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Baltimore was the hub of the transportation and communications system that
integrated the state geographically. This system included the railroads, the
coastwise shipping routes (the Chesapeake Bay was the largest inland waterway in
the country), the telegraph, and increasingly, the telephone system. Additionally,
during the 1920s, a major road building campaign produced a 3,000 mile state
highway system, that was judged second best in the U.S. by one source, and several
new ferry services were initiated between the shores of the Chesapeake.
Economically, Baltimore was the center of commerce for its whole metropolitan
region, both as the major destination of the region's products and the major source
of its consumer goods. The western shore of Maryland was particularly important
to Baltimore as a consumer market and as a source for wheat. Three railroad
companies built new grain elevators in Baltimore in the 1920s for wheat from this
area, adding 8,000,000 bushels of capacity (only to see the grain trade decline
disastrously from the middle of the decade).**4
Politically, Baltimore's influence over its hinterlands was based in its
predominating and increasing power in the state government, which grew all the
more rapidly as the traditional power of the Eastern Shore declined after 1920.
This political power was in good part economic in origin, but it was also
demographic. And Baltimore held a growing demographic balance of power: in the
1920s the city population for the first time surpassed 1/2 of the state's. Moreover
the city was the fastest growing area of the state. Baltimore was a magnet to the
people of the broader region, and much of the population growth in the Baltimore
area in the post-World War I era was a result of emigration from its hinterlands.
Significantly, most in-state immigration ~ Black and white — came from the Eastern
Shore and southern Maryland.
Culturally, Baltimore had the universities and colleges, the opera, the
symphony, the theater, the museums - organs of "high" culture attractive to the
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