Came here.

Before the pier

Baltimore's ties to Bremen, the German port, went back to the late 1700s, when its merchants traded tobacco across the Atlantic.⁠¹ By the 1830s, ships that carried tobacco east carried emigrants west, and Fells Point was where most of them landed.⁠^1,2 Before the Civil War, by one historian's count, about four in five immigrants arriving in Baltimore were German.⁠² The Irish came next, many of them to dig the turnpikes and canals and lay track for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and many more during the famine years of the 1840s and 1850s.⁠¹ By 1860, about a quarter of the city was foreign-born.⁠¹³

They did not arrive to a welcome. From the mid-1850s to 1860, Baltimore was governed by the American Party, known as the Know-Nothings, whose platform was hostility to immigrants and Catholics.⁠^7,13 Its street gangs, with names like the Plug Uglies and the Blood Tubs, beat voters who looked German or Irish, kidnapped men and forced them to vote again and again, and turned election days into battles.⁠⁷ Estimates of the dead in the 1856 elections alone run from 17 to 30.⁠^21,7 Maryland was the only state that voted for the party's presidential candidate, Millard Fillmore, that year.⁠⁷

The same decade was violent on the docks. White workers, backed at times by police, drove Black caulkers out of shipyards in Fells Point, and at least one account ties the attacks to a nativist gang.⁠¹⁵ The people who worked this waterfront were competing for the same jobs, and the lines between them were drawn in more than one direction.

The deal

In early 1867, the B&O and the North German Lloyd steamship line of Bremen struck an agreement.⁠^2,13 The man who brokered it was Albert Schumacher, a Bremen-born Baltimore merchant who sat on the railroad's board.⁠¹³ The railroad would build an immigration pier at Locust Point and connect it to its tracks. The Lloyd would send ships from Bremen. Immigrants could buy a single ticket that covered the crossing and the train west.⁠^16,1

On March 23, 1868, the Lloyd's steamship Baltimore docked at Locust Point twenty days after leaving Bremen, by way of Southampton. The city turned out with a parade.⁠¹⁴ The immigration station came to stand on B&O Pier 9, on the harbor side of the peninsula.⁠^5,6

The design was simple. Passengers walked off the ship and onto waiting trains. Photographs from 1904 show families from the steamship Neckar on the pier with their bundles, sorted into pens by destination.⁠⁵ By 1887 the railroad had built an inspection station on the pier and leased it to the federal government.⁠²

Who came

Jews from Central and Eastern Europe came through the Locust Point docks as well; Baltimore's Jewish population grew from about 10,000 in 1880 to about 24,000 in 1890.⁠⁸ After about 1890 the ships carried more people from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires: Poles, Lithuanians, Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Hungarians and Russian Jews.⁠^6,13

Most did not stay. The B&O's trains carried most of the passengers on to the Ohio Valley and the Midwest.⁠^1,2 Those who stayed settled close to the work. Poles built a community in Fells Point and Canton, and Irish families lived near the B&O shops at Mount Clare.⁠¹³

The work

The water and the railroad hired them. Irish families built and ran the B&O; one of their homes on Lemmon Street is now the Irish Railroad Workers Museum.⁠¹⁸ Locust Point's rowhouses filled with dockworkers and men from the factories that grew up around the B&O terminals.

Baltimore became one of the country's leading canning centers, built on Chesapeake oysters and Maryland farms.⁠^17,9 Polish and Bohemian families shucked oysters and packed the cans.⁠^9,10 Many Polish families followed a yearly circuit: berry fields on Maryland farms in late spring, Baltimore canneries through the summer, country canneries in the fall, then oyster canneries on the Gulf Coast in winter.⁠^9,10,20 The photographer Lewis Hine documented their children at work in those fields and sheds.⁠^20,10

In East Baltimore, 300 to 400 small garment shops ran on immigrant labor. By a 1901 state count, nine in ten sweatshop workers were Eastern European Jews. More than half of the city's garment workers were women and girls.⁠¹¹

Newcomers who needed a bed could find one a short walk from the pier. In 1904, a German congregation, Christ Church, opened the Immigrant House at 1308 Beason Street, offering room and board, help finding work, and English lessons. By its pastor's count, it had taken in 3,710 guests by 1916.⁠⁶

The end of the pier

The First World War ended it. When war broke out in 1914, the North German Lloyd's service stopped.⁠¹ On October 30, 1917, the B&O piers at Locust Point caught fire, and the old immigration building on Pier 9 burned. Four men died, three of them crew of the British steamship Kerry Range. Germans and Austrians were arrested on suspicion of sabotage, but investigators later traced the fire to electrical wiring.⁠¹²

Why this story, now

Where the accounts differ

We checked this story against federal records, newspapers, scholarship and public-history sources. Where they disagree, here is what we found and what we wrote.

