In almost every kitchen in Baltimore, and maybe Maryland, there is a tiny yellow, blue, and red tin of Old Bay seasoning. It is an essential part of local cuisine. Yet, most people are unaware of the spice’s dramatic Jewish history. Old Bay was created by Gustav Brunn, a Jewish immigrant who came to the United States after escaping from Nazi Germany.��

On the night of Nov. 9, 1938, violent mobs across Nazi Germany and Austria burned and looted Jewish homes, businesses, hospitals, and synagogues in what would be known as Kristallnacht, or "The Night of Broken Glass." The Nazis also rounded up 30,000 Jewish men and sent them to concentration camps. Brunn was among those captured and sent to Camp Buchenwald.

His family helped secure Brunn’s release by paying 10,000 marks to a lawyer who bailed him out. As soon as he was released, Brunn and his children left for the United States. A spice merchant, Brunn left with very little, but he insisted on taking his hand-crank spice grinder.

In 1939, the Brunn family arrived in Baltimore and settled into an apartment at 2317 Eutaw Place. After arriving in America, Brunn wanted to re-enter the spice trade, but he had no capital. Brunn had to secure a loan from Katz American to open his spice business. Katz American was not a bank, it was another spice company. As a fellow Jewish spice merchant, Katz put profit aside to help Brunn start his business. After securing a loan from Katz American, Brunn created the Baltimore Spice Company. The company took up residence on the second floor of 26 Market Place; and, the hand-crank spice grinder began to turn once again.��

Before Brunn created the Baltimore Spice Company, he had worked at McCormick until he was fired for being Jewish. Brunn’s son said that after McCormick learned Brunn was Jewish, he was promptly fired, and told to “go and see the Jewish charities.” Although Brunn experienced rampant anti-semitism in his lifetime, he continued to persevere.��

The Baltimore Spice Company began developing a crab seasoning around 1940. Brunn created the famous spice after noticing local crab steamers come to his shop to buy various spices. His shop at 26 Market Place was directly across from the Wholesale Fish Market. The crab steamers would then blend the spices together to season their crabs. Brunn was inspired by the crab steamers to create his own crab seasoning--Old Bay. Brunn added tiny amounts of various spices to his crab seasoning in order to be unique in an overly saturated crab spice market. According to Brunn’s son,��

“Those minor things he put in there — the most unlikely things, including cinnamon and nutmeg and cloves and all kinds of stuff that had nothing to do with crabs at all — gave a background bouquet that he couldn’t have anticipated. Old Bay, per se, was almost an accident.”

In the very beginning, Brunn had trouble selling the spice mixture that would one day become synonymous with Baltimore. However, after giving samples to the local crab steamers, business began to pick up. By this time, the spice still had no name. Brunn named the spice after the Old Bay steamship line, which used to run out of Baltimore. After getting its name, the spice mix’s popularity continued to grow. Major companies, including McCormick, began to sell a similar product in a similar can.��

The rivalry between the Baltimore Spice Company and McCormick over the rights to Old Bay did not end until five years after the death of Gustav Brunn. In 1990, the company sold the rights to the original Old Bay recipe to McCormick. The spice has continued to be a mainstay in grocery stores in Baltimore and across the entire Mid-Atlantic. In recent years, the spice mix has gained an almost cult-like popularity and has helped spawn the development of things such as: Old Bay apparel, vodka, and beer.��

The spice is so quintessentially Maryland that a poll by Goucher College found that “opinions toward Old Bay transcend party, age, race, gender, and ideological lines,” said Mileah Kromer, director of the Sara T. Hughes Politics Center at Goucher. “An overwhelming majority of Marylanders view it favorably.”��

When Gustav Brunn created Old Bay in 1939, he thought he just created a great spice mixture. He did not know he would create a product that would become integral to the cultural fabric of Maryland.

Edward J. Codd founded the E. J. Codd Company in the 1850s. The E. J. Codd�� Company focused on industrial machinery and aided Baltimore’s booming shipbuilding industry by assembling boilers, propellers, and engines. At the turn of the century, Baltimore workers went on strike demanding the nine-hour work day. The E. J. Codd strikers proved victorious when in 1899, the company agreed to give workers the nine-hour work day with their former pay.

