Lutherville: A Town Sold Lot by Lot to Fund a Seminary

Lutherville was designed from scratch in eighteen fifty-two by two Lutheran ministers who needed to raise money for a women's college. The plan was straightforward: buy land, lay out a village, sell the lots, and use the proceeds to fund the Lutherville Female Seminary. The land came from the Hampton Estate of Charles Ridgely. A surveyor divided it into one hundred and eighteen lots, the streets were named after Lutheran clergymen, and the grid radiated outward from a central lot reserved for the Lutheran church.

Classes at the seminary began in October of eighteen fifty-four, offering art, chemistry, mathematics, modern and classical languages, music, natural sciences, and needlework. The location near the Susquehanna Railroad made the commuter logic work. The planned village survived the seminary's eventual closure and became what it is today: a leafy Baltimore County suburb with streets bearing the names of eighteenth-century Lutheran divines.