Price : American Port Towns	171

had a very good reputation and often fetched a superior price. To-
bacco growers round about preferred therefore to sent their to-
bacco to Elk Ridge and little came to Baltimore.^In 1750 it was a
totally insignificant place. In the next quarter century, however, it
came alive. Baltimore sat near the geological line dividing lowland
jr   tidewater'' Maryland, the land ot tobacco, from the upcountry
or "piedmont    region better suited to wheat, in tact, the back"
"country of western Maryland was an extension southward of die
wheat-producing lands of adjacent Pennsylvania. In the years after
1750, as wheat prices rose in Europe, there was a great incentive to
settle these areas, and Scotch-Irish and German farmers from Penn-
sylvania pushed southward to take up lands in hitherto neglected
western Maryland. Baltimore was most conveniently situated to
serve these new wheat-producing areas. Flour mills were estab-
lished and soon Baltimore was attracting wheat shipments not only
from western Maryland but also from the adjacent parts of central
Pennsylvania west of the Susquehanna River. A distinct me.
community came into existence at Baltimore	__
ports, for tobacco traders were not interested in a prod____
markets fluctuated radically from year to year and were quite dif-
Terent trom their own. Shipyards were set up in and near JbaT
"to build the sloops, schooners, and ships needed to take Baltimore's
wheat, flour, and provisions to die West Indies and southern -hti^
"rope. They also built some larger tobacco vessels for sale in Britain.
'^ier trade and occupational configuration were quite similar to*   1
those of Philadelphia, and Baltimore w.-is Hamming Philadelphia's
Tceenest rival.^ In the years after the American Revolution, Balti-
more became much more of a general entrepot, sending its wheat
to Britain and importing all sort of merchandise from there. The
tobacco regions of lowland Maryland which before the Revolution
had ignored Baltimore now began to feel its pull and sent dieir to-
bacco too for sale there. By then, of course, the Acts of Trade and
Navigation no longer affected American commerce, and Baltimore

79. Cf. Clarence P. Gould, "The Economic Causes of the Rise of Baltimore," Essays in
Colonial History Presented ta Charles McLean Andrews by His StuJems (New Haven, 1931),
pp. 225-251.