The Woodberry Factory and Park Mill were built near the site of an eighteenth-century gristmill. An active industrial area for nearly two centuries, buildings here have been replaced and repurposed to meet changing demands for production of everything from textiles and netting in the nineteenth century to rubber tires and ice cream cones in the twentieth century.

John Payne, in his comprehensive 1798 tome, A New and Complete System of Universal Geography, noted the flouring mills along the Jones Falls near Baltimore. At the time, wealthy abolitionist Elisha Tyson owned two of the ten documented mills: one at the location of what is now Mill No. 1, and another in Woodberry. The Woodberry mill is described as a "handsome three story building, the first of stone and the other two of brick" that "can grind at least eighty-thousand bushels a year."

Tyson's Woodberry gristmill sold to Horatio Gambrill, David Carroll, and their associates who expanded the structure into a textile mill they called the Woodberry Factory. It was the partnership’s second venture in the area after buying and converting Whitehall gristmill (just south of their new factory) for textile production in 1839. The mills manufactured cotton duck, a fabric primarily used for ship sails during a time when clipper sailing ships dominated local trade. Through the low cost of raw cotton cultivated with enslaved labor and an ability to attract workers despite lower wages than competing mills in the North, the mills along the Jones Falls cornered the market. Their largest buyers were in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. They also found markets overseas in British provinces, South America, and England.

The Woodberry Factory was a purely functional building: a long, three story building designed to maximize daylight and accommodate the machinery powered by horizontal line shafts. A clerestory roof provided more light. Each floor housed machinery for a different step in the manufacturing process. A central stair tower was topped with a dome shaped bell tower. The bell rang on a schedule to call nearby workers to the factory for their shifts.

The new textile mills required a large workforce and this large workforce needed homes. To this end, owners erected mill villages close to their factories. Woodberry began as a string of Gothic Revival duplexes built of locally quarried stone and resembling country cottages. The homes included yards for growing produce, raising livestock, and planting flower beds. Gambrill erected a church in the village. A school was also built, although it was common for children of mill workers to drop out early to work in the mills and help support their families. In 1850, an all-in-one general store, post-office, and social hall was constructed near the railroad tracks.

Additional structures went up as operations grew and new technologies emerged. When the factory started using steam power in 1846, a boiler house was built on the side facing the Jones Falls. The factory acquired a fire engine some time before 1854; a shrewd acquisition considering the tendency for factories full of “cotton-flyings” (or fuzz) to catch fire and burn. The most significant addition to the site was Park Mill, built in 1855 to produce seine netting for fishing boats.

By the turn of the twentieth century, most of the mills in the Jones Falls Valley were brought under a national textile conglomerate, the Mount Vernon-Woodberry Mills. In the 1920s, the company began shuttering the mills in favor of its plants in the South. The Woodberry Factory was sold to Frank G. Schenuit Rubber Co. in 1924. In 1929, a six-alarm fire destroyed the building. Residents across the tracks had to evacuate their homes and the blaze was large enough to attract a reported crowd of 10,000 people.

Schenuit manufactured truck and automobile tires, and later manufactured aircraft tires for the military during World War II. The company became dependent on government contracts and nearly went bankrupt after the war. By the 1960s, the company began expanding into the home and garden industry by buying out smaller manufacturers that made wheelbarrows, industrial wood products, lawn equipment, exercise equipment, and lawn and patio furniture. By the 1970s, Schenuit had moved out of the tire business. In 1972, after Hurricane Agnes, Schenuit sold the Woodberry plant to McCreary Tire and Rubber Company. McCreary closed down just three years later when the company laid off all of the plant’s three hundred workers.

Park Mill sold in 1925, and over the next four decades, the mill was used by a variety of companies including the Commercial Envelope Company and Bes-Cone, an ice-cream cone manufacturing company established by Mitchell Glassner, who invented one of the early machines for that purpose.

Today, Park Mill is leased to a number of small businesses. The Schenuit factory remains empty after yet another fire, one of the only major industrial buildings in the Jones Falls Valley awaiting redevelopment.

1750 Union Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21211

Hampden Falls, now known as Round Falls, was once part of a dam servicing Rock Mill. Completed in the early nineteenth century and rebuilt several times, it became a popular subject for local artists.

