How Baltimore Invented the Modern World

THE STAR- SPANGLED BANNER

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As the shelling of Fort McHenry began Sept. 12, 1814, more than 4,000 British troops landed on North Point Peninsula, planning a shock and awe march toward Baltimore. Instead, Maryland's militia gave the overwhelming British forces all they could handle, delaying them long enough for the earthen buttresses in today’s Patterson Park, built by local citizens—including free blacks—to successfully protect the city. The massive 42-by-30-foot flag commissioned by Maj. George Armistead, who specifically ordered “a flag so large that the British will have no difficulty in seeing it from a distance,” was sewn by widowed Baltimore seamstress Mary Pickersgill . And, of course, it held up under the ensuing 25-hour bombardment as Francis Scott Key chronicled the Battle of Baltimore in epic verse.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS ESCAPES TO FREEDOM

Born on an Eastern Shore plantation, Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery in Baltimore on Sept. 3, 1838, and became a prophet of universal human rights like few before or since. Sent to work as a caulker on Baltimore’s docks, the 20-year-old Douglass, who had secretly taught himself to read and write, jumped a train for Philadelphia while impersonating a free black sailor. His 1845 memoir, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, sold out its 5,000-copy first run in four months, quickly becoming one of the most important pieces of literature of the abolitionist movement. Two years later, Douglass founded The North Star, an influential Rochester, New York, newspaper with the slogan, “Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren,” while agitating for abolition, women’s suffrage, desegregation, and public education. He was also the first African American to receive a nominating vote for president.

BABE RUTH SAVES BASEBALL

The self-confessed “bad kid” born on Emory Street in Pigtown, Ruth’s wayward life was saved by baseball at St. Mary’s Industrial School before he went on to save the game itself following the Black Sox scandal of 1919. With 714 home runs fueled by hot dogs, beer, a voracious sexual appetite, the torso of a bear, and the hand-eye coordination of a fighter pilot, he was Elvis times 10 on the scales of American celebrity. When the street kid grew up, he never forgot where he came from, either—bringing the St. Mary’s Industrial School band along on road trips to help it raise money after a fire at the school.

THE NATIONAL ROAD GETS AUTHORIZED

Known in many places as Route 40 today, the National Road was authorized by the Jefferson Administration and became the country’s first federally funded road. Supplementing the Western Maryland gateway to the Midwest, the state legislature linked several routes from Baltimore to Cumberland—creating the Baltimore National Pike—to connect the city’s port and economic engine to markets from West Virginia to Illinois.

THURGOOD MARSHALL OVERTURNS SEGREGATION

Oliver Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas , was brought to the Supreme Court by the father of a third-grade girl forced to ride a bus to a “colored” school rather than be allowed to walk to a closer—and better—white elementary school. It was the same saga that played out in the lives of thousands of Baltimore schoolchildren and, undoubtedly, was a familiar story to Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP’s chief counsel representing Brown before the Supreme Court. An alumnus of Frederick Douglass High School, Marshall had spent two decades winning smaller but critical civil-rights and education legal battles—including several in Maryland—that set the stage for the 1954 landmark desegregation victory. “Inherently unequal” was the phrase Earl Warren used in crafting his first major opinion as chief justice on May 17, 1954, striking down the “separate but equal” principle that had long governed American public education. Baltimore’s public school system, led by Walter Sondheim Jr., was the first district south of the Mason-Dixon line to comply. Marshall, the great-grandson of a slave, was on his way to establishing himself as a seminal figure of the civil rights movement and the American judicial system. In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson nominated him to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he served until 1991.

FIRST POST OFFICE SYSTEM

Experiencing censorship by the British postmaster, Baltimore printer William Goddard responded by designing a uniquely American system founded upon the principles of open communication and an exchange of ideas free from governmental interference. His plan—the Constitutional Post—was adopted in 1775, “ensuring communication between patriots and the populace during the American Revolution,” according to the National Postal Museum.

