Baltimore is known as "the first Northern city and the last Southern city." Just after the Civil War, numbers of former Confederate soldiers and their families left the ruined South and emigrated to Baltimore. This migration was a was a [sic] true migration and, just as our Polish and Italian neighbors still preserve memories of their countries of origin but still enter fully into their new lives, so many of these refugees from the ashes of that most dreadful of American wars became leading citizens of Baltimore while still cherishing their former homes. The Baltimore architect, Charles E. Cassell, was a prime example of this and his story is well worth remembering for Baltimoreans.
I heard most of that story from my grandmother, one of Cassell's three daughters. She was born in 1874 and, as a child of ten or so, lost her mother to "the influenza." Little girls needed constant overseeing, and so aunts from Richmond would come up in three month shifts on the Old Bay Line. As one got off in Baltimore, the other returned to Richmond. These old-maid Southern ladies supplied a rich store of family history, and my grandmother was in her 70's and 80's when she told me these stories some forty odd years ago, I cannot vouch for her memory, nor, for that matter, mine. But this is pretty well what I remember.
The Casselli's were from Genoa and members of the family are buried in the Campo Santo there. (Family legend has it that the Casselli's were related to the Borgia's!) They left sometime in the 1830's and, leaving Italy as Roman Catholic Casselli's somehow or other ended up in Portsmouth as Episcopalian Cassell's. They are all buried at Cedar Grove (Protestant Episcopal) Cemetery in Portsmouth.
Cassell went to the University of Virginia and graduated as a civil engineer [No evidence of attendance or graduation]. He then went to work for the Department of the Army at Old Point Comfort at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, and was designing water-works for one of the forts thereabouts when the war broke out. The Union at once occupied the fort and raised the Stars and Stripes. Anyone who entered the fort thereby implicitly swore allegiance to the Union. Cassell, who had left all his drawings in his desk the night before the Union occupation, walked into the fort, went to his office and taped his drawings to his leg and left, to become a captain in the Confederate Army's Corp of Engineers. Because he had entered the fort after the stars and stripes had been hoisted, he was considered to be more than a rebel; he had become a traitor with a price on his head. If he were caught, he would be hung at once as a traitor to the union. He still had that price on his head and he was still a wanted man under the sentence of death when the first general amnesty, for rebels, was declared in 1865. The second general amnesty, in about 1870, also failed to cover his case, [But he was a founding member of the AIA Baltimore Chapter by December 1870] and so he was still a fugitive with a price on his head, under a sentence of death. Rather than play the hunted fugitive, however, Cassell left the country in 1865 and went to Chile, where he captained a large sailing vessel until around 1872, when he was fully pardoned and could return home. (Another branch of the Cassell's had emigrated to Brazil, and when I was a young boy we still had the last letter from them begging for outside help to rescue them from an attack by head-hunters. The guide who had brought that letter out of the jungle then disappeared and no one ever saw or heard from any member of that branch of the family again. As a child I had visions of buying a shrunken head at a curio shop and learning that it was one of my great aunts or uncles on the Cassell side.)
One story survives concerning Cassell's stint as a fugitive sea-captain. Outgoing ships exchanged mail with incoming ones and the captains usually dined with one another when the pulled abreast of one another for the exchange. One ship pulled up to Cassell's ship and he heard a terrible screaming coming from it. When he asked the captain what was going on, he got the answer that it was a monkey being punished. "Give him to me, I'm good with animals," Cassell said, and the other captain did just that. Later on, as Captain Cassell laboriously wrote out the day's transactions in the ship's log, he saw the money [sic] watching him. Someone called, and Cassell left the cabin for a moment. When he returned, the monkey had poked his paw into the ink-well and had "written" all over the open page of the ship's log. He spent the next few months trying to give the monkey away, but it had already been a guest on all the ships. My grandmother never would tell me what finally happened to the beast.
At any rate, Cassell ended up with a full pardon, no house left in Portsmouth, and no money. Penniless as he was, he still married, went on to Baltimore and set up as an architect. His younger brother was a stock-broker and started to build a home for him and his new wife in the 1400 block of Park Avenue [This could be 1407] when a "Black Friday" wiped him out and left a partially built house, with Carrara marble fire-places, Japanese gold-leaf wall-paper in the dining room, and four foot high bronze knights holding gas jets at the bottom of the main stair case. Cassell rolled up his sleeves, worked hard in his profession of architecture, and finished building a home for himself and his new bride. He was firmly established as an architect by the time the Baltimore Fire took place -- an enviable position, parallel to that of a mortician in a plague-town.
Four of his buildings are particularly well-known to Baltimoreans. The Christian Science Church on University Parkway opposite Hopkins' lacrosse field was designed under the constant supervision of Mary Baker Eddy herself. The (Byzantine) Greek Orthodox Cathedral at the corner of Cathedral and Preston Streets -- a true gem -- was built originally for a Unitarian [Associate Reformed] congregation. The beautiful doors and crypts of Corpus Christie at Landvale and Mt. Royal were commissioned by the Jenkins family. And then there are the three wonderful English village homes across the street from the Rotunda which Cassell designed under the inspiration of something he had read by John Ruskin.
Having heard of all these buildings as a child, I took them for granted and never, even once, entered them until I had children of my own to shepherd around town. (I had also, as a child, neglected to go to the Shot Tower -- a wonderful place! -- to Fort McHenry or to St. Vincent DePaul's. God bless the kids!) I was curiously moved by the Byzantine Greek Cathedral and by the Christian Science Church. They are splendid pieces of architecture and reveal Cassell as a deep observer of the world around him and as a man whose soul had been enriched by adversity.
We all too often forget that many, if not most, of the southerners who came to Baltimore between 1865 and 1875 were penniless and profoundly bruised by the war. But, like so many other penniless emigrants, they settled down in their new home, Baltimore, and were a credit to it. Charles E. Cassell was an architectural blessing to his adopted city, Baltimore, and an inspirational example to the architects who followed him.