The mill was razed in 1930 by Baltimore City as part of flood control efforts along the Jones Falls but the dam remained. In 2001, Baltimore-area developers Bill Struever and Ted Rouse led efforts to build a stairway and platform from which to view the falls.

Falls Road below Wyman Park Drive, Baltimore, MD 21211

The Former Home of David Carroll of the Mount Vernon Mill Company

Crittenton Home was originally the home of David Carroll, owner of the Mount Vernon Mill Company. The building got its name after being absorbed by the Florence Crittenton Mission in 1925.

Crittenton Home was originally the home of David Carroll, owner of the Mount Vernon Mill Company. The building got its name after being absorbed by the Florence Crittenton Mission in 1925.

The Mission was started in 1882 by wealthy New Yorker and Protestant evangelist Charles Crittenton who made his fortune in pharmaceuticals. After losing his four year old daughter Florence to Scarlet Fever, Crittenton dedicated himself to philanthropy, using his wealth to open sanctuaries for unwed mothers. He traveled across the country proselytizing and offering five-hundred dollars to each town willing to open a Home. In 1898, President McKinley signed a special act of Congress which granted a national charter to the Florence Crittenton Mission, making it the first charitable organization to receive a national charter from the United States. At its peak, the Mission had over seventy-five Homes internationally.

The mansion that became the Crittenton Home was likely constructed in 1845 during the development of Stone Hill, a company housing development for workers of the Mount Vernon mills. Positioned high on a hill, the mansion provided an impressive view over Stone Hill and the mills.Carroll could comfortably oversee his industrial domain from the comfort of his grand home, while employees catching glimpses of the house from their homes and workplace below could not shake the feeling that the boss was always watching.

Carroll died in 1881. Afterward other executives of the Mount Vernon Mill Company likely inhabited the mansion. (His son, Albert Carroll, had Evergreen on the Hill, a Greek Revival Mansion now used by the SPCA). After a devastating 1923 labor strike, the mill company moved its operations south in search of cheaper labor and in 1925, the mansion was sold to the Florence Crittenton Mission. The purchase was a response to overcrowding at Baltimore's first Crittenton Home located in Little Italy.

By the 1950s and '60s many Florence Crittenton Homes had become places where embarrassed middle class families hid their pregnant daughters. Under these arrangements, children were taken from their mothers and given up for adoption. With the introduction of birth control pills, the legalization of abortion, and the lessening of stigma against unwed pregnancy, Homes across the country began closing. The Hampden Florence Crittenton Home stayed in use until 2010.

The mansion is currently being renovated and converted to apartments. The mid-century dormitories that served the Florence Crittenton House have been demolished to make way for townhouses.

3110 Crittenton Place, Baltimore, MD 21211

Before the rise of textile mills, the fast-flowing water of the Jones Falls instead powered gristmills supplying Baltimore's lucrative flour trade. Whitehall Mill was established as a gristmill in the late 1700s and owned by James Ellicott, a member of the same family that settled Ellicott City. In 1839, David Carroll, Horatio Gambrill, and their associates purchased the mill from Ellicott and converted it to a textile mill for weaving cotton duck, a tightly woven canvas used to make ship sails.

Over the years, the mill was expanded, burned, rebuilt, renamed, and converted to a number of different commercial uses. To house their workers, Carroll and Gambrill built Clipper Village, a cluster of homes located across from Whitehall for the mill's workers. The capacity of the mill was doubled in 1845 and the mill was converted to steam power to keep up with manufacturing demand. By 1850, forty men and sixty-five women were working at Whitehall Mill with an output of 220,000 yards of cotton duck. Carroll and Gambrill quickly expanded by converting other gristmills along the Jones Falls to textile mills.

The three-story granite factory burned in 1854 and, after it was rebuilt, renamed Clipper Mill in recognition of the ships that used the cotton duck cloth for sails. By this point, William E. Hooper, a sailmaker who expanded his business to selling raw cotton to the textile mills, had joined as a partner. In the 1860s, Gambrill sold his shares in the company to Hooper and opened Druid Mill. After another fire in 1868, Clipper Mill was rebuilt at twice its size. The mill was sold in 1899 to the Mount Vernon-Woodberry Cotton Duck Company, a national conglomerate. In 1902, the mill manufactured the cotton duck for Kaiser Wilhelm's yacht, which was christened by Alice Roosevelt as the Meteor III. In addition to ship sails, the mill manufactured other heavy canvas items such as mail bags for the U.S. government.