FIRST CITY STREETLIGHTS

COURTESY OF THE CONTEMPORARY, 2016

We didn’t invent gaslights (the Chinese did), but Charm City did bring them to the U.S. The credit goes to painter Rembrandt Peale, who fired up a gas-fueled chandelier in his home museum of artwork and eclectic things (think mastodon bones) in 1816, using “carburetted hydrogen gas.” Though the novelty was at first only for the wealthy—and actually pretty dangerous, since there was no way to measure gas volumes—Peale and a partner soon convinced several businessmen to found the nation’s first gas company, which became Baltimore Gas and Electric and just celebrated its 200th year. Then Peale and company talked the city into lighting Baltimore’s streets with the potentially explosive stuff. Reports of the first lamp being lit in 1817 noted “that the effect produced was highly gratifying to those who had an opportunity of witnessing it, among whom were several members of the Legislature of the State.”

MODERN PRINTING PRESS

Printing technology in the mid-1800s was still pretty much mired in the mid-1400s, which was when Johannes Gutenberg developed a novel but laborious typesetting method requiring each letter to be set manually on a plate. But that all changed thanks to Baltimore’s Ottmar Mergenthaler, a German immigrant and watchmaker who—after a few false starts and some inspiration from an absurdly complex machine envisioned by author Mark Twain—developed the first typewriter-like typesetting machine in 1884. (Thomas Edison subsequently called it “the eighth wonder of the world.”) The New York Tribune quickly demonstrated the first commercial use in 1886. According to Mergenthaler’s son, Herman, “When Tribune publisher Whitelaw Reid saw Ottmar type on the keyboard and shortly after witnessed a thin metal slug bearing several words slide down into a tray, he exclaimed, ‘Ottmar, you’ve done it! A line o’ type!’ Thus the Linotype machine was born.” One stunning effect? In the first decade of its use, American newspaper readership went from 3.6 million to more than 33 million.

CLEAN PUBLIC DRINKING WATER

Before the 20th century, tap water carried diseases such as cholera, dysentery, and typhoid. Chlorine was known to kill disease-causing microbes since the 1850s, but it is also a powerful poison for humans. Native son Abel Wolman, a Hopkins-trained engineer, devised how to chlorinate water safely in 1919, making clean drinking water possible for the world and saving millions of lives in the process.

FIRST TELEGRAPH SENT FROM D.C. TO BALTIMORE

On May 24, 1844, using the language of dots and dashes that he would become famous for, Samuel Morse sent the first successful long-distance telegram from the U.S. Capitol to the B&O’s Mount Clare Station 38 miles away in Baltimore. Among those gathered in Washington were presidential candidate Henry Clay, former first lady Dolley Madison, and Annie Ellsworth, daughter of the patent commissioner, who selected the telegraph’s first message—“What hath God wrought?”—from the Bible. After fellow inventor Alfred Vail transcribed the message in Baltimore, he and Morse discussed the weather and current events in each city. Morse’s coded message sped along cable lines strung beside the B&O’s right-of-way, foreshadowing a deep partnership: Within 10 years, more than 20,000 miles of telegraph wire crisscrossed the U.S.

ENOCH PRATT FREE LIBRARY SYSTEM

On Jan. 5, 1886, businessman Enoch Pratt brought one of the first free public libraries to the American people—and not one just intended for the elite and Anglo intellectuals, like others at the time. Instead, Pratt offered an egalitarian vision of his city athenaeum—one “for all, rich and poor without distinction of race or color.” Within three months of its Mulberry Street opening, four new branches popped up, and by fall, the library issued its first borrower’s card to an African American. More than 130 years later, across 23 locations, the library honors Enoch’s original mission—through holidays, storms, and uprisings, from Pennsylvania Avenue to Hamilton.

WORLD’S FIRST DREDGER

INVENTED In 1783, flour mill owners John and Andrew Ellicott invented what became known as the Baltimore Mud Machine—a horse-drawn barge with a scoop that removed sediment from the harbor so ships could reach their warehouse at Pratt and Light streets. In 1827, a steam engine replaced the horses, creating the first non-animal-powered dredger.

