03/31/2026
For Women’s History Month, we are featuring a portrait of the first woman to be part of the Board of Park Commissioners for Baltimore City, Anne W. Bunker. Originally from Manchester, England, Bunker had married an American naval lieutenant she met during World War I. The Bunkers moved to Baltimore in 1925, and since 1933, Anne Bunker had been active in the Federation of Republican Women of Maryland. Holding office in that group may have led to her appointment to the Parks Board by Mayor Theodore R. McKeldin in January of 1946. Mrs. Bunker “thought the Mayor was very courageous in appointing a woman to the Park Board.”
Indicative of the time period, newspaper articles focused on how Bunker would “take housekeeping into the city’s parks.” She told the newspaper that more trash receptacles were needed in the parks, because picnickers “will not carry their papers, boxes and the like back home with them. They leave them on the ground.”
While Bunker only served as a Parks Commissioner for just over a year, under its new president C. Kirk Staub, that year included many controversial and newsworthy issues, including the integration of parks facilities, the new Baltimore Stadium and contract with the Baltimore Colts, leasing or selling Parks land to private entities, reopening Druid Hill Park Zoo’s aquarium, and the elimination of the parks’ “policewoman” position, which had been established during World War II. The reason given by Police Captain George Gordon Gaeng was that “women should not be assigned to night work and, therefore, do not fit into the over-all park police plan involving night shifts.”
After Anne Bunker moved to New Jersey in 1947, Puerto Rican-born Mercedes DeGoenaga Ford was appointed to the reorganized Board of Recreation and Parks, along with the board’s first Black member, Bernard Harris, Sr., whom we featured on an earlier post. We are searching for a portrait of Mrs. Ford!
[Baltimore Sun, February 5, 1946 and May 31, 1975; BRG51-5-6, BRG51-3-2-22]
