Beachwood Park is open from Dawn to Dusk. Obey all park rules! More information on the park can be found on the related web page.
In 1948, Hiram Smith opened nonsegregated Beachwood Park, “Maryland’s finest interracial beach and amusement park.” This cache will bring you to one of the few remaining remnants of Smith's creation. The cinder block walls here lined a path to the water and the dock where Smith ran boat cruises up and down the Magothy river.
Hiram Smith came to Baltimore in the 1920s from rural Virginia, and soon after founded West Baltimore’s Mount Lebanon Baptist Church, of which he was pastor for 40 years. His ministry couldn't support his growing family of seven on its own, so he bought and sold real estate. Thanks to his church, he knew many people. Thanks to his business savvy, he spotted an opportunity. So-called “black beaches” weren't anything new; in 1893, Charles Douglass, son of Baltimore’s abolitionist legend Frederick Douglass, had founded one of the first in what is now the town of Highland Beach as a private enclave for affluent African-Americans further down the bay, past Annapolis. But many waterside spots were off-limits to black bathers, and some that were accessible allowed alcohol. “He felt that there wasn't a family-friendly park for blacks,” Leacock says. “So he saw a market.”
Using a white straw-buyer to purchase 65 acres, Smith enlisted his sons and daughters, all teenagers or preteens, to help him clear the land for picnic sites and a wooden pavilion.
Each Saturday dozens of buses full of church groups from Anne Arundel County, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and beyond rolled into the parking lot across the road and released hundreds of revelers on the park.
Beachwood Park flourished after surviving an early legal challenge from its white neighbors, who argued that the purchase of an additional section of acreage went against restrictive covenants that barred sale of the land to anyone of “Negro, Chinese, or Japanese decent.” The state Supreme Court ruled in Smith’s favor in 1949 but another legal decision would have a more chilling effect: 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education, which began the process of ending segregation in the United States. “A lot of places that were unavailable opened up,” Gerald Smith says. “Before we had a captive audience because there was no other place to go, but people started considering other options. We still did all right . . . but business started to decline after Brown.”
Hiram Smith lost the property to foreclosure in 1963 and died in 1964. The land somehow escaped development, and over the decades the cleared trees and brush grew back. Anne Arundel County acquired the property in 2002 and redubbed it Beachwood Park.
Portions of this listing are excerpts from an article in The Baltimore City Paper.