LARGEST CANNING CENTER IN THE U.S.

COURTESY OF THE BGE PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION, BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF INDUSTRY

Canning was discovered by an early-19th-century confectioner and brewer in France, who recognized that cooked food stored inside a seal-tight jar did not go bad. In the U.S., canning enterprises first introduced in Boston and New York were brought to Baltimore, where the industry was perfected in the mid-1800s with the region’s plentiful oysters—a boon to both Baltimoreans and their countrymen, who’d become enthralled with the flavorful staple of the Chesapeake. In the 1850s, local canner Isaac Solomon, advancing an innovation of a British chemist, introduced salt to the boiling process—raising the boiling point and speeding up the cooking time of oysters. From oysters, the canning industry exploded around the Port of Baltimore, where packers became the first in the country to can corn and tomatoes, which were culled from the fertile soil of Central Maryland and the Eastern Shore. In 1874, Andrew Shriver, ancestor of Maryland’s famous Shriver clan, invented the retort kettle—aka the pressure cooker—further cutting cooking times and costs, while also industrializing canning operations. By 1889, there were 82 canned goods packers along the waterfront, including Platt & Co. (now home to the Baltimore Museum of Industry), with the city and the mid-Atlantic area serving as “the nation’s pantry” until California’s emergence in the 1920s.

THE GREAT RAILROAD STRIKE OF 1877

Protesting pay cuts in July 1877, B&O firemen in Baltimore, and rail workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia, launched the first national strike. The uprising spread to 14 states before it was broken up by the U.S. Army. By then, more than 100 people had been killed, including 11 Baltimore citizens. The strike served as a precursor to the successful, broader labor actions of the 1880s and 1890s.

ALEX. BROWN FIRST INVESTMENT BANK

ENOCH PRATT FREE LIBRARY, MARYLAND’S STATE LIBRARY RESOURCE CENTER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

America’s oldest continuously operating investment bank sort of stopped being a local thing when Bankers Trust Corp. bought it in 1997—two years before Deutsche Bank AG swallowed up both Bankers Trust and Alex. Brown for more than $10 billion. But the history is interesting: Founded by, you guessed it, Alexander Brown, in 1800, it operated as a linen trading firm on Gay Street before morphing into an investment bank and brokerage house. It became known nationally for such feats as financing early utilities companies, Baltimore’s first water system, and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. In modern times, it made financial headlines for taking companies public, including Microsoft Corp. and Starbucks Coffee.

FIRST U.S. ICE CREAM FACTORY

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In 1851, after a dairyman defaulted on a debt for his catering business, which sold a frosty blend of milk, eggs, and sugar, Baltimore milk dealer Jacob Fussell took over the business and soon created the nation’s first large-scale ice cream factory. Once an exotic treat, the cold stuff became wildly popular and Fussell was dubbed “the Father of the Ice Cream Industry.” Movie stars Tony Curtis and Piper Laurie were among the city’s special guests at its giant centennial ice cream celebration in 1951—10,000 free cups were handed out.

THE FIRST AMERICAN BICYCLE

SMITHSONIAN’S NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY

After learning of a human-powered, two-wheel vehicle gaining popularity among Europe’s “dandies,” Baltimore piano-maker James Stewart built the first U.S. velocipede—a precursor to the bicycle with pedals attached directly to the front wheel—in late 1818. Capturing the country’s imagination after the Civil War, influential early innovators held public bicycle races around Druid Hill Park and by the 1880s, as the sport took off, Baltimore hosted national meets of the League of American Wheelmen. No less than H.L. Mencken described learning to bike ride in 1898 as a “great and urgent matter.”

FIRST U.S. SUGAR REFINERY

Domino Sugars might dominate the Charm City skyline today, but more than 100 years before that sweet factory was built on the Inner Harbor, America’s first sugar refinery was opened in 1796 in Baltimore by a little known German company, Garts & Leypoldt.

