It was a diminutive plaque, scarcely noticeable above the grass in a corner of the upper Park Avenue median. The buried block of concrete to which it was affixed had been dinged and gouged by the wear of roughly 90 years, but the tarnished plaque itself was very much intact. It read simply:
WILLIAM L. MARBURY
Dec. 26, 1859, Oct. 26, 1935
PLANTED BY
MT. ROYAL GARDEN CLUB
It was also a cryptic plaque. The plaque’s surroundings offered no clues as to why it was placed there. Where it may have headed a planter bed, the bed had long been covered by grass. For passersby who didn’t know anything about William L. Marbury, it was a benign curiosity: the man must have been a master gardener who the garden club wanted to lovingly memorize, the plaque the only remaining sign of his gardening on the median.
The Mt. Royal Garden Club, predecessor to the Bolton Hill Garden Club, installed it within a couple years of Marbury’s death. The club’s 1937 handbook referred to its plans to plant two magnolia trees in his honor at the location of the plaque. Today, no magnolias grace that corner of the median, and for decades, the plaque sat anachronistically in its solitary position low in the grass.
The entry in the 1937 handbook provided more explanation for the magnolias:
These living sentinels will always remind us of the one who did more to save this District than anyone else. His brilliance, kindliness and tact won many a battle for us, and we must never forget that it is our duty to assist in making our neighborhood more livable and attractive.
William L. Marbury was not merely a gardener. The veiled language in that entry from the handbook referring to his actions to “save this District” that “won many a battle for us” in the interest of making “our neighborhood more livable and attractive” were, with a modicum of speculation, surely referring to Marbury’s public actions to promote segregation. He was the founder of the Mount Royal Protective Association in 1910, whose mission was to halt African Americans from renting or purchasing property in the Mount Royal District, which included present-day Bolton Hill and Reservoir Hill.
An influential lawyer who at one time was United States Attorney for Maryland, Marbury is credited with being the architect of redlining laws in Baltimore. He actively tried to disenfranchise voters in Maryland with dark skin, even arguing, unsuccessfully, before the U.S. Supreme Court that the State of Maryland could legally strip their voting rights because Maryland never ratified the Fifteenth Amendment. He himself was a descendant of the plaintiff in Marbury v. Madison roughly a century earlier, the case which famously established the power of the Supreme Court to invalidate state laws and acts of Congress that contravene the Constitution.
In 2020, the Bolton Hill Community Association formed a public historic markers committee to examine public markers—monuments, plaques, and place names—in the neighborhood that may honor individuals or institutions contributing to systemic racism. After conducting research on Marbury and consulting the Bolton Hill Garden Club, the committee recommended, along with the garden club, to have the plaque removed, which the Bolton Hill Community Association board of directors approved.
Descendants of William L. Marbury did not have any knowledge of the plaque but indicated an interest in receiving it upon removal. After the Bolton Hill Community Association worked with the city to follow disposition procedures, the plaque’s concrete block was unceremoniously dug up in November and has been tendered to Marbury’s descendants.
Reasonable, dissenting voices to removing the plaque were concerned that it would erase the odious history it signified, where dispensing with it would be a convenient means of ignoring the history of segregation in Bolton Hill. Yet, that history remains despite the absence of the plaque on the Park Avenue median, and the public historic markers committee’s work was a means of drawing attention to it. As the committee concluded, the plaque was placed to honor a man whose legacy would not be honored with such a plaque today by the Bolton Hill Garden Club nor by the Bolton Hill Community Association. His former residence does not bear a Blue Plaque. The Marbury plaque’s placement amid a grassy median on Park Avenue had become as incongruous as the man himself would be today.
While it was on the Park Avenue median, the Marbury plaque attracted attention proportionate to its size. It largely went unnoticed near the ground as an unassuming relic of a bygone era of Bolton Hill. Given the man’s prominent role in promoting actions and laws directly related to segregation and disenfranchisement, it is remarkable that the plaque never became a rallying point for protests, nor was it defaced with graffiti.
I’m glad the plaque was intact when its anchoring concrete block was unearthed. To his descendants, the Marbury plaque is a familial artifact. They had no say in inheriting the racist legacy of their forebearer, just as today’s residents of Bolton Hill did not live in the neighborhood of Marbury’s day. The Marbury plaque remains, just not where it was originally planted.
—David Nyweide
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