It's like when Mary and a bunch of us went to that crab restaurant in rural Maryland and came upon, quite by surprise, plaques indicating that the backroad we were on (leading to the Potomac River) was the route that John Wilkes Booth took trying to escape capture.
So Mary had one of these moments today in Baltimore for a Dragon Boat Race. She writes:
This is where our festival
was today. I never thought about immigrants coming to the US through Baltimore
(Duhhh). This plaque says many (most?) came from Germany and often took the
train somewhere from here.
To complete today's history lesson and to satisfy my own curiosity, here are the first two paragraphs of an article calling Locust Point "the other Ellis Island." Mary should remove the "duhh" because I didn't know that either.
E llis Island in New York harbor is well known as the main entry point for European immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What many do not know is that Baltimore was the second-leading port of entry at that time. The establishment of the nation's first commercial steam railway, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, in 1828 opened the way to the West. As the westernmost major port on the East Coast, Baltimore was a popular destination.
Irish and
German settlers were the first to use Baltimore as a point of entry. Their tide
increased after the Irish potato famine of the mid-1840s and the German
political uprisings of 1848. The number became so great that after 1850,
immigrants were no longer brought directly to Fell's Point, Baltimore's first
port. Instead, they were unloaded at Locust Point, next to Fort McHenry. Between
1790 and 1860, Baltimore's population soared from 13,503 to 212,418. Word spread
that, for those who worked hard, there were jobs to be had with the railroad and
businesses in the city
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