BANJO HISTORY

Despite its affiliation with predominantly white musical genres like country and bluegrass, the banjo traces its lineage to the “plucked lutes” brought to North America (including Chesapeake Bay plantations) by West African slaves. By the 1840s, the instrument’s popularity had exploded, crossing over to the white mainstream through minstrel acts. Soon after, in a factory on East Baltimore Street, William Boucher became the earliest known commercial banjo manufacturer, standardizing the instrument’s design in the process. Now Boucher banjos rightfully reside in collections at the Smithsonian and the Met as prized pieces of Americana.

PIONEERING WOMEN EDUCATORS

CECILIA LAWRENCE, WWW.THEOPHILIA.DEVIANTART.COM

In the late 1870s, five spirited suffragettes from prominent Baltimore families made a weekly tradition of meeting to discuss art, literature, poetry, and philosophy. Among them were M. Carey Thomas and Mary Elizabeth Garrett, founders of the Friday Evening Group, who joined forces to create equal opportunities for women in education. In addition to shaping the curriculum at Bryn Mawr College, where Thomas later became president, the duo founded The Bryn Mawr girls’ preparatory school in Roland Park in 1885. With a huge financial assist from Garrett, who became known as a sharp businesswoman after inheriting a hefty portion of her father’s estate, the ladies also helped establish The Johns Hopkins Medical School under the condition that both men and women be admitted.

FIRST MONUMENT TO EDGAR ALLAN POE

Best known for his narrative poems and macabre short stories, such as “The Raven” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Edgar Allan Poe is also widely considered to have invented the modern detective story with the creation of fictional detective C. Auguste Dupin, who appears in the stories “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and “The Purloined Letter.” It’s believed Poe penned eight of his published poems and nine of his short stories at his residence on Amity Street—home to the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum today. Dying of mysterious causes in Baltimore after being discovered delirious and semiconscious outside a saloon on an October night in 1849, he reportedly prayed his final words, “Lord, help this poor soul,” on his death bed. Initially buried in an unmarked grave, a campaign for a memorial—“Pennies for Poe”—was started in 1865 by a local teacher, leading to his marble headstone at Westminster Hall, where it remains a tradition for visitors to place a penny atop his grave.

FIRST AMERICAN SAINT

A young widow who converted to Catholicism, Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton (1774-1821) fled religious prejudice in her native New York City and moved to Catholic-friendly Baltimore at age 33. She was canonized by Rome in 1975 after a miracle attributed to her—a healing bestowed upon a Baltimore girl suffering from acute leukemia (she attended a now-defunct high school named in Seton’s honor) was accepted as genuine. She also founded the first Catholic religious order for women in the U.S.—the Sisters of Charity—in Emmitsburg, which is home to her national shrine.

FIRST FLOUR MILL

Constructed in 1792, the Ellicott Flour Mill in the small Baltimore County town of Oella, on the east banks of the Patapsco River, is said to be the first merchant flour mill in the U.S. Built by brothers John, Andrew, and Joseph Ellicott, the mill complex proved successful enough to serve as the initial terminus of Baltimore’s B&O Railroad.

FIRST U.S.MONUMENT TO WASHINGTON

Our Washington Monument is nearly 400 feet shorter than that more famous one on the Potomac, but it was built more than 50 years sooner, making it the first public monument to the Father of Our Country. Designed by architect Robert Mills (who later would plan the D.C. obelisk) and built with local white marble, it inspired the city slogan “The Monumental City”—apparently coined (a bit sarcastically—what a surprise!) by a Washington newspaper editor in 1823.

FIRST MUSEUM BUILDING

On a quiet stretch of Holliday Street, America’s first building designed as a museum once housed the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Diego Velázquez, and Raphael. The Federal Period-style townhome was co-founded in 1814 by Rembrandt Peale, a prolific portrait painter and man of many firsts who would go on to found the country’s first gas company, aka BGE. His museum remained open until 1829, when it was turned into Baltimore City Hall, then the city’s first high school for African Americans, and later a longtime municipal museum, before a long span of vacancy. Relaunched as a nonprofit in 2008, the organization is now working to raise funds to restore and reopen the Peale Museum, but in the meantime, it’s innovative legacy lives on. The building continues to present modern art projects and exhibits, including last spring’s breathtaking Only When It’s Dark Enough Can You See the Stars by The Contemporary and Abigail DeVille.

