“Slow Beginnings, 1729--1776"

I. Introduction

A) Administrative

1) ask for assignments to be passed in; book report choices and initial assessment of your assigned neighborhood based upon the document packet;

2) pass out corrected syllabus and outline of last week's lecture. B) In her chapter “The Empty Century,” Sherry Olson sets the context for tonight's lecture in the first paragraphs:

p. 1--2:

“The [geographical] features [along the banks of the Patapsco River to its mouth] belonged to a town site of magnificent potential.  The place was a natural haven for ships.  It possessed streams with plenty of fall for turning mills, and also admirable timber on the necks, a generous agricultural climate, a great variety of soils, an abundance of fine springs of water, and a along ridge of excellent red brick clays, called the bolus by John Smith, but later known as the minebank for its nuggets of iron ore.

Yet for a hundred years no city grew.  Unlike Boston, New York, Philadelphia, or Charleston, Baltimore was never a significant center of colonial trade, enterprise, government, or culture. Laid out in 1730, it was still a mere village of twenty--five houses in 1752, and at the onset of the Revolution it was a small town of six thousand persons and ten churches, and it had just acquired its first newspaper.  The failure to develop a colonial city on the Patapsco cannot be blamed on a strong rival.  Colonial Maryland had no truly urban life, and its economy required no system of market towns. ..."

II.  Baltimore's Problem: finding a reason other than Tobacco for being a Port Town in an economy where London (and to a lesser extent, Glasgow) served that function well enough.

Those 18th century Marylanders who would have liked to have seen Baltimore become a thriving Port (Lord Proprietor and developers of the iron industry such as Charles Carroll of Annapolis, Dr. Charles Carroll, and the Tasker Family (whose progeny married into the Virginia Aristocracy) had a hard time of it.

Baltimore had to wait until the settlements of the hinterland produced enough crops to make a town/city worthwhile.  Even then it would take entrepreneurs such as Dr. Stevenson to promote the redirection of the hinterland export trade from Philadelphia to the banks of the Patapsco.

Only when the major crop of the hinterland (wheat) was combined with the major crop of the Eastern Shore (also wheat) and brought to Baltimore for re--export as grain or flour (milled in the Baltimore area) did Baltimore begin to grow significantly as a port town.

To put Baltimore into the urban experience of Europe (specifically London):  In 1320 London had a an estimated population of about 40,000 people.  That London was a teeming city even then is evidence by Robert de Lincoln's bequest in 1318 of one penny for each of the known 2,000.  In 1322, when alms were distributed at Black Friars, the crowd was so vast that 50 people were trampled to death.  It would not be until about 1810 that Baltimore's population would exceed the 40,000 that London had five hundred years earlier.

A seminal work on the origins and growth of American Port Towns is “Economic Function and Growth of American Port Towns in the Eighteenth Century by Jacob M. Price in PERSPECTIVES IN AMERICAN HISTORY, vol viii, 1974, pp. 123--186.”  We won't discuss the work in detail except as it relates to the Chesapeake, but his chart on p. 176 places Baltimore into the context of the development of the major towns of America in the 18th Century.

use p. 176 from the perspectives in American History, Price, to show the relationship of Baltimore to other Port Towns in America.

Price saves his discussion of the lack of urban/ port towns in the Chesapeake Bay to the conclusion of his discussion of what made of the success of the other port towns in America;

1) tobacco inhibits urban growth; too decentralized;  by 1770 Chesapeake tobacco trade was worth some L900,000

“The failure of Virginia and Maryland to develop any large commercial centers before 1775 (or even any middling centers before 1750) has long perplexed historians and geographers.  Moreover, it perplexed the people and leaders of the two colonies themselves in the 17th and 18th centuries.  In general royal policy favored town growth, and the legislatures of the two colonies passed numerous acts intended to encourage town growth, but all to very little effect.

most common explanation for the lack of towns is geographical: 8,000 miles of waterways, Bay 190 miles long, with many rivers that flow into it, great and small, and the numerous tributaries of those rivers.   no need for a compulsory point of transsshipment as at Philadelphia where wholesale dealers and greater merchants might congregate and services useful be centralized.  Price not satisfied with this argument: seems to place location before activity;

1) if more towns, more activity.  Relevant question: why were there e not more merchants, traders, and artisans in the Chesapeake

2) does ease of transportation really lead to population dispersal necessarily?   Some urban places thrive on costal trade (Charleston, Boston) which is  heavily dependent upon the ease of water transportation

driving force inhibiting urbanization was the organization of the tobacco trade;  even when wheat took hold and began to exported from Baltimore as an urban center, exports of wheat from the whole Bay were worth (1771) only L92,000 sterling as opposed to L900,000 sterling. Roughly 1/10; to the advantage of the merchants trading in the Bay to keep their stores decentralized and out of the hands of native merchants;