Edward Codd, like other captains of industry in Gilded Age America, was not only a man of business, but a philanthropist. According to a Baltimore Sun article published on Christmas Eve in 1905, Edward Codd gave 460 children of east Baltimore each a nickel on Christmas Eve. In addition to handing out nickels each Christmas Eve, Edward Codd reportedly gave children each a penny every other day of the year. Back in the early twentieth-century, a nickel could buy children a goodly amount of candy and one reporter even reported that children’s “bright red wheelbarrows” filled with “painted candies” dotted the street on Christmas Eve. Needless to say, Edward Codd was well-liked by the children of east Baltimore.��

After World War II, the Codd family sold the company to Ray Kauffman. Kauffman expanded the company to include “Codd Fabricators and Boiler Co.” and “Baltimore Lead Burning.” Under Kauffman, the E. J. Codd Company served many local Baltimore businesses such as Bethlehem Steel, Allied Chemical, and even the American Visionary Arts Museum located right down the road from the Baltimore Museum of Industry.����

Today, real estate agents are leasing the once mighty machine shop as office spaces.

In 1894, William G. Scarlett founded the William G. Scarlett Seed Company. Born in Baltimore in 1873, George D. Scarlett was a true entrepreneur who chased the American dream. At twenty-one, George Scarlett began working in the seed industry by “importing seeds from various parts of the world and exporting dried apples." Under the management of George Scarlett, the company expanded its inventory; selling grass, grain, and bird seeds. A Baltimore Sun article stated that “his [George Scarlett’s] business mushroomed principally through his own efforts and at one time was the largest east of the Mississippi River." Although the William G. Scarlett Seed Company expanded opening branches in other cities, Baltimore remained the company headquarters.

The Scarlett Seed Company remained in the family as George D. Scarlett passed over the company reins to his sons Raymond G. Scarlett and William G. Scarlett. As eccentric as his father, Raymond Scarlett was not only the company president, but also a badminton champion. An adamant badminton enthusiast, Raymond Scarlett founded the junior national badminton championship tournament. William George Scarlett succeeded his brother Raymond in running the company. Following in the unique footsteps of his father and brother, in addition to managing the family business, William Scarlett joined the Army Counter Intelligence Corps, also known as the CIC, during WWII.

After the company vacated the property, in the 1980s, the site was developed into retail space, office space, and condominiums. Today, the Scarlett Seed Company Property is now known as Scarlett Place, paying tribute to the bird-seed businessmen.

In the twentieth century, Pier 8 in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and then Broadway Pier in Fells Point used to be the launching point for the steamboats of the Wilson Line. The Wilson Line extended from Philadelphia to Wilmington to Baltimore and ran a line of excursion boats out of Baltimore after WWII. The “Bay Belle,” one of the Baltimore excursion boats, carried passengers on day trips to places such as Betterton Beach.��

Although the Wilson Line steamboat company advertised sunny trips to the beach and fun at resorts, this was overshadowed by the company’s practice of segregation. In July of 1944, a group of African American teenagers from Philadelphia were separated from white passengers on the Wilson Line ship the Maybelle. According to an article from the Baltimore Afro American, Wilson Line employees placed a rope across the dance floor to separate white and black passengers, and even went so far as to close their game room to prevent integration. In 1950, the company continued discriminatory practices by refusing to sell tickets to four African American patrons: Helena Haley, Charles Haley, Loncie Malloy, and Prunella Norwood. The four patrons sued the Wilson Line and as a result the company was ordered to end its discriminatory practices by the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1951.

The shadow of segregation extended from the steamboat line to the beaches. For example Ocean City, one of the most popular beach attractions today, once banned African Americans from enjoying its sunny shores. Elizabeth Carr Smith and Florence Carr Sparrow, two African American sisters, fought back against segregation by founding Carr’s Beach in 1926 and Sparrow’s Beach in 1931. Both sisters inherited pieces of land from their father on the Annapolis coast facing the Chesapeake Bay. Carr’s and Sparrow’s beaches were known for ample entertainment and hosted many famous African American performers such as Billie Holiday, James Brown, and Ray Charles. For many African Americans along the east coast, Carr’s and Sparrow’s Beaches provided a safe vacation spot.

In the face of discrimination, the African American community rallied in order to fight for their civil rights. As a result of the power of the black community, the ICC forced the Wilson Line to adopt integration and beaches desegregated.

