A campaign is underway to raise money to renovate the Battle Monument at Fayette and Calvert Streets. The nation's first war memorial commemorates the dead in the Battle of Baltimore during the War of 1812. It also appears on the seal of the City of Baltimore.

The City's Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation (CHAP) has so for raised over $8O,000 of an estimated needed $250,000 from state, city, and private sources. CHAP hopes to complete renovation and rededicate the monument on September 12, 1997, the 183rd anniversary of the Battle of North Point.

Designed by French emigre Maximilian Godefroy, the 52-foot high monument features a square base representing an Egyptian tomb with false doors and 18 courses of masonry, one each for the 18 states when the monument was completed In the 1820"s. Constructed of local Cockeysville marble, the base is now yellowed and discolored. From the base rises a Roman fasces, a bundle of sticks symbolizing unity (the device also seen on the old Morgan dime). Wrapped around the fasces are the names of 41 dead above tableaus of the baffles of North Point and Fort McHenry. Italian sculptor Antonio Copellano carved the fasces and other now weatherworn details from Carrara marble imported from Italy. Four griffins (beasts with the body of a lion and head of an eagle) surround the fasces, and Lady Baltimore crowns the monument raising a laurel wreath in one hand and in the other holding a rudder symbolizing the port of Baltimore. An eagle and a British bomb (one of Francis Scott Key's "bombs bursting in air') lie at her feet.