Expand on Price: takes a good 150 years before there is enough local capital (beginning about 1770) to challenge the hegemony of the Glasgow and London tobacco merchant/bankers and even then some of the source of the capital came from those who were profiting at last from the Iron Industry (itself requiring a long gestation period) and who wanted urban growth (example of the Taskers financing WDJ.   And even then such American based entrepreneurial activity did not need a large metropolitan area to be successful.  In time Baltimore would take over the export trade of tobacco from London, but ONLY after it was well--established as a city and took the opportunity of consolidating the tobacco trade in Baltimore as part and parcel of its burgeoning re--export trade, a phenomena that took place between 1790 and 1820.

In other words urban growth would not occur easily when the economy was dominated by tobacco production.

While shipbuilding in urban centers contributed to the growth of those centers in Philadelphia, New York, and New England, it was just as easily decentralized in the Chesapeake.  Almost any deep creek or river feeding the bay could be a place to build ships as long as the timber held out.

How then did Baltimore come to be a port town?

III. Lets look first at the physical development of the town reviewing first the article from Reps that we read for tonight and then the outline of the argument in an excellent paper entitled “The Taking up and Parceling Out of Land in the Vicinity of Baltimore, 1632--1796" by Garrett Power, the husband of one of the members of the Class, Penny Power.

A) Reps: provides a good, nicely illustrated, overview of the development of the City

1) note difficulty of establishing a site for the city; originally the Carrolls wanted it to be on Whetstone Point, where the Principio company mined iron, but were deflected by John Moale's efforts in the Legislature so that they moved it to its present location

2) town by 1776 consisted of four distinct elements:

the 60, 1 acre lots of the Carrolls
old town, or Jones Town
Fell's Point
Howard's addition to Baltimore Town
[for details see Document Packet]

3) characteristic of the town planning for Baltimore: rigid grid system that did not allow for adaptation to contours and public spaces; exceptions were what would happen to Colonel Howard's estate (Mount Vernon Square)

4) might want to note the rough rule of thumb of five people per house that Morea de St. Mery uses with the 1795 population as we try to chart the population growth of the town based upon the number of houses built each year (3000 houses, 15,000 people in 1795).  According to the 1990 census, the number of housing units in Baltimore City, with a population of 736,014, was 303,706 or 2.42 people per unit, BUT the housing unit in 1795 was smaller: 1--2 story brick dwellings like those you can still find today in Fell's Point and South Baltimore. By 1990 the definition of a housing unit was

“a group of rooms or a single room occupied or intended for occupancy as separate living quarters; that is, the occupants do not live and eat with any other persons in the structure, and there is either (1) direct access from the outside or through a common hall, or (2) complete kitchen facilities for the exclusive use of the occupants.  Transient accommodations, barracks for workers, and institutional--type quarters are not counted as housing units.” (1981 Statistical Abstract of the United States, p. 750."

B) a closer look at the transition of the lands along the Patapsco and Jones Falls from a rural agricultural economy to a port town is provided by Professor Power's unpublished study of the taking up and parceling out of land in the vicinity of Baltimore: 1632--1796.

From your document packet from last week you learn that from the original purchase in 1729 of 60 acres until the annexation of 1816--1818, Baltimore  Town encompassed no more than 808 acres or 1.26 square miles, by far the greater share of which was added in 1781 and 1782 when victory over the British was at hand.

If you look at the map of baltimore in the Reps handout, figure 197 and on p. 203 (use overlays as well). you can get a good idea of the physical development of the town from 1729 to 1800.  Indeed you can even get a feel for the pace of growth in the later period by comparing the 1792 map of the town with that of 1797/1800.

As Professor Power points out, because the land was first thought of in agricultural terms, sorting out ownership and boundaries of the original tracts for the development of an urban center in which differences in boundaries of a few inches let alone a few feet matter a great deal, is no small undertaking.

In 1786 a surveyor, George Presbury, tried to determine where the then city lay in relationship to the original land grants that went back to as early as the 1650s.  This was the result. [Presbury Plat]

In essence the question who had the right to lay out and develope Baltimore resolved itself into a whole series of legal battles among some familiar names: the Carrolls and the Fells, .  In the end, the Carrolls held on to their claims to the west of the Jones Falls, not through an original patented granted by Lord Baltimore, but through having notoriously, and adversely used the land for more than twenty years. The Fells made good use of the Land system to obtain patents and claims to what became Fells Point, after losing out on trying to claim title to what became Jones Town.  On the southern edge of Baltimore Town Cornelius Howard developed lands on which, after 1755 the Acadians (displaced French from Canada) settled forming “Frenchtown.”  Howard had his troubles with the Carroll's too, who claimed his land to no avail, although it took the courts until 1784 to finally decide in Howard's favor.