FIRST DENTAL COLLEGE

During the first early years of America, dentistry was relegated to untrained and self-trained practitioners, quacks, and a few doctors. In 1840, Horace H. Hayden and Chapin A. Harris founded the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery—first of its kind and soon a prototype for others across the country. More than 175 years later, the institution thrives as the University of Maryland School of Dentistry.

INVENTION OF THE BOTTLE CAP

Where wouldhumanity be without an ice-cold bottle of beer after a long day? Well, thanks to Baltimorean William Painter, we’re able to seal those beers with the bottle cap, which he invented in 1891. Soon after, every beverage company in the world was looking to Painter (who also invented, naturally, bottle openers) for his brilliant caps. He opened the Crown Cork and Seal Company in 1897 on Guilford Avenue, moving it to Highlandtown in 1906, where it remained until leaving for Philadelphia in 1958.

AFRICAN-AMERICAN JOURNALISM

Baltimore-born abolitionist, poet, and writer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper penned the first published short story, “The Two Offers,” by an African-American author. Harper, who helped slaves escape through the Underground Railroad, also wrote prolifically for black newspapers, becoming known as the mother of African-American journalism.

LOCUST POINT IMMIGRATION PIER
WELCOMES 1.2 MILLION IMMIGRANTS

COURTESY OF THE MARYLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY, MC4733.6

Ellis Island in New York has long cast a shadow over immigration in other U.S. cities. However, from the construction of the Locust Point immigration pier in 1867 until its closing in 1914—the period between the Civil War and the start of World War I—approximately 1.2 million mostly Central and Eastern European immigrants streamed into the South Baltimore peninsula, making Baltimore the second or third busiest U.S. port of entry (depending on the year) for new arrivals. By the 1890s, an estimated 90 percent of immigrants arriving at the Locust Point Pier, which had been built by the B&O Railroad, traveled directly to a destination farther west. But the rest stayed here, many working in the port’s burgeoning canning, steel, garment, shipbuilding, railroad, and manufacturing industries. Baltimore’s Immigration Museum opened this year in an historic German boarding house in Locust Point.

FIRST BLACK TRADE UNION

In 1855, Isaac Myers, a former Baltimore shipyard supervisor, founded a maritime industry union of “colored mechanics.” In 1866, Myers and more than a dozen other African-American men formed their own enterprise, the Chesapeake Marine Railway and Dry Dock Company. Three years later, Myers, one of nine black delegates to attend the National Labor Movement Convention, helped launch the Colored National Labor Union, of which he was elected president.

LEADING AFRICAN-AMERICAN NEWSPAPER

REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION OF THE BALTIMORE AFRO-AMERICAN NEWSPAPER

John Henry Murphy Sr., founder of one of the oldest African-American newspapers, was born into slavery in Baltimore on Christmas Day, 1840. After rising to the rank of sergeant in the U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War, he worked as a porter, janitor, and postal clerk before merging two church publications and a third publication into the Afro-American, which celebrates its 125th anniversary this year. In its pages, The Afro fought against Jim Crow laws, including pushing for the hiring of black Baltimoreans into the city’s police and fire departments. Murphy’s son, Carl, expanded the paper into 13 major cities at its peak.

LAUNCH OF WWII LIBERTY SHIPS

PERMISSION GRANTED FROM THE BALTIMORE SUN. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

On Jan. 3, 1941, with the world engulfed in a second global war and America on the precipice of entering the fray, President Franklin Roosevelt announced an emergency, $350-million shipbuilding program. The S.S. Patrick Henry, the first of these ships, was launched with great fanfare on Liberty Fleet Day in September 1941. Ultimately, 384 Liberty ships and 94 leaner, faster Victory ships were built at Bethlehem Steel’s Fairfield shipyard, which made more vessels than any U.S. shipyard. By late 1943, the shipyard employed some 46,700 workers, including 6,000 African Americans, who worked around the clock, according to The Baltimore Sun. Two-hundred of the massive Liberty ships, which could carry the same amount of cargo as 300 railroad boxcars, and 500 soldiers were lost during the war, but the S.S. John Brown, also built in Baltimore, survives to this day. Usually docked in New York for educational tours, the ship occasionally sits at its birthplace, with tours scheduled here for 2017.