In 1925, the mill was sold to Purity Paper Vessels, a firm that manufactured paper containers that could hold semi-liquid foods. The mill's cotton manufacturing machinery was shipped to Mount-Vernon-Woodberry Company's Southern mills in Tallassee, Alabama and Columbia, South Carolina. During the year of the sale, several elegiac articles appeared in the Baltimore Sun that looked back on the time when Baltimore's cotton duck manufacturing was at its peak and its clipper ships dominated international trade. Purity Paper Vessels later sub-leased part of the building to the Shapiro Waste Paper Company. In 1941, half the building was leased by the Army Quartermaster Office to be used as a warehouse for the Third Corps Area.

By the 1940s, the I. Sekine Brush Company, a maker of men's grooming products and toothbrushes, occupied the mill. The company was founded in 1906 and had been operating plants in Baltimore since 1928. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, H.H. Sekine, who had been living in the United States for over twenty years, was arrested and interrogated, along with dozens of foreign-born Baltimoreans connected to nations on the Axis side. At the time, Sekine was operating a factory in Reservoir Hill that the government shut down for two weeks. When it reopened shortly before Christmas, Sekine paid all his employees in full for the time they lost during the closure. Over time, portions of the Clipper Mill property were leased to other companies, including Penguin Books, The Maryland Venetian Blind Manufacturing Corporation, and Star Built Kitchen Units. Sekine maintained operations at the Whitehall mill location until 1992 when it was sold to Komar Industries.

Most recently, developer Terra Nova Ventures transformed the building into a mixed use development with a planned market. Architects Alexander Design Studio restored much of the long neglected mill, bringing new life to the historic structure. Numerous improvements were made for flood prevention, including the construction of a pedestrian bridge over Clipper Mill Road.

3300 Clipper Mill Road, Baltimore, MD 21211

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.

Watch on this site!

1340 Smith Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21209ï»ż

Offices at Mount Vernon Mill No. 3

Mount Vernon Mill No. 3, renamed Mill Centre in the 1980s, represented in 1853 an important expansion to Mt.Vernon Company. Led by president and former sailor Captain William Kennedy, both were among fourteen U.S. mills that—as part of a huge textile conglomerate—would capture up to 80% of the world’s demand for cotton duck in the early 1900s.

Mount Vernon Mill No. 3 was once part of the network of mills owned by the Mount Vernon Mill Company. The village of Stone Hill, adjacent to Mill No. 3, was built around 1845 to house the growing workforce. Families housed in the cottage-like stone duplexes were brought in from surrounding rural areas by mill owners, who also built a company store, churches, a boarding house, and a school.

By the 1880s, the combined mills employed 1,600 workers. Originally erected in 1853, Mill No. 3 was expanded in 1880 as demand for cotton duck increased. More housing followed, so much so that by 1888—when Hampden and Woodberry were annexed by Baltimore City — development had exceeded well beyond the original boundaries of the mill villages.

A 1923 strike against an increase in hours with little increase in pay proved devastating for workers. Soon after, what was once Hampden’s major employer moved much of the mills’ operations to the South. The company began selling off properties, and Stone Hill families in turn were able to buy their homes from their former employers. A new generation of manufacturers moved in and repurposed the old textile mills. In 1974, Rockland Industries bought Mill No. 3, installed new looms, and produced assorted synthetic textiles.

By 1986, the mill was once again sold and redeveloped into a complex of artist studios, galleries, and commercial office space. Today, the site is home to more than seventy tenants of various occupations.

, Greater Hampden Heritage Alliance

3000 Chestnut Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21211

Private Property

Meadow Mill was built by industrialist William E. Hooper in 1877 during one of the most prosperous periods for industry in the Jones Falls Valley. Designed by architect Reuben Gladfelter, it represented the finest of Baltimore mill design. A striking belfry, landscaped paths, and tidy gardens signaled Hooper’s prominence among business leaders.

