Kennard's Wharf at the end of Philpot Street, the very place where Frederick Douglass entered Baltimore as an enslaved child in the 1820s, later became the site of one of the most successful black-owned businesses in Baltimore City, the Chesapeake Marine Railway and Dry Dock Company. It was founded by Isaac Myers and other Black labor organizers.Â
A caulker by trade, Myers was born free in Baltimore in 1835. The ship-building/maritime industries, and specifically the caulking trade, of Baltimore were historically interracial. By the close of the U.S. Civil War, black workers were systematically pushed out of this type of employment to make room for growing numbers of white workers in the city. This reality led Myers and others to found the Colored Caulkers Trade Union Society.
In the early 1860's, the union formed a cooperative company. Pooling their resources, the workers issued stock and quickly raised $10,000 in subscriptions among Black Baltimore residents. On February 12, 1866, they purchased a shipyard and railway, which they named the Chesapeake Marine Railway and Dry Dock Company. Within months, the cooperative employed 300 black caulkers and received several government contracts. Ultimately it employed a number of white workers as well.Â
The success of Myers’s union in Baltimore encouraged black caulkers in other seaport cities to organize. Myers was elected president of the (Colored) National Labor Union, the first organization of its type in U.S. history. Myers appealed to black workers to join unions and called on white unions to accept them as full members. Myers also organized and became president of the Maryland Colored State Industrial Fair Association, the Colored Business Men’s Association of Baltimore, the Colored Building and Loan Association, and the Aged Ministers Home of the A.M.E. Church. He also authored the Mason’s Digest. Myers was married twice and had several sons, one of whom became a leading political figure in Ohio. Isaac Myers died in Baltimore in 1891.
Mt. Washington Mill—historically Washington Mill, part of Washington Cotton Manufacturing Company—is one of Maryland’s earliest purpose-built cotton mills. In the early nineteenth century, the Napoleonic Wars and the Embargo Act disrupted imports and created new demand for locally-made cotton goods. When the nearly four stories tall stone Mt. Washington Mill began operation in 1810, it could fill this new market.
Located near the center of the complex, the mill was first powered by the current of the Jones Falls. Indentured servants, primarily young boys, worked to make fabrics like ginghams and calicos. The operation grew and the mill began hiring more men, women and children as workers. Most lived nearby in Washingtonville, a company town that, by 1847, included a company store and nearly forty homes between the factory and the railroad tracks. Workers were called to their shifts by the sound of the bell ringing in the mill's cupola.
The mill passed through several hands before 1853 when industrialists Horatio Gambrill and David Carroll acquired the facility. The pair had been quickly erecting textile mills in the Jones Falls Valley for the production of cotton duck, a heavy canvas used primarily for ship sails. By 1899, it had become part of the Mt. Vernon-Woodberry Cotton Duck Company — a large conglomerate of textile mills comprising fourteen sites in Maryland and beyond — which would eventually control as much as 80% of the world’s cotton duck production until 1915, when the conglomerate split apart.
Washingtonville the mill village was soon overshadowed by the residential suburb of Mt. Washington, established in 1854 on the other side of the tracks. Mt. Washington became a fashionable neighborhood for middle-class Baltimoreans looking to get out of the city—Baltimore remained easily accessible by train. Life in Mt. Washington was much different than life in Washingtonville. Children were under little pressure to drop out of school to work in the mills to support their families, homes were spacious and built to fine standards, and residents had access to plenty of leisure activities and entertainment, such as at the "Casino" where all sorts of exhibitions and games and held.
In 1923, Washington Cotton Mill was purchased by the Maryland Bolt and Nut Company and repurposed for the production of metal fasteners like bolts, nuts, screws, and rivets. Industrial buildings were added to the campus and existing ones were outfitted for working steel. In 1972, Hurricane Agnes wrecked much of the industrial campus and in response, the factory was sold to Leonard Jed Company, a manufacturer of industrial supplies. It was sold again in 1984 to Don L. Byrne, a manager at the plant, before being redeveloped by Himmelrich Associates in the 1990s for office and commercial use.
Washingtonville never underwent the same revitalization. The village was largely razed in 1958 to make way for the Jones Falls Expressway leaving only a single duplex house still standing today.
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Built in 1928, the Lord Baltimore Hotel is a beautiful example of an early twentieth-century high-rise hotel. Designed by prolific hotel architect William Lee Stoddart, it is reminiscent of such famous American hotels as New York's Vanderbilt Hotel or Chicago's Palmer House. The twenty-two-story steel frame building was the largest hotel building ever constructed in Maryland. However, the Lord Baltimore is also a reminder of the city’s history of racial discrimination and the long fight for integrated public accommodation.
In 1954, the same year the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education called for an end to segregated schools, black players from three American League teams with integrated rosters came to Baltimore to play against the Orioles. White players stayed at the Lord Baltimore, the Emerson, and Southern Hotel downtown. But for their black teammates, the only option was the African American-owned York Hotel in West Baltimore.