BOXING CHAMP JOE GANS

The now obscure Joe Gans held the World Lightweight title from 1902 to 1908 and was named by The Ring magazine as the greatest lightweight pugilist in the history of the sweet science. A gentleman known as “the Old Master,” Gans was most likely born in Baltimore a decade after emancipation and is buried at Mount Auburn cemetery near Westport. After one of his titles, he told his manager that he would trade it all “for a white boy’s chance in the world.”

FIRST PRACTICAL SUBMARINE

On Dec. 17, 1897, in the cold waters off Locust Point, Simon Lake—an inventor inspired by an underwater boat in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, which he’d read as a teenager—launched the Argonaut, the first practical submarine. Thirty-six feet long and weighing 75 tons, the vessel's 30-horsepower engine was built by Baltimore’s White and Middleton Gas Engine Company, which became a pioneer in submarine technology. After initial struggles during its maiden voyage, Lake’s Argonaut eventually submerged, making its way around Fort McHenry and Curtis Bay. Among the city officials and observers on hand was a Baltimore Sun reporter, whose editor gave the following instructions: “If Lake succeeds, give him a column. If he fails, he gets an obituary.”

WWII B-26 BOMBERS

After forming an airplane-manufacturing company in 1912, aviation pioneer Glenn L. Martin set up shop in Middle River, producing the MB-1 bomber in the waning days of World War I. His company later built the B-26 Marauder and “Baltimore” and “Maryland” light bombers used by not just us, but also the British Royal Air Force in World War II. The factory remains as part of Lockheed Martin, as do the bungalows first built for factory workers, on streets with names like Fuselage Avenue.

FIRST PUBLICLY FUNDED GIRLS HIGH SCHOOL

In 1844, Baltimore’s Eastern High School and Western High School became the first publicly supported secondary schools for girls, setting a precedent in education equality that would take years for the entire nation to follow. At Western, located on Falls Road near Cold Spring Lane, the first class included 36 female students taught by a lone male teacher who doubled as the headmaster. Courses included grammar, rhetoric, elocution, moral philosophy, ancient history, astronomy, and botany. Eastern took an equally revolutionary, albeit less stable road, hopping from Jonestown to North Avenue before settling on 33rd Street in Waverly, where it eventually went coed, then shuttered in 1986. Western still stands, however, as the oldest public all-girls high school in the U.S.

FIRST MAJOR AMERICAN ORCHESTRA
SUPPORTED BY PUBLIC FUNDS

PERMISSION GRANTED FROM THE BALTIMORE SUN. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Ever wonder why the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is so beloved? It might have something to do with its origins. Founded in 1916, the BSO was the first major orchestra in the country fully funded by public money. The orchestra went private in 1942, but its strong bond with the city had been forged. And the BSO has built upon those forward-thinking roots, naming maestro Marin Alsop music director in 2007, making her the first woman to lead a major American symphony.

MUTUAL UNITED BROTHERHOOD OF LIBERTY

One of a handful of Americans born into slavery to document his world-view, Baltimore Rev. Harvey Johnson founded the Mutual United Brotherhood of Liberty—the forerunner of the Niagara Movement and the NAACP. After ejection from a B&O train for refusing to sit in a segregated compartment on his way to a Niagara meeting in Harpers Ferry in 1906, Johnson went on to fight and overturned Maryland’s separate car rules for interstate passengers—six decades before the famous Freedom Riders. Union Baptist, the historic church he led, thrives to this day on Druid Hill Avenue.