• How busy the port was. Baltimore is often called the second-busiest immigrant port after New York. The museum's own historian and the federal arrival tables we checked put it usually third, behind New York and Boston, and second in some years. We avoid the ranking.
• How many arrived. Baltimore Heritage and Baltimore Magazine give about 1.2 million for Locust Point. The memorial's own historian and its marker say about 1 million, or more than 1 million. Other accounts give 1.5 million to nearly 2 million for the whole port over longer periods. We say more than a million and show the most cited figure.
• The yearly peak. A peak of about 40,000 a year is often repeated. Federal reports show about 56,000 in 1904 alone. We give no peak.
• When the deal was made. Accounts give January 1867, late 1866 or early 1867, or 1868, the year the pier opened. We say early 1867.
• Which pier. Accounts name Pier 8, Piers 8 and 9, or Piers 6 through 9. The 1904 photographs and the 1917 fire reports place the immigration building on Pier 9.
• When inspection began. Sources give an inspection station leased to the federal government in 1887, federal inspection of every immigrant from 1891, and inspection on board as ships entered the Bay. We give 1887, the date the memorial and its marker give.
• The 1917 fire. It is often called mysterious. Reports at the time suspected sabotage; later findings blamed sparking wiring in piles of oakum. Accounts of the dead give three or four; a memorial record names four, among them a tally clerk, Michael J. Hand. We give four and name the ship.
• Know-Nothing violence. Counts of the dead in 1856 range from 17 to 30. We give the range.
• Who came through the pier. Italians and Greeks are often listed among Locust Point's arrivals, but most came to Baltimore by train from New York or Philadelphia. We leave them out of the pier's story and include them in the city's work.
• How many stayed. Shares from a quarter to a tenth are repeated, and so is a claim that two-thirds of the first arrivals went west. We could not trace those figures to a source we trust. We say most went on.

Sources

Each number in the text links to the source here that supports it.

1. Nicholas Fessenden, "Norddeutscher Lloyd and Baltimore: A Transatlantic Partnership" and "Which Side Are You On? Baltimore's Immigrants and the Civil War," Report of the Society for the History of the Germans in Maryland
2. Baltimore Immigration Memorial, immigration history, and historical markers at Haubert Street (HMdb 131173)
3. Sherry H. Olson, Baltimore: The Building of an American City, chapter 7 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980; Maryland State Archives)
4. U.S. Commissioner-General of Immigration, Annual Reports, arrivals by port (1904)
5. Maryland Center for History and Culture, photographs of the immigration station at Pier 9 (1904)
6. Explore Baltimore Heritage, Immigrant House, the immigration memorial and Gibbs Preserving Company
7. Martin Ford, "Gangs of Baltimore," Humanities (National Endowment for the Humanities, 2008)
8. Jewish Museum of Maryland, timeline of Jewish Baltimore
9. University of Baltimore, on Thomas Hollowak's Picking, Packing, & Shucking
10. David Cecelski, "A Forgotten People: Bohemian Oyster Shuckers," and Library of Congress, Lewis Hine photographs
11. Baltimore Histories, on the garment sweatshops, citing Olson and Jo Ann Argersinger
12. The New Bernian, "Baltimore Scene of Costly Blaze" (October 31, 1917), and WW1 Sacrifice, citing the Baltimore Sun and the Federal Reporter
13. Baltimore Magazine, "City of Immigrants" (2018); Baltimore National Heritage Area, "A City of Immigrants"
14. SS Baltimore, Wikipedia, citing the Baltimore Sun of March 24, 1868; and Baltimore Magazine, on the 150th anniversary of the first ship (2018)
15. Chesapeake Bay Magazine, "A Place on the Waterfront"
16. Baltimore Histories, on the B&O and the immigrant trade
17. Bay Journal, "Baltimore Museum of Industry shows city's can-do spirit"
18. Explore Baltimore Heritage, Irish Railroad Workers Museum
19. SoBo Post, on the Baltimore Immigration Museum (2022)
20. The Baltimore Banner, on Lewis Hine's Maryland photographs
21. Baltimore Know-Nothing riots of 1856, Wikipedia, citing Frank Towers and J. Thomas Scharf
22. Maryland State Archives, the Constitution of 1864