A year later, in 1955, students at Johns Hopkins University moved the prom away from the Lord Baltimore to the at the Alcazar Hotel in Mount Vernon in protest to the hotel manager’s refusal to admit black students to the dance and his threat to “stop the dance if Negroes attended.” By the late 1950s, after lobbying by Baltimore’s progressive Mayor Theodore McKeldin, the Lord Baltimore Hotel consented to rent rooms to black ballplayers and some conference attendees. In 1958, Baltimore hosted the All-Star Game and six black All-Stars, including Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson, registered at the Lord Baltimore. For visiting black spectators, however, the hotel was not an option. Jimmy Williams, an assistant editor at the Afro American, advised spectators to bring pup tents and box lunches, writing, “The box lunches will be to ease the pangs of an aching stomach… The pup tents will provide a place for them to rest their carcasses after the last door of the downtown hotels have been slammed in their face and the uptown hotels are filled.” Williams predicted visitors would leave “just loving the quaint customs of Baltimore, which boasts of major league baseball and minor league businessmen.”
By the early 1960s, policies finally began to change. After hotel management realized they had rented rooms for the campaign office of segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace in 1964, the management refused to let them stay and the campaign was forced to move to a motel in Towson. In 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr., stayed at the hotel during a meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, where he gave a lengthy press conference and received symbolic keys to the city from Mayor Tommy D’Alesandro III.
The hotel was one of the few historic buildings retained as part of the redevelopment of Charles Center and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.
In the 1930s, when the managers at Bethlehem Steel remained staunchly opposed to unionization, labor activists at Sparrow’s Point faced real challenges. According to Ellen Pinter, men couldn’t wear union buttons for fear of losing their jobs. During the struggles for unionization in the mills, several of the organizers were foreign-born residents of neighborhoods like Highlandtown in the southeastern section of the city along Eastern Avenue. These activists tried to organize their fellow workers by speaking to them in their native languages in places where ethnic workers would congregate.
For these activists, immigrant and native-born, public speaking became the best way to advance their cause. Nathaniel Parks, a retired steelworker and former resident of Sparrow’s Point, describes one way that activists exercised their right to free speech during the early 1930s:
“The company never did allow people to come in and talk union at Sparrow’s Point. It was an island…And it happened that the car pulled up a half a block from this corner…And a lady got out [of the car] and a man got out, and they walked over to this iron [street light] pole, and then she handcuffed him to the pole. And then he started putting in his spiel about union: what its advantages was, what they were trying to do. And then, the police, they were in a quarrel; they didn’t know what to do. They ran around trying to find a hacksaw or something to get him untied from this pole. And he got his spiel before they got him. And then when they put him in this patrol wagon and carried him on the other side of the bridge, he was still with his head out of the window…blasting out just about what the union was in for, what the people was in for. Oh, it was really nice to see what was going to happen the way the company was treating men on the jobs in those days…”
During the 1930s and 1940s, a traffic island at the intersection of Eastern Avenue and Lehigh Street became a hotspot for pro-union soapbox speakers. Many of these speakers were women, the daughters and wives of steel workers. Most of the work in the steel mills at this time was restricted to men. Male labor activists, therefore, faced the potential of unemployment and blacklists if they were caught organizing. Women, however, did not face this direct threat and used their voices to rally support for the union. Besides speaking in a public arena, like the traffic median on Eastern Avenue, women also went door-to-door and backyard-to-backyard, preaching to women about the union cause as they went about their housework.
Tucked away in the southeastern corner of Baltimore County, and separated from the rest of Sparrow’s Point by a creek, Turner Station is where many African American workers at Bethlehem Steel and nearby factories lived with their families from the 1800s up through the present.
New housing was constructed around World War I in Dundalk for white factory workers, but it excluded black workers. Partially as a result, African Americans focused on building their own community. According to local historian and cosmetologist , Turner Station takes its name from Joshua Turner who first purchased the property in the 1800s:
“It started with a man named Joshua Turner who had purchased this land back in the 1800s and he had purchased it for guano, which is pigeon droppings, and this was [what] fertilized land... There was a lot of farmland near so the fertilizer was to be used for the different orchard farms. I understand there were apple farms and different vegetable farms not too far from here. So Joshua Turner, as I understand, from the records that we had read, had set up a station for the employees that were employed at Sparrows Point and thus this is how the name came about, Turner Station after Joshua Turner.”
While Bethlehem Steel built housing for white workers in Dundalk after WWI, they made no investments in housing for black workers in Turner Station. Instead, residents built their own homes and businesses, growing a community outside the oversight of company officials.
Beginning around 1920, development started in the neighborhoods of Steelton Park and Carnegie. Turner Station soon became one of the largest African American communities in Baltimore County. The town reached a peak around WWII when wartime workers at Bethlehem Steel moved to the area. According to local historian Louis Diggs, credit for the self-sufficient community’s development belongs largely to Mr. Anthony Thomas (1857-1931) and Dr. Joseph Thomas (1885-1963), Anthony Thomas’ son.