Baltimore industrialist William E. Hooper built Meadow Mill in 1877 during one of the most prosperous periods for industry in the Jones Falls Valley. Designed by architect Reuben Gladfelter, the structure represents the finest of Baltimore mill design. The striking belfry, landscaped paths, and tidy gardens all signaled Hooper’s prominence among business leaders.

Over the next century, workers at Meadow Mill manufactured twine, lamp wicks, cotton duck (a heavy canvas used primarily for ship sails), and, when during the building’s time as a London Fog factory, raincoats. When the building was new, Meadow Mill was one of four factories comprising Hooper’s Woodberry Manufacturing Company, including Mt. Washington Mill, Woodberry Mill, Clipper Mill and Park Mill. In 1899, the mill became part of the Mt. Vernon-Woodberry Cotton Duck Company, a textile empire that manufactured as much as eighty percent of the world's cotton duck.

Entire families worked long hours to make ends meet. In 1880, children under the age of fifteen made up a quarter of the mill’s workforce. After 1900, the state began to enforce child labor laws that required permits for children under fifteen years old, but children could still expect to work twelve hour shifts for little pay, and at the sacrifice of an education. In 1906, thirty-five girls with no union leader or organization walked out of Meadow Mill demanding a pay increase. Fifty bobbin boys followed the girls out on strike. In the end, the girls' received a raise from fourteen dollars to sixteen dollars a month. The boys received nothing. Their fathers, seeing their boys out of work and not making any money, scolded them and sent them back to work.

By 1915, the Mt. Vernon-Woodberry Cotton Duck Company broke apart and was reestablished as Mt. Vernon-Woodberry Mills. The new company controlled mills in Hampden-Woodberry, South Carolina and Alabama. Production boomed during World War I but, by the 1920s, the company began shifting its operations to the South where wages were low and workers less organized. Meadow Mill continued operations through the Depression then boosted production again during World War II to fill military commissions for canvas. Following the war, the company converted the mill for synthetic textile production, which required sealing the windows and installing air conditioning to regulate temperature and humidity.

In 1960, Meadow Mill was sold to Londontown Manufacturing Company, the makers of London Fog Raincoats. Company founder Israel Meyers started in the outerwear business in the 1920s and popularized military-style trench coats for civilians. London Fog went on to become the leading men's raincoat manufacturer of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1978, the Sun referred to Baltimore as the “nation's raincoat capital,” reporting that Londontown employed 1,500 people in the city including 600 at the Meadow Mill plant. Londontown also continued the textile manufacturing tradition in the building, making proprietary polyester-cotton blends.

In 1972, Hurricane Agnes hit and flooded the factory causing $148,000 in damages. The company's signature raincoats could be found floating down the torrent of the Jones Falls. In 1976, the company was bought by Interco, a conglomerate based in St. Louis. In 1988, the Baltimore Economic Development Corp. struck a deal to move the London Fog factory from Meadow Mill to the Park Circle Business Park in northwest Baltimore. The company closed the Meadow Mill factory and sold the building to developer Himmelrich Associates. The new owners adapted the building for a wide mix of uses including offices, a gym, a restaurant, and a bakery.

As for London Fog, the company struggled through the 1990s. Interco filed for bankruptcy in 1991. The company renamed London Fog Inc. and tried opening its own retail locations, which ended up angering the company's biggest customers—department stores. By 1995, London Fog had shuttered five of its Baltimore area factories and shifted production overseas. In 1997, London Fog announced plans to close its last U.S. factory in northwest Baltimore, citing competition from cheaper overseas labor. Two years later, London Fog filed for bankruptcy protection. Founder Israel Meyers died the same year.

3600 Clipper Mill Road, Baltimore, MD 21211

At the heart of textile manufacturing along the Jones Falls

Mill No. 1 sits on the site of Laurel Mill, a late 18th-century flour mill originally owned by prominent businessman and abolitionist Elisha Tyson. In 1849, the newly chartered Mount Vernon Company built a textile mill on the site. Mill No. 1 stood at the threshold of a burgeoning textile empire that would control most of the world’s cotton duck production, a heavy canvas used primarily for ship sails.

The textile mill and neighboring village Stone Hill shared a close relationship well into the 20th century. Residents renting company-owned housing in Stone Hill were required to be employed in the mill to live there. The mill's bell called workers to the factory floor for their twelve hour shifts. Mill boss David Carroll lived in a mansion at the top of the hill overlooking the village and mill his wealth built. The extant mansion later became the Florence Crittenton Home.

