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

While Baltimore is remembered for the city’s role in fabricating ships and railcars, the companies that made the large machines required to build those ships and railcars have largely been forgotten. The Detrick & Harvey Machine Company buildings is one of the last remnants of Baltimore’s place in the history of machinery manufacture.

The Detrick & Harvey Machine Company began downtown, a block from the Inner Harbor, in an area of Baltimore where both the buildings and, ultimately, the streets themselves were lost to the 1904 Fire. Before Jacob S. Detrick founded his machine company on Preston Street, he operated the Enterprise Machine Works (featured in the 1882 volume “Industries of Maryland”). Around 1883, Alexander Harvey, a recent graduate of Harvard University and Baltimore native, joined Detrick in his machine shop by and the two soon formed the partnership of Detrick & Harvey.

The company outgrew Detrick's original downtown location by 1885 and moved north to Preston Street just east of the Jones Falls. There they began the construction of an impressive factory complex. Around 1890, the company’s name changed to the Detrick & Harvey Machine Company. They were well known for their metal working machines, notably their planers and the band saw filing machine first offered by Enterprise Machine Works. Alexander Harvey passed away in 1914 at age 57.

The next year, on August 17, 1915, the Bethlehem Steel Company purchased the company and the complex became the Bethlehem Steel Detrick & Harvey Plant. Examples of large D & H machines are in two notable local collections: a large planer at the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum's repair facility and another at the Baltimore Museum of Industry. The Yellow Cab Company purchased the facility in 1929 and continue to operate there until the early 1980s.

508 E. Preston Street, Baltimore, MD 21202

The L. Gordon & Son factory is a sixty-four thousand square foot industrial building on the corner of South Paca Street and West Cross Street, a few blocks from M&T Stadium. It is a three-story building of lightly-ornamented but utilitarian brick, with a Star of David design in the brickwork at the top. In the past century, the factory has housed at least four family businesses and each one has left their mark.

Fr. Bergner & Co. erected the factory on Paca Street, designed by architect J. Edward Sperry, in 1905. Two brothers, Frederick and William Bergner, ran the company for over 25 years manufacturing picture frames, photo albums, and other small luxuries. William died in 1902, leaving behind his parents, three brothers, and wife. It was Frederick who moved the business to the new factory and continued to oversee the company until his death in 1919.

The onset of the Great Depression, however, was a greater challenge than fire. In 1930, the company began leasing out the top floor of the Paca and Cross Street factory. In 1931, the company sold two tracts of land adjoining the Paca and Cross Street factory, one to the city to expand Sterrett Street, the other to the Catholic Church. By 1933, at the trial for a fraud case involving forty-two shares of Bergner & Co. stock, the prosecuting attorney implied that “the company consisted only of an empty warehouse.” In March 1933, Fr. Bergner & Co.’s remaining assets were seized, and in 1934 the court-appointed trustee sold the Paca and Cross Street factory to The Hopkins Place Savings Bank, who had held the mortgage for $47,000.By 1940, L. Gordon & Son was operating out of the Paca & Cross Street factory and they purchased the building in 1942. Paca and Cross Street was at least L. Gordon & Son’s third factory in the fifty years since its founding, but the firm would remain in that building for the next sixty years.

L. Gordon & Son was, as the name suggests, a family-owned business. Louis Gordon started the enterprise in 1891, making paper boxes by hand at his house on Orleans Street. He was a Russian Jewish immigrant, and his son Paul was, from the time he was a young man, an active participant in several Jewish and Zionist organizations in Baltimore.

Given his spiritual and political affiliations, it seems likely that Gordon installed the six-pointed star design at the top of the outer wall of the factory around the time they acquired the building. In 1897, the six-pointed star, known as a 'Magen David', was adopted as a symbol by the First Zionist Congress. From that point forward, the star became a symbol of Jewishness in general in the early twentieth century. The crest of Hadassah, the women’s branch of the American Zionist movement and the organization to which Paul Gordon's wife belonged, included the Magen David in their crest design at least as early as 1915.

After Paul's death the company passed to his son, Bertram I. Gordon. In 1951, L. Gordon & Son bought several lots surrounding their factory from Barnett L. Silver, who had spent the last decade buying them up from individual homeowners. Besides buying up half of the block at Paca & Cross Street, Gordon & Son also added a warehouse in 1967 at 2020 Hollins Ferry Road.

In May 1985, Bertram Gordon died of a heart attack. His widow Marjorie Gordon took over the company after his death, and it remained in operation at least through 1991. Marjorie Gordon died in 2009 at the age of eighty. The company sold the factory to Toybox, LLC, in 1997, and it has remained largely empty ever since.