JAZZ LEGEND EUBIE BLAKE

COURTESY OF THE MARYLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY, PP301.442

Blake was born James Hubert Blake at 319 Forest St. in Baltimore, and grew up with the sounds of ragtime. A whiz on the piano, he used those syncopated rhythms as inspiration for the popular songs he wrote, particularly when he joined forces with Noble Sissle. The pair performed in vaudeville and, most notably, wrote the music and lyrics for Shuffle Along, which, when it opened in 1921 at the Sixty-Third Street Music Hall in New York, changed musical theater. It was one of the first musicals to be written by African Americans and to feature a black cast (including a young Josephine Baker), which was remarkable since African Americans were banned from performing onstage in front of whites for much of the 19th century. Shuffle Along became a huge hit and did much to further the presence of African Americans in theater. Blake lived to be 100 years old. Casts of his hands are part of the permanent collection at the newly opened National Museum of African-American History and Culture at the Smithsonian.

FIRST CATHOLIC BASILICA
BUILT IN BALTIMORE IN 1806

MIKE MORGAN

The cradle of American Catholicism, in a former colony founded by the Calvert family for religious freedom, Baltimore was home to the first Roman Catholic diocese in the United States, established in 1789. By the early 19th century, the diocese, ruled by the Jesuit Archbishop John Carroll, stretched from the Chesapeake to the edge of the Idaho territory and down to New Orleans after the Louisiana Purchase. The list of Catholic “firsts” that occurred in Baltimore—particularly landmark dates in African-American history—are enough to fill a church bulletin: first Catholic seminary, St. Mary’s, established 1791 on Pennsylvania Avenue near Paca Street; first black parish, St. Francis Xavier, established 1793; first Catholic school for black children, St. Frances Academy, 1828, still in operation on East Chase Street; first order of African-American Catholic nuns, the Oblate Sisters of Providence, founded 1829 by Haitian immigrant Mother Mary Lange; first African-American ordained Catholic priest, the Rev. Charles Uncles, 1891; first Roman Catholic college for women, the College of Notre Dame, chartered in 1896 and now a university. And, of course, the first Catholic cathedral in the United States, the Basilica of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, cornerstone laid July 7, 1806.

BANDLEADER CAB CALLOWAY

The legendary “Hi-De-Ho Man” and big band leader grew up in West Baltimore’s Sugar Hill neighborhood, following in the footsteps of Eubie Blake in Frederick Douglass High School’s revered music program. He later got his start in the famed clubs of nearby Pennsylvania Avenue, including the Royal and Regent theaters.

FIRST PHOTO OF EARTH FROM SPACE

NASA

On Oct. 24, 1946, a missile with a 35-mm camera designed by Clyde Holliday of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory hurtled upward to an unprecedented height of 65 miles above Earth. When recovered, the grainy, black-and-white images revealed a cloud-swirled segment of the planet set against the inky blackness of space. We could, for the first time, see “how our Earth would look to visitors from another planet coming in on a space ship,” Holliday later wrote in National Geographic. The experiment laid the groundwork for missile surveillance and mapping, weather satellite imaging, and, of course, the space program.

FIRST DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION

The first-ever Democratic National Convention took place in Baltimore from May 21-23, 1832. During the party’s confab, delegates selected Martin Van Buren as the running mate for then-incumbent president (and party founder) Andrew Jackson. The Jackson-Van Buren ticket won in a landslide, ushering in Jackson’s second term and setting the stage for Van Buren’s subsequent presidency.

FIRST SUCCESSFUL LUNCH COUNTER SIT-IN

THE BGE PHOTO COLLECTION, BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF INDUSTRY;

Sixty-two years ago this month, Morgan State student Helena Hicks and several friends ducked inside segregated Read’s Drugstore in the Howard Street shopping district on a blustery morning. “Let’s go inside, all they are going to do is tell us to leave,” Hicks told her friends. That small act of defiance—on the heels of others by Morgan students—caught the attention of The Afro-American, sparking a change in Read’s lunch-counter policy.