In the mid-1800s, about 400 men, women and children—some as young as eight years old—worked in and lived next to the mills. The company expanded in 1853 with the construction of Mill No. 3 across the street. In 1855, the Mt. Vernon Company controlled six mills in the Jones Falls Valley from Mt. Washington to Remington, and established adjoining villages that would grow into the neighborhoods of Hampden and Woodberry. When Mill No. 1 burned in 1873, it was replaced with the larger factory that stands on this site today. Inside the mills, the cotton looms made a lot of noise, and dust from the cotton was always in the air. Excess cotton had to be swept off the floor and cleaned off the looms to prevent fire. Workers heard the constant loud humming of the looms and breathed in the cotton dust. An entire paycheck could go to rent for the company houses and toward groceries purchased from the company store.

In 1899, area mills merged to form the Mount Vernon-Woodberry Cotton Duck Company, at the time the world’s foremost manufacturer of cotton duck, with mills from South Carolina to Connecticut, and a board of directors based out of New York City. By 1915, the Mt. Vernon-Woodberry Cotton Duck Company broke apart and was reformed as Mt. Vernon-Woodberry Mills, which controlled mills in Hampden and Woodberry, South Carolina, and Alabama, and employed about 2,200 workers locally. Production boomed during World War I and workers leveraged demand to gain a 10 percent wage increase, a reduced 55 hour work week, and cleaner facilities.

Demand for cotton duck dropped immediately after the war, and management cut wages by one-third and increased hours. Tensions within the company culminated in a 1923 strike, when 600 workers voted to reject the offer of a 54-hour work week and 7.5 percent pay increase and demanded a 48-hour work week with a 25 percent pay increase. Despite support from local clergy and the Textile Workers Union of America, the workers were forced by necessity to return to the mills. The company began to sell off its housing and move its operations to Alabama and South Carolina where labor was cheaper and less organized. During the Great Depression, many mill workers were laid off. Many went on welfare. Others, however, refused to go on welfare, and searched for additional jobs to support themselves. At this time most workers made between five and seven dollars per week and worked ten hours a day.

World War II created new demand for canvas. Tarps, rope, netting, mailbags, tents, and stuffing (made from cotton bits called ‘shoddy’) were all in demand from the military. Synthetic fabrics, which required bricking up the mill's windows to control humidity levels, emerged as new products. Many people from the South came to work in the mills at this time. After the war, production declined, never to regain its earlier levels. The Mount Vernon Company finally closed its Baltimore mills and moved all operations to North Carolina in 1972.

Some industry persisted in the mill buildings. Life-Like Products, a maker of model train sets and styrofoam coolers, was one. The international textile firm Rockland Industries, with origins upstream, used Mill No. 3 to store its textile supply after the Mount Vernon Company left. In 2013, Mill No. 1 was redeveloped by developer Terra Nova Ventures and now includes apartments, office space, a restaurant, and an event venue. Although they no longer function as mills, these buildings continue to serve as places of housing, food, and work within Hampden.

2980 Falls Road, Baltimore, MD 21211

Industry and Adaptive Reuse at Clipper Mill

At its peak in the late nineteenth century, the Poole & Hunt Foundry and Machine Works employed over 700 people, making it one of the largest employers in the Jones Falls Valley after the textile mills. The company manufactured an impressive array of machinery: turbines, boilers and looms for the mills, screwpile lighthouses, railroad machinery, and transmission equipment for cable cars. Perhaps their greatest contribution was to the construction of the United States Capitol Building, to which the company manufactured the structural elements of the dome and cast the columns of its peristyle, made structural elements for the House and Senate wings, and built the derricks, steam engines, and lifting equipment that made the construction of the Capitol possible.

Robert Poole emigrated as a child from what is now Northern Ireland to Baltimore in the 1820s. When he was old enough to work, he found employment at the machine shop of Lanvale Cotton Mill (located near where Penn Station is today) and later worked at Savage Mill. In the 1830s, Poole worked for Ross Winans, the millionaire engineer for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Through these early jobs, Poole gained experience working on machinery for mills and the railroad—two key markets for the company he would later form.