1050 S. Paca Street, Baltimore, MD 21230

When Baltimorean William Painter invented the bottle cap in 1891, it didn’t take long for beverage companies (beer brewers in particular) to realize its value, and for Painter to realize he needed to build significant manufacturing facilities to keep up with demand. Painter's enterprise, the Crown Cork and Seal Company, opened its first big production facility in 1897 on Guilford Avenue and not long after expanded by opening a larger complex on Eastern Avenue in Highlandtown in 1906. The Guilford Avenue complex continued as the base of operations for custom building the sealing machinery while the Highlandtown complex acted as the hub of Crown Cork and Seal’s manufacturing operations.

In 1910, the Highlandtown complex expanded again to include two new buildings. Both used mill construction with brick exteriors and granite trimmings as well as new advances like fireproof elevator shafts, fire escapes and ventilators. The five story building had two massive water towers that held 15,000 gallons each to be released in case a fire broke out inside.

Crown Cork and Seal’s Highlandtown complex became the base of machinery production in 1928 after the owners abandoned the Guildford Avenue plant. Despite its modern fire protections, however, the added activity at the complex and its constantly whirring electrical machines were at high risk of fire. In 1940, managers at the building made twenty-six calls to the fire department, almost all of which appeared unnecessary, until one signaled a very real five-alarm fire. Despite the loss of $500,000 in baled cork, the company minimized the damage and kept churning out bottle caps for the world’s beer brewers.

In 1958, Crown Cork and Seal moved its headquarters from Baltimore to Philadelphia and the owners sold a group of thirty buildings, including the Guilford Avenue complex, to the city for $1.5 million. The Highlandtown plant continued to operate for nearly 30 more years, but finally closed in 1987 as use of aluminum and plastic containers rose and the demand for glass bottle caps waned. Today the building houses artist studios and light manufacturing and is occasionally used by movie studios.

5501 Eastern Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21224

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

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

August Rosenberger got into the broom business by chance in the late 1800s. One of his customers, a farmer who was unable to make ends meet, asked Mr. Rosenberger if he would accept a small shack with one broom machine and one sewing machine in payment for his grocery bill. Mr. Rosenberger accepted and sent him on his way. By 1907, Rosenberger had a successful broom business and he set his sights on Baltimore.

Construction began on the Atlantic-Southwestern Broom Company in Baltimore in 1910. The business continued to grow and between 1922 and 1924, the building expanded with additional buildings to the east and north, adding 57,500 square feet of warehouse and space. Production peaked in 1932 at 3.6 million brooms and 300 employees.

The company closed in 1989. Harbor Enterprise Center opened it's doors in 1992 in the old Atlantic-Southwestern Broom Company and quickly became home to an eclectic mix of artists, woodworkers, and startup companies. Completed in early 2009, the ground floor has been converted to 20,000 square-feet of retail with office/studio space above. The factory is now home to more than fifty local businesses.

3500 Boston Street, Baltimore, MD, 21224

Originally known as Druid Mill, Union Mill was built between 1865 and 1872. At the time, it was the largest cotton duck mill in the United States. A unique feature of the mill's construction is the use of locally quarried stone. The other mills in the area were constructed with brick.

Druid Mill was was the first mill in the area to feature a clock tower, which was clearly visible to the workers living in Druidville located across Union Avenue. The mill joined the Mount Vernon Woodberry Cotton Duck Company in 1899, which had a virtual monopoly on the world's production of cotton duck. The mill was then renamed Mount Vernon Mill No. 4.

Today, the mill is home to residences and businesses, including Artifact Coffee.

1500 Union Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21211

This building was slated for demolition in 2023. 

Looking up at this large, handsome red brick and stone building across Baltimore Street, one can just make out the remnants of “Hendler Creamery Company” written across the front façade. Manuel Hendler (1885-1962) opened this ice cream manufacturing plant in 1912. Born to Jewish immigrants and raised on a Baltimore County dairy farm, Hendler became a household name in Baltimore. His popular ice cream attracted the attention of the New Jersey-based Borden Company, which bought his operation in 1928.

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Jewish Museum of Maryland

1100 E. Baltimore Street, Baltimore, MD 21202

Former Factory and Former Art Space

For years, the Bell Foundry operated as a cooperatively run arts space that took its name and its building from the historic McShane Bell Foundry. But, since December 2016, the building has stood vacant. After the "Ghost Ship" warehouse fire in Oakland, California, the city cracked down on code violations in local DIY art spaces and evicted the tenants at the Bell Foundry.

Henry McShane started the McShane Bell Foundry at Holliday and Centre Streets in 1856. By the late nineteenth century, when the business expanded to Guilford Avenue (then known as North Street) the firm had already produced tens of thousands of bells and chimes, shipping them out to churches and public buildings across the country.

