of Barre and Charles Sts. Following his work with Border State, he went on to architect the Mount Royal Pumping Station (1897) at North Ave and McMechen (destroyed for I-83 construction) and the Northern District Police Station (1899) building currently at 3355 Keswick Road which are all characteristically similar in Victorian/French Renaissance design.  Nearing the end of his life, he was also responsible for the Browns Arcade building at 322-328 N. Charles Street (1904).

   Since its opening in 1874, the Border State Savings Bank advertised the "acceptance of $1.00 and upwards received on deposit." Small deposits rack up and as reported in the Annual Reports of the Comptroller of the Treasury, MD Comptrollers Office, the Border State Savings Bank held an average end of year deposit amount anywhere from $222,000 ten years after its establishment to near $900,000 by the time it ceased to exist around 1912.