By the late 1840s, Poole was running his own shop in downtown Baltimore with partner William Ferguson. After Ferguson retired in 1851, German Hunt, an executive at the firm, became a partner. The shop burned in 1853 and the company relocated to Woodberry along the Northern Central Railway and near the prospering textile mills. Poole oversaw the shop while Hunt handled the business side downtown. By 1890, the complex included a massive 80 foot high erecting shop, signaling the impressive scale of machinery being manufactured by the company.

In 1854, Captain Montgomery Meigs, a US Army Corps of Engineers official in charge of the US Capitol extension project, commissioned Poole & Hunt to build steam engines and derricks for the construction of the Capitol Building, along with structural ironwork for the roof. Within a year, Meigs offered Poole & Hunt the opportunity to bid on work for the columns of the Capitol dome. The firm won with an extremely low bid, 2/10s of a cent per pound. Poole & Hunt continued to work on the columns until 1859 when Meigs was replaced and the contract for the remainder of the columns went to New York foundry Janes, Fowler, Kirtland & Co.

By this point, Poole & Hunt had made a name for themselves. Robert Poole would build his Second Empire mansion "Maple Hill" across the Jones Falls in Hampden overlooking his factory, while German Hunt resided in fashionable Bolton Hill. Poole involved himself in the lives of his workers by funding the construction of housing, churches for multiple denominations, a general store, and a circulating library. The library closed after Poole donated funds to the construction of an Enoch Pratt Free Library branch in Hampden. The company also cast the iron columns for the library, which originally shared the building with the Provident Savings Bank, also controlled by the Poole family. Robert Poole and German Hunt were also involved in establishing the Woman's College of Baltimore, which became Goucher College. German Hunt served on the college's first board of trustees and Poole donated a significant amount of cash to the endeavor.

In addition to overseeing the lives of local residents, Robert Poole and German Hunt maintained close relationships with the textile mill owners. Robert Poole's daughter, Sarah, married James E. Hooper, who would become president of the Mt. Vernon-Woodberry Cotton Company before splitting off and forming Hooperwood Cotton Mills adjacent to Poole's industrial campus.

German Hunt retired from the company in 1889. Poole made his son George partner and renamed the company Robert Poole & Son. The company was now the largest machine shop and foundry in Maryland, employing over 700 workers at its peak. It garnered national acclaim in trade journals for its impressive manufacturing feats. The Leffel Double Turbine, used to power mills, was praised for its efficiency and durability, and became popular with manufacturers across the country. By the 1880s, the company made a name for itself building machinery for cable car powerhouses along the East Coast and in the Midwest. In 1901, the Calumet and Hecla 65' sand wheel manufactured by Poole, the largest of its kind in the world, made the cover of Scientific American, bringing more national attention to the firm.

Robert Poole died in 1903 and the company continued under the name Poole Engineering & Machine Company. In 1905, the company added an administrative building to the campus. In 1916, to meet manufacturing demand, a new erecting shop was added. World War I brought a new wave of commissions to the company. The company manufactured naval artillery mountings and operated an ammunition works in Texas, Maryland.

In 1934, hard hit by the depression, the company sold much of its original campus to the Franklin Balmar Company, which during World War II was commissioned to provide components to the Manhattan Project's atomic bomb. Some of the buildings were sold to Hooperwood Cotton Mills. The campus was later used by the Aero-Chatillon Company to manufacture components for aircraft carriers.

A kitchen cabinet manufacturer was using the site in 1972, and by the 1990s, a rock climbing gym had taken over the massive erecting shop and artists had set up studios on the campus. In 1995, a large fire that began at the rock climbing gym claimed the life of a firefighter and destroyed the erecting shop and machine shops.

After years of vacancy, the development firm Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse tackled the large site with a preservation and rehabilitation focus. Designed by architects Cho Benn Holback + Associates, the site is now a thriving complex of residences, offices, shops, restaurants, and even a new crop of hard-at-work artisans. The burned out erecting shop was transformed into apartments, and condos were built on the site of the original machine shop. Not least of its notable attributes, the restoration of Clipper Mill has won, not one, but two historic preservation awards from 91ÊÓÆ”.

1760 Union Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21211