Hampden-Woodberry

By Mark Chalkley

An interesting history suburban Baltimore's Hampden-Woodberry community, from mill village to thriving industrial community.

The urban Baltimore neighborhood of Hampden-Woodberry began as a mill village in rural Baltimore County, where the swift-flowing waters of Jones Falls provided the power for early gristmills. As the nearby city grew into a major international port, the flour mills gave way to cloth mills that turned out cotton duck for sails. At their peak, the mills of Hampden-Woodberry turned out 80 percent of the world's cotton duck. Thousands of men, women, and children were employed in what was, in the late 19th century, the United States' largest concentration of factory labor. Fortunes were made by such men as Robert Poole and the Hooper, Carroll, and Gambrill families, who owned the mills. When it was annexed to Baltimore in 1888, Hampden-Woodberry was a thriving industrial community. The last of the mills closed in 1972, but many of these historic structures are now being reused for a variety of purposes. More importantly, Hampden-Woodberry still survives as a community with deep roots in America's industrial past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Oct 16, 2006
• ISBN: 9781439617441

Mark Chalkley

Mark Chalkley is a graduate of the University of Maryland and West Virginia University who taught for years at Baltimore City Community College. A Hampden resident, Chalkley worked with birthright Hampdenites to bring these images of the area's history to light and share them with a new generation.

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INTRODUCTION

In the middle of the 19th century, the landscape of Maryland was dotted with a large number of mill villages. These were small settlements, often clustered around a single business that used waterpower to grind wheat, spin and weave cotton thread, or even to manufacture nails. A century and a half later, most of those mill towns are gone with few traces, either swallowed up by large towns or washed away by the erosive forces of flood and economic change. Who today knows or cares about the fate of Alberton, Daniel, or other similar places long since abandoned to the blackberry vines and poison ivy? But Hampden and Woodberry are familiar names to thousands of Baltimoreans and even to others outside the city.

Now usually thought of as two separate communities, Hampden-Woodberry was considered more as one place in former times. The community grew up on either side of the Jones Falls, the swift-flowing river whose waters provided the initial power source for industry there and whose valley was the right-of-way for the North Central Railroad. Flour and meal made of wheat and other grains were the first important commodities to be made by harnessing the river’s energy, but it was cotton milling, the making of cotton duck for sailcloth and other uses, that really built up the mills of Woodberry and Hampden.

Drawn from the hills of rural Maryland, Pennsylvania, and the Virginias by the prospect of steady work and better living standards, thousands of people came to work as operatives or hands in the cotton mills. Their labor made possible the success of merchant shipping in the age of sail and also the fortunes of the men who owned the mills. The mill employees formed the original population of Hampden-Woodberry.

Today Hampden is known for offbeat retail stores, galleries, and festive occasions, and Woodberry, aside from its dubious fame as the location of TV Hill, is familiar as a stop on the Light Rail. Like the rest of post-industrial Baltimore, the area is changing fast. This book is meant to help keep alive something of the identity and heritage of a quickly receding past that shaped not only Baltimore or Maryland, but also the country beyond them.

—Mark Chalkley

June 2006

One

THE BEGINNINGS

The land that became Hampden-Woodberry was not part of early Baltimore. In the 17th century, the area west of Jones Falls now known as Woodberry was part of Come By Chance, a land claim made by Moses Edwards, a Baltimore County ranger. What later became Hampden was then split between two large land claims, one known as Daniel’s Whimsey and the other as Seed Tick’s Plenty. These original tracts were never much cleared or settled, remaining mostly wild forest.

Only after Baltimore became an important point for the export of wheat in the mid-18th century did the area along the swift-flowing upper Jones Falls begin to develop as a milling zone. The mill called Hollingsworth’s or Jessup’s, just above Stony Run, was operating in 1786. In 1804, the Falls Road Turnpike was chartered, following the route of an ancient Native American warpath, and some settlement began along it. The name Hampden was given to the village on the east side of the falls by Gen. Henry Mankin to honor a British statesman of the time of King Charles I. John Hampden was one of the first members of Parliament to question the taxation of the colonies. The p in the name has never been pronounced: HAM-den.

An important part of the area’s growth was the establishment of the mill known as Woodberry on the old Come by Chance tract by Elisha Tyson early in the 19th century. Tyson used the natural waterpower to build up a thriving gristmill