In 1935, the Henry McShane Manufacturing Company sold the foundry to William Parker, whose son continues to operate the business today. The McShane Bell Foundry moved in 1979 to Glen Burnie, Maryland, where their total production is over 300,000 bells made for cathedrals, churches, municipal buildings, and schools in communities around the world—including the 7,000-pound bell that hangs in the dome of Baltimore's City Hall. The firm is the only large Western-style bell maker in the United States and one of a handful of bell manufacturers around the world.

The entrance to the former foundry is now on Calvert Street. For years, the Bell Foundry was a thriving art space including the building and the adjacent grounds, where there is a community garden and a communal skate park. The basement was used for shows and rehearsal space. The Castle Print Shop was located upstairs along with rehearsal space for the Baltimore Rock Opera Society. Outcry over the evictions in December 2016 prompted the creation of the Safe Art Space Task Force to address the broader issue of safety in underground art spaces. Unfortunately, no immediate repairs were available for the Bell Foundry and, in April 2017, the building's owners put it up for sale.

1539 N. Calvert Street, Baltimore, MD 21202

Built in 1925 over the loud protests of local residents who opposed a new factory in their residential neighborhood, the Ward Baking Company is a handsome brick box, designed by C.B. Comstock, a New York-based refrigeration architect and engineer. Based in Pittsburgh, the Ward Baking Company, then known as the Ward Bread Company, also had factories in the Bronx, Buffalo, and East Orange, New Jersey. Long retired as a factory, the building has more recently been used as a church.

2140 Edmondson Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21229

A Former Factory on Franklin Street

Constructed in 1911, the American Ice Company is an enduring reminder of West Baltimore’s industrial development with a striking brick facade on W. Franklin Street and a powerhouse that backs up to the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks. At the time of the building’s construction, West Baltimore was quickly developing beyond the 1816 city line as small builders put up new rowhouses that soon extended west out to the Gwynns Falls.

The previous decade had also witnessed significant changes in the ice industry as the business of importing natural ice from rivers and lakes in the Northeast to Mid-Atlantic and Southern cities dwindled in the face of competition from new factories that enabled businesses to supply a more regular and consistent supply of “manufactured ice.”

The building was severely damaged in a 2004 fire. Fortunately, the current owner supported a recent nomination to the National Register of Historic Places and plans to redevelop the property while retaining the historic ice house structure.

2100 W. Franklin Street, Baltimore, MD 21223

The Appold- Faust Brothers Building at 307-309 West Baltimore Street is one of a handful of surviving cast-iron fronted buildings in Baltimore and one of the only structures in the city that can boast two iron facades on front and back.

The building's first owner, George J. Appold, a prominent entrepreneur and owner of Appold and Sons (the city's leading tannery and leather dealer), commissioned builder Benjamin F. Bennet to construct this Italianate structure in 1870. Appold advertised the space as suitable for any business requiring space, light, and an independent entrance on Baltimore Street. With its Corinthian columns, arched windows, and graceful segmented bays, the building was an elegant addition to the area and remains one of the finest examples of iron façade construction in Baltimore.

John Faust, a German immigrant and shoe manufacturing pioneer bought the building from George Appold in 1875 for $78,000. Faust soon demolished two buildings behind the structure and added a cast iron-front on Redwood Street as the entrance warehouse for his shoe factory. Faust was the first shoe manufacturer south of the Mason Dixon line to use machinery to craft shoes.

Though the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 threatened the building it emerged unscathed—together with its neighbors on the south side of Baltimore Street. The building has still seen its fair share of fire and destruction. Just three years after the Great Baltimore Fire, the Baltimore Sun reported that the structure (which at the time housed two local auction firms—Grotjan, Lobe & Co. and Lobe, Winkler & Co.) experienced a fire that caused $95,000 worth of damage, injured 15 people, and killed Baltimore fireman Tillerman Gill, who perished when a poorly constructed portion of the top floor, collapsed.

The owners repaired the building and, in 1908, the Baltimore Shoe House, proudly known as "The Fair and Square House" moved in. Israel Levenstein, a Russian Jewish immigrant who founded the firm in 1895 had welcomed partner Joseph Lubin into the business in that same year. The firm sold shoes and boots in the Mid-Atlantic and the South, and as far west as Texas and Oklahoma. After workers had gone home on a brisk October night in 1911 the Appold-Faust Building once again caught fire. The fire began in the basement and though over $20,000 worth of merchandise was lost, the automatic fire-alarm box in the building alerted the fire department in time and the building itself suffered only light damage.

Various shoe wholesalers and a host of merchants (including Hochschild Kohn, who used it as a warehouse in the 1920s) occupied this site in the early years of the twentieth century. From 1941 to the 1970s, a riding store called The Trading Post operated out of the building and in 2006 it was sold to Faust Brothers, LLC and rehabilitated as office space.

