This neoclassical building, raised in 1814, was the first in America built purely to be a museum. The Peale Museum was built in 1814 by Rembrandt Peale, son of the celebrated painter and naturalist Charles Willson Peale, who had founded the famous Peale's Museum in Philadelphia. Rembrandt Peale designed this neoclassical building himself and filled it with the eclectic mix of art, natural history specimens, and scientific curiosities that constituted a museum in the early nineteenth century.
The admission fee was twenty-five cents. The museum displayed paintings, fossils, stuffed animals, and — most sensationally — the mastodon skeleton that Charles Willson Peale had excavated from a New York farm in 1801, one of the first complete large-animal fossils ever assembled and exhibited. Baltimore's museum was also notable for being lit by gas light — Rembrandt Peale installed his own gas lighting system in 1816, making it one of the first public buildings in America to use manufactured gas illumination, and he sold excess gas to light the neighboring streets.
The building later served as Baltimore's City Hall, a police headquarters, and a municipal storage facility before being recognized for its historical significance and restored. It is now a museum about museums, about the history of collecting and displaying knowledge in America.