Mount Vernon Cultural Walk: Women's Industrial Exchange

Be Here Stories

The Mount Vernon Cultural Walk is created by The Baltimore National Heritage Area (BNHA), which promotes, preserves, and enhances Baltimore's historic and cultural legacy and natural resources for current and future generations. A site-by-site walking tour of this and other destinations is available at www.https://bnha.visit.zone/ Located at 333 North Charles Street Transcript: Sometime after the Civil War, Mrs. G. Harmon Brown opened her Saratoga Street home as a place for “gentlewomen” in reduced circumstances to earn money selling family heirlooms and handmade items. From this beginning grew the Woman’s Industrial Exchange, founded in 1882 as part of the national women-run exchange movement, which helped “needy women to help themselves” by providing respectable showrooms where they could sell their wares. In 1887, the Exchange moved to its longtime home on Charles Street, a former private residence built in 1815. Philanthropic women in Baltimore’s Black community operated their own Colored Woman’s Industrial Exchange on West Hoffman Street. The Charles Street building housed a gift shop where women sold homemade goods and handicrafts on consignment. In the rear, the Exchange operated a renowned Tea Room, where generations of Baltimoreans went for ladylike lunches of chicken salad and tomato aspic. One of the national exchange movement’s last remaining chapters, the Woman’s Industrial Exchange closed in 2020. It turned its building over to Marian House, a nonprofit serving homeless women and children. In the former gift shop, the Maryland Women’s Heritage Center presents exhibits that honor the achievements of Maryland women, with bay windows featuring women artists.