Baltimore City Archives
The Baltimore City Archives is the official municipal archive of Baltimore, Maryland. The archive is located on Mathews Street in the Waverly neighborhood of Baltimore. The Baltimore City Archives "is the central depository for government records of permanent value."
History
Before the incorporating charter of Baltimore stipulated the care of records in 1796, the clerk of Baltimore's Special Commissioners had been ordered to keep records of the town in a chest for safekeeping. The first Record Office of Baltimore was completed in 1839, built to house the growing number of municipal records needing safekeeping. In 1839, the city librarian's office was created, and the librarians and assistants that followed worked to create order out of the multiplying records.20th century
Arguments of cronyism in the city librarian's office resulted in the creation of the Bureau of Archives within the Department of Legislative Reference in 1927.During the late 1930s, the Works Progress Administration assigned workers from the Historical Records Survey to the Baltimore City Archives, the outcome being twelve hundred detailed worksheets and a completed index of the records of the Archives. Despite this work, the archives fell into disrepair until the 1970s, when a renewed interest in Baltimore's history was the impetus for the creation of the position of City Archivist. After several years of work, which resulted in a guide to the holdings of the Archive in relation to the WPA-HRS index, the archives again fell into disrepair, housed in a substandard building with environmental.