Except for a few final court decisions, the ownership of the lands on which Baltimore was built was settled by the end of the American Revolution.

In the meantime, while the legal ownership of the land was on its way to being settled, an English Immigrant, Thomas Harrison, devised a method to build houses quickly without burdening the process with the additional cost of having to buy the land on which the houses were built.  It was called ground rents.   Next week we will look more closely at Harrison's career and the city that emerged as a result of his creative financing project but let me explain how the system worked.

IV. What then gives Baltimore the impulse to grow

a) phase I: the Wheat Trade

Review Clarence P. Gould and the Economic Causes of the Rise of Baltimore:

1) In contrast to Frederick Maryland, where in 1755, one of General Braddock's officers could write

This town has not been settled above seven years, and there are about 200 houses and 2 churches, one English, one Dutch [German]; the inhabitants, chiefly Dutch [German] are industrious but imposing people; here we got plenty of provisions and forage

by the 1750s, the prospects that Baltimore would be more than an unimportant landing on the Chesapeake were not very great.  Wheat, as Clarence Gould points out, would change all that.

2) critique of Gould's argument [too much emphasis on Frederick Area & not enough on the Eastern Shore contribution to Baltimore's rise]

3) Paul H. Giddens: J. Economic History, May, 1932:

“By 1771 Baltimore Merchants & their friends in the legislature had seen to it that good roads were built into Pennsylvania.  It became easier for Western Pennsylvania Farmers to float their produce down the  the Susquehanna to Baltimore than haul it overland to Philadelphia.  ”A Friend to Trade" in “An Address to the Merchants and Inhabitants of Pennsylvania” said in 1771, “Baltimore Town in Maryland has within a few years past, carried off from this city [Philadelphia[ almost the whole trade of Frederick, York, Bedford, and Cumberland counties.”

V.  Opportunity strikes: Baltimore on the eve of the Revolution

A) By 1776 Baltimore had become a port town of significance with empahsis on the exporting of wheat and flour and the importing of goods for sale in Baltimore and to a lesser extend to customers on the Eastern Shore and in the Frederick region. Trade and the shipbuilding industry necessary to the continuance of that trade made the town and was the basis of its growth to this poitn.  Manufacturing was beginning, but its importance lay in the future.  By 1786 the Mechanics, those engaged int the clothing, construction, shipbuilding, wood, metal, leather and stone trades [see Charles G. Steffen's book on the Mechanics of Baltimore, U. Ill Press, 19 84) would bne uniting with similar groups in other cities in a cry for a strong national government that would provide protection for thier livelihood, but in 1776, Baltimore still had a port0town, character that kept its distance from most of the rest of rural Maryland (Frederick Town excepted), even though its presence was such that politically it could not be ignored.  In 1776 Baltimore had a population of approximately 6,000 people of whom as many as 850 were slaves.  In July of 1776 it was given its first voice in provincial politics with the granting of the right to select two delegates to the legislature, a right confirmed only after a struggle in the Constitutional Convention held later that same year.  Jeremiah Townley Chase, an Annapolitan, served as one of the first two delegates chosen from Baltimore City.  In the Constitutional Convention he tried to ameliorate the hostility of the rural delegates by proposing that if Baltimore grew, its representation would grow, but if Baltimore declined, its representation would cease.  The rest of the delegates to the convention agreed to the second part, but insisted that if Baltimore did grow, representation would remain at two regardless of size.

B) The revolution gave an unparalleled boost to Baltimore's growth at the expense of the other port towns and transformed the community into a thriving metropolis.

[refer to “A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise” by Thomas M. Doerflinger, 1986  who argues that cities grow on the spirit of thier entrepreneurs and on the adversity that befalls their competitors.]

One of founders of Baltimore, Dr. Henry Stevenson, a man who diasavowed the Revolution and became a loyalist understood well how Baltimore benefited from the war.  In 1778 he wrote that

“Baltimore  is the only town of consequence the Rebels now possess from Boston to Charlestown.  It is astonishing the commerce that is carried on there.   Tis from Baltmore mostly the Revel's army is supplied with provisions and ammunition; the latter is supplied from the Rench and Dutch to two inlets on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virignia, one called Sinapuxent, the other Chingoteque, (both to the Northward of Cape Charles) and transported in small craft to Baltimore.  The whole trade of the Bay centres there; tis but thirty miles from Annapolis, the rebels seat of government, ... Laying nearly centrical between the two grand Rivers, Patowmack and Susquhanah, Baltimore commands a fine Country for some hundred Miles North West.”