St. Vincent de Paul: Built by Railroad Workers

The congregation that built this church on Front Street gathered in eighteen forty around a particular group of workers: the Irish immigrants laying track for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and digging the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. Father John Baptist Gildea was their first pastor. The building opened in eighteen forty-one.

The slender white tower rises one hundred and fifty feet above the entrance, narrowing through three successive tiers, one octagonal and two cylindrical, capped by a copper dome and a gold-leafed cross. It is the oldest Catholic parish church in continuous use in Baltimore. By the eighteen eighties the congregation had grown to more than seven thousand communicants, making it the largest parish in the Archdiocese of Baltimore. The church still holds services today, though after one hundred and eighty-four years of operation the archdiocese announced a merger in twenty twenty-five.