• Bodine, A. Aubrey. The Bay Belle. Photograph. Betterton Heritage. Betterton Heritage Museum. 2004. . Accessed April 21, 2021.

Bull Line. ‘Welcome Aboard’- S.S. Puerto Rico Ad. Advertisement.The Past and Now. N.d. . Accessed April 21, 2021.

Burgert Brothers. A H Bull Steamship Company warehouse, 1135 Ellamae Avenue: Tampa, Fla. Photograph. Hillsborough County Public Library Cooperative. 1958. . Accessed April 21, 2021.

General Ship Repair maintains the rich shipbuilding tradition so long associated with the South Baltimore neighborhoods of Federal Hill and Locust Point. Charles “Buck” Lynch founded the company in 1924, moved to this location in 1929, lost the company to bankruptcy during the Great Depression and managed to buy it back at auction. Today, the fourth generation of the Lynch family operates the company at one of the last remaining industrial sites along Key Highway.

General Ship has repaired a variety of vessels through the years, including schooners, steamships, paddle wheelers, and supertankers. Among the notable vessels that have been worked on recently are the Pride of Baltimore II and Mr. Trash Wheel. Workers perform maintenance work on ships in dry docks at this site in addition to sending crews out to other facilities. As of 2020 the facility, which includes a 17,300 square foot shed and two 1000-ton floating docks, repairs mostly workboats. The company serves as the tug and barge repair facility for the Port of Baltimore. The machine shop on site allows General Ship crews to weld and fabricate steel parts here.

Key Highway was once home to a variety of industries including molasses production, oil reprocessing, canning, and locomotive repair. While access to the waterfront remains more limited here than around other parts of the Inner Harbor, residential and mixed-use development has boomed in South Baltimore for the past decade. The Lynch family has considered relocating the business for the past few years, selling the waterfront property to be redeveloped into luxury housing. However, as of October 2020, General Ship Repair remains a bastion of shipbuilding in South Baltimore. What do you predict the Locust Point peninsula will be known for in the 21st century?

The Key Highway Yards along the southern side of the Inner Harbor played a pivotal role in Baltimore’s shipbuilding industry from the 1820s until 1982. Passersby today see almost no traces of this industrial history at the upscale Ritz Carlton and HarborView communities. One of the only remnants of shipbuilding along this stretch of Baltimore’s waterfront lies underneath the 30-story HarborView Towers, completed in 1992: the dry docks used for ship repair were converted to become a parking garage.

Boatbuilding brothers William Skinner Jr. and Jeremiah Skinner moved from Dorchester County to Baltimore in the 1820s to establish the Skinner yard at the base of Federal Hill. William later sold his share of the company to his brother and purchased his own shipyard on Cross Street specializing in sailing ships and steamboats. The Skinners contributed greatly to the city’s prominence in American shipbuilding, with William remembered as having built the first Baltimore clipper ship. The for this site describes the Skinner yard as “the largest and most important of the period.”

William’s descendants carried on the family business and consolidated other small shipyards, eventually creating a 35-acre complex at Key Highway. Business boomed during the Civil War and continued through the turn of the century. Although World War I brought another wave of activity to these shipbuilding operations, the company went into receivership and Bethlehem Steel Company acquired this yard in 1921.��

During the Bethlehem era, this was known as the “upper yard.” The “lower yard” referred to the shipyard adjacent to Fort McHenry, which is still in operation today. Workers at Bethlehem’s shipyards at Locust Point as well as Sparrows Point and Fairfield—together the largest ship repair operation in the United States—participated in the. Baltimore shipyards churned out a record-setting number of Liberty and Victory Ships between 1941-1945. The Key Highway yards repaired over 2,500 ships during WWII.��

Enjoying a stroll along the harbor today, one could almost miss the fact that this place was once a hub of heavy industry, lined with massive equipment and bustling with workers. Although the shipyards are no longer visible at this location, you can experience this chapter of history at the Baltimore Museum of Industry. The 1942 Clyde Model 17 DE 90 whirley crane outside the museum, restored and painted bright green in 2019, worked on Pier 3 between the 1940s-1980s. Can you imagine the sense of awe one would have experienced seeing a whole fleet of these massive cranes hard at work along the shipyard?