Mercantile Trust & Deposit Company, 200 East Redwood Street (Redwood & Calvert Streets), Baltimore, Independent City, MD

Significance: This building, erected in 1885, was designed by J.B. Noel Wyatt and Joseph Evans Sperry. Its exterior design is outstanding for the period in Baltimore.

The significance of the Mercantile Safe Deposit & Trust Company building resides not only in its considerable aesthetic merits, discussed in the 1960 HABS report, but also in the importance of the institution and its founding members to the history of commerce in late nineteenth-century Baltimore. While the Mercantile Trust Company and the Safe Deposit did not merge until 1953, their histories were intertwined from the beginning, and together they illuminate a crucial segment of Baltimore's post-Civil War financial culture. The Mercantile's significance as a Baltimore landmark is strengthened by virtue of its status as one of few structures in the city's central business district to survive the Great Fire of 1904.
Survey number: HABS MD-191
Building/structure dates: 1885 Initial Construction
Building/structure dates: 2000 Subsequent Work