Little Bits of History

It's always so delightful for me to run into some little bit of history when you least expect it. For example, I once took a wrong turn (dyslexia brain) out of a bank of elevators of a high-rise office building near Grand Central in order to come face to face with a historical plaque (so maybe it wasn't a "wrong" turn at that) saying that General Washington (as in George) had done something on that spot during the Revolutionary War.

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