307 W. Baltimore Street, Baltimore, MD 21201

While few remember the slogan of the Emerson Bromo-Seltzer Company—"If you keep late hours for Society's sake Bromo-Seltzer will cure that headache"—the iconic Bromo-Seltzer Tower has been a Baltimore landmark since its construction in 1911.

While few remember the slogan of the Emerson Bromo-Seltzer Company—"If you keep late hours for Society's sake Bromo-Seltzer will cure that headache"—the iconic Bromo-Seltzer Tower has been a Baltimore landmark since its construction in 1911. At fifteen stories, the tower made the Bromo-Seltzer factory the tallest building in the city. The tower boasted a four-dial gravity clock that was the largest in the world (bigger, even, than London's Big Ben) and an illuminated, rotating 51-foot blue steel bottle. The iconic design immediately secured the tower's spot as a favorite of city residents and visitors alike. Ship captains traveling up the bay reportedly used the bottle as a beacon to guide them toward the Light Street docks and the removal of the blue bottle in 1936 is still a sore point with many Baltimoreans. The tower was built by Captain Isaac Emerson, a chemist, and inventor of the headache remedy and alleged hangover cure, Bromo-Seltzer. Emerson was a wealthy and well-regarded Baltimorean, known as a generous philanthropist and world traveler. He had been a lieutenant in the Navy during the Spanish-American war and a post-war visit to Florence's tower on the Palazzo Vecchio provided the inspiration for the design of this tower created by local architect Joseph Evans Sperry. Though the factory was torn down in 1969, the 289-foot tower survived several threats of demolition and in 2007 philanthropists Eddie and Sylvia Brown worked with Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts to transform the structure into 33 artists' studios. The tower is open once a month for public 91ĘÓƵ and while much has changed visitors can still ride the 1911 Otis elevator to the clock room on the 15th floor and view the still-functioning clock works.

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, Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts

21 S. Eutaw Street, Baltimore, MD 21201

Former Factory Turned MICA Graduate Studios

The Morgan Millwork Company, now known as the MICA Graduate Studio Center, is a product of Baltimore's once vibrant industrial development and a clear reflection of how industry has struggled in Baltimore over the past 50 years. J. Earl Morgan together with his cousin, Albert T. Morgan, incorporated the Morgan Company in Osh Kosh, Wisconsin in 1889, building on an enterprise first established by their fathers in 1868 to manufacture processed lumber and shingles. Here in Baltimore, J. Earl Morgan partnered with Charles A. Hanscom to start a Baltimore office for the Morgan Millwork Company in 1910. Within a few years, they purchased a property from Frank Ehlen on the south side of North Avenue just west of Maryland Avenue with the plan to construct a "sales distributing plant" for $60,000.

The Morgan Millwork Company remained on West North Avenue for nearly 60 years, selling and distributing a range of building products produced by Morgan Millwork, Andersen Window-all, Armstrong Cork and others, to contractors, lumber yards and building supply firms. In 1971, the company announced their plans to move from North Avenue to a new 90,000 square foot office in Baltimore County in a 1,000-acre industrial complex known as Chesapeake Park, developed by the Martin-Marietta Corporation.

Next to take over the building, was Max Rubin Industries, a Baltimore clothing manufacturer established by Max Rubin — a unique character with a personal passion for poetry and a reputation for employing people with disabilities. Over the years, Rubin wrote over three thousand poems on such varied topics as the 1952 Baltimore transit strike and the historic old Otterbein Church (located across the street from one of his factories) gaining him recognition as the Poet Laureate of Baltimore in 1947. His business grew from a modest start in the 1920s with a small chain of stores in West Virginia and Pennsylvania before he moved to Baltimore in the 1930s. By the 1970s had become one of the city's oldest clothing manufacturers. Regrettably, the loss of a large government contract and the challenges of the late 1970s recession brought an end to the business in 1983. On Christmas Day, a small classified ad appeared announcing an auction to sell of all the sewing machines, cutting tables and clothes presses at West North Avenue on January 9, 1983.

Even as Baltimore's struggling textile industry continued to slide, in 1984 this building again found a use as a factory for Jos. A. Bank Clothiers to produce suit coats at the rate of 5,000 a week. Jos. A. Bank has deep Baltimore roots, dating back to 1905 when 11-year old Joseph A. Bank got a job working for his grandfather, Charles Bank, cutting trousers in the family owned factory. The firm continued to produce clothes at Baltimore factories until they ended all production in the United States in the mid-1990s.

For the past fifteen years, the building has been occupied as studios for students at the Maryland Institute College of Art. The building is currently undergoing a transformation into a hub for MICA's graduate study programs with renovations led by architects Cho Benn Holback + Associates to create shared galleries, a lecture hall, meeting rooms, work and fabrication space, café, and painting, mixed-media and photography studios.

131 W. North Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21201