Located in Baltimore, Maryland, at 519 West Fayette Street (near North Greene Street), Westminster Hall and Burying Ground is a cemetery and former church. It is presently a part of the University of Maryland School of Law’s premises. On the western edge of Baltimore’s downtown, it is located at the southeast corner of West Fayette and North Greene Street. Edgar Allan Poe’s grave is located across from the Baltimore VA hospital (1809–1849). In 1974, the complex was designated as a national historic district.[1]#
First Presbyterian Church of Baltimore founded the cemetery in January 1787 on land on the west side of old Baltimore Town, which had been purchased by a group of notable laymen led by William Smith, John Boyd, and William Patterson, a prominent merchant, civic activist, owner of Patterson Park, and father of the well-known socialite and debutante Elizabeth (“Betsy”) Patterson (1785–1879), who married the French emperor Napoleon I’s brother Jerome Bonaparte in 1803, from Col. John Eager Howard ( In what was known as “Howard’s Woods,” north of Baltimore Town (eventually to become the neighbourhood of Mount Vernon), Col. Howard possessed the estate and mansion known as “Belvidere.”
