Maryland's port city rode America's first railroad
Baltimore is Maryland's most populous city, counting 585,708 residents in 2020. Named for Cecil Calvert, second Baron Baltimore, it used the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, begun in 1830 and the nation's oldest, to funnel Midwest and Appalachian freight toward its harbor, and it still has more public monuments per head than any other American city.
The Calverts drew their title from an Irish estate in County Longford; Baltimore anglicises an Irish phrase meaning town of the big house. Paleo-Indians hunted the area from at least the 10th millennium BC, and in 2021 Woodland-period artifacts 5,000 to 9,000 years old surfaced in Herring Run Park. By the early 1600s the Susquehannock used the land as hunting ground, keeping the Piscataway to the south along the Potomac.
Maryland's assembly created the port at Whetstone Point in 1706 for tobacco, and the town was chartered in 1729, still only 27 homes in 1752. Lexington Market, opened in 1782, is among the oldest public markets still running and was also a site of slave sales. For roughly three winter months spanning 1776 and 1777 the Continental Congress sat at a Baltimore house owned by Henry Fite, briefly making the city the national capital. The 1814 British bombardment of Fort McHenry inspired Francis Scott Key's poem that became The Star-Spangled Banner, and an 1827 toast by John Quincy Adams gave the nickname Monumental City.
The city introduced gas lighting in 1816, founded the world's first dental college in 1840 and shared the first telegraph line with Washington in 1844. Pinkerton agents foiled a plot there against President-elect Lincoln in 1861, and some of the war's first casualties fell on its streets that April. In the slump after the Panic of 1873, B&O wage cuts sparked strikes that left 10 dead, and the Great Fire of 1904 burned more than 1,500 buildings.
Today Johns Hopkins is the top employer, and over 65,000 buildings are listed as historic, more than in any other American city.
Source: Baltimore
