What Baltimore intends to indicate is, not that it pertains to monuments, but that monuments pertain to it: that it is a city in which many monuments have been erected--as is indeed the pleasing fact.

My pamphlet informed me that the first monument to Columbus and the first to George Washington were here put up, and that among the city's other monuments was one to Francis Scott Key.

I had quite forgotten that it was at Baltimore that Key wrote the words of "The Star-Spangled Banner," and, as others may have done the same, it may be well here to recall the details.
In 1814, after the British had burned a number of Government buildings in Washington, including "the President's palace" (as one of their officers expressed it), they moved on Baltimore, making an attack by land at North Point and a naval attack at Fort McHenry on Whetstone Point in the estuary of the Patapsco River--here practically an arm of Chesapeake Bay.

Both attacks were repulsed.

Having gone on the United States cartel ship _Minden_ (used by the government in negotiating exchanges of prisoners) to intercede for his friend, Dr.William Beanes, of Upper Marlborough, Maryland, who was held captive on a British vessel, Key witnessed the bombardment of Fort McHenry from the deck of the _Minden_, and when he perceived "by the dawn's early light" that the flag still flew over the fort, he was moved to write his famous poem.
Later it was printed and set to music; it was first sung in a restaurant near the old Holliday Street Theater, but neither the restaurant nor the theater exists to-day.