THE JACKSON-MITCHELL FAMILY

ALAMY

The history of the NAACP and the civil rights movement in both Maryland and the U.S. is inseparable from the story of Baltimore’s leading civil rights family. From 1935 through the 1960s, Lillie May Carroll Jackson led the NAACP’s Baltimore chapter, which initiated precedent-setting legal challenges of segregation. Her Bolton Hill home serves as a civil rights museum today. Her daughter, Juanita Jackson Mitchell, was the NAACP’s first national youth director and later, the first black woman to practice law in the state. She succeeded her mother as president of the NAACP Baltimore branch. Her husband, Clarence M. Mitchell Jr., whom the city courthouse is named for, became known as “the 101st U.S. Senator” on Capitol Hill during his relentless campaign to win passage of the Civil Rights, Voting Rights, and Fair Housing acts.

FIRST U.S. MANNED BALLOON LAUNCH

The first manned American aircraft flight is credited to 13-year-old Edward Warren in 1784—119 years before the Wright Brothers took flight. In lieu of the balloon’s 234-pound inventor, Warren volunteered his services before a large Howard Park crowd. According to accounts, the lad “behaved with the steady fortitude of an old voyager” as he “soared aloft,” acknowledging by a “significant wave of his hat” the cheers of those gathered below.

FIRST MODERN MEDICAL SCHOOL

COURTESY OF THE ALAN MASON CHESNEY MEDICAL ARCHIVES OF THE JOHNS HOPKINS MEDICAL INSTITUTIONS

After his death in 1873, Quaker merchant Johns Hopkins left a $7 million bequest to establish a university and hospital in Baltimore. Hopkins’ first president, Daniel Coit Gilman, and the school’s trustees envisioned a medical school in a European model of training, emphasizing graduate education and research. The centerpiece of the medical school was a state-of-the-art hospital that opened in 1889, with a powerhouse faculty of some of the best and brightest medical practitioners of the era. Over the decades since, Hopkins doctors developed the “blue baby” surgery, the field of neurosurgery, the use of latex gloves in surgery, implantable defibrillators, and countless other innovations.

FIRST GENERAL MEETING OF THE QUAKERS

You probably remember learning about George Fox in grade-school history. Known for his dissent of the Church of England, Fox began spreading his message of spiritual individualism in the 1640s. By the mid-seventeenth century, his teachings made their way to America, and in 1785, the first Quaker Yearly Meeting was held in Charm City. The local gathering, which led to a regional arm of the Religious Society of Friends, drew Quakers from Northern Virginia, Western Maryland, and parts of Pennsylvania. Still active today, the Baltimore chapter offers a wide range of programs for the Quaker community, including summer camps and women’s retreats.

FIRST U.S. ORDAINED RABBI

The Baltimore Hebrew Congregation first convened above a Fells Point grocery. The synagogue was revolutionized when German-born Rabbi Abraham Rice, the first ordained rabbi in the country, joined in 1840. Rice strengthened Baltimore’s knowledge of Orthodox Judaism and established the community’s first Hebrew schools.

IRENE MORGAN REBELS

In July 1944, more than a decade before Rosa Parks, Irene Morgan, a 27-year-old mother of two, was dragged from a Greyhound bus, arrested, and convicted after refusing to give up her seat to a white couple during a ride through Virginia, where she been recuperating from a miscarriage at her mother’s home. Unlike Parks, she had no civil rights training, but pled not guilty to violating the state’s segregation law. Appealing her 1944 conviction with the help of NAACP lawyers, including fellow Baltimorean Thurgood Marshall, she broke down a key constitutional interstate segregation law in her landmark Supreme Court case, Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia.

THEODORE WOODWARD CURES TYPHUS

The enemy in WWII wasn’t just global fascism, but also infectious diseases that decimated U.S. troops. The University of Maryland’s Theodore Woodward helped cure typhus, tularemia, cholera, and other diseases. Among the honors bestowed upon “one of the fathers of the subspecialty of infectious disease” was a nomination for the Nobel Prize.

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