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Stories from these waters · Work and enterprise · Baltimore, 1866

Isaac Myers and the shipyard Black Baltimore built

Fells Point, 1865. As the Civil War ended, Baltimore's shipyards became a fight over who would get the work. White caulkers and ship carpenters struck until the yards fired their Black coworkers. Within months, the men who had been pushed out raised the money, found a way around owners who would not deal with them, and opened a shipyard of their own.

$10,000raised from Black Baltimoreans
300Black caulkers hired within months
18 yearson the water, 1866 to 1884

The trade

Wooden ships leak. Caulkers kept them afloat, driving fiber into the seams of the hull and sealing it with hot pitch. In the shipyards of Fells Point before the Civil War, much of that work was done by Black men, free and enslaved, working side by side. Frederick Douglass learned the trade there while he was still enslaved. In 1838, Black caulkers formed the Caulkers Association, one of the first Black trade unions in the country, and used it to bargain for better pay.

Isaac Myers was born free in Baltimore in 1835. Maryland would not educate Black children in its public schools, so he was taught at a private day school run by the Rev. John Fortie. At 16 he was apprenticed to a Black master caulker. By 20 he was supervising the caulking of clipper ships.

Pushed out

The pay that Black caulkers had won made them a target. In the years before the war, white workers attacked them in the yards, and some owners stopped hiring them. In October 1865, as the war ended, white caulkers backed by ship carpenters went on strike and refused to return until the yards fired Black caulkers and longshoremen. City officials and police sided with the strikers. The yards gave in.

Accounts of how many lost their work range from more than a hundred caulkers to more than a thousand dockworkers. Myers, who had spent the early 1860s in the grocery trade and returned to caulking, was among those shut out.

The yard

Myers proposed an answer: if the yards would not hire Black workers, Black workers would own a yard. He, John W. Locks and about fifteen other men, many of them from nearby Black churches, organized the effort. They sold stock and raised $10,000 from Black residents of Baltimore and beyond. Frederick Douglass is reported to have been among the investors. They borrowed $30,000 more, on a mortgage from a ship captain.

Money alone did not open the gate. White property owners would not deal with them, so a white businessman, William Applegarth, negotiated the lease on a yard at Kennard's Wharf, at the foot of Philpot Street in Fells Point, and assigned it to them. On February 12, 1866, the company opened, first under the name of the John Smith Company. In 1868 it was chartered by the state as the Chesapeake Marine Railway and Dry Dock Company.

Within months it employed about 300 Black caulkers, paying around $3 a day, and won government contracts. In time it hired white workers too.

From the yard to the national stage

In 1868, Myers and his fellow workers organized the Colored Caulkers Trade Union Society and elected him president. The next year the National Labor Union, the country's first national labor federation, invited Black delegates to its August 1869 convention in Philadelphia, and nine were recognized. Myers addressed the convention.

"I speak today for the colored men of the whole country... when I tell you that all they ask for themselves is a fair chance."

Isaac Myers, National Labor Union convention, 1869

The convention declared that it drew no color line. It left membership to local unions, and many of them kept Black workers out. That December, 214 delegates met in Washington, D.C., and founded the Colored National Labor Union. They elected Myers its first president.

The two federations split for good in 1870. At the National Labor Union's congress that August, white delegates pressed Black workers to leave the Republican Party for the new National Labor Reform Party. The resolution passed 60 to 5. All five Black delegates voted no and did not return. In January 1871, Frederick Douglass succeeded Myers as president of the Colored National Labor Union. Without allies in the wider labor movement, and hit by the depression of 1873, it faded within a few years.

The end of the yard

The shipyard outlasted both federations. It closed in 1884, when its lease on the waterfront expired and was not renewed. The Maryland State Archives records the cause as a misunderstanding. By then, iron and steel were replacing wood in shipbuilding, and with it the work of caulking.

In the 1870s, Myers worked as a special agent for the Post Office Department. After running a coal yard in Baltimore, he was appointed a federal customs gauger in 1882. He organized the Maryland Colored State Industrial Fair Association, the Colored Business Men's Association of Baltimore and a building and loan association. He died in Baltimore on January 26, 1891, at 56. The Baltimore Sun reported that the crowd at his funeral was so large a path had to be opened through it.

Why this story, now

Black capital, labor and leadership built the yard. It still took a white agent's signature to get the land, and when the lease ended, so did the yard. Eighteen years of work, wages and contracts rested on a lease. At Dock we think about that every time we come to the water: who owns the waterfront shapes who gets to use it.

Shut out, these men did two things at once. They built their own institutions: a company, a union, a federation. They also kept asking to be let into the larger ones. Myers stood before the largest labor body in the country and asked for a fair chance. That request is still being made.

Black workers remain a strong presence in organized labor. In 2025, Black workers in the United States were more likely to belong to a union than white, Asian or Hispanic workers: 11.4 percent, against 9.9 percent of white workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (Its 2025 figures average eleven months, because October data were not collected during the federal shutdown.)

The site of the yard is now the Frederick Douglass–Isaac Myers Maritime Park, at 1417 Thames Street, run by the Living Classrooms Foundation. Anyone can stand on the water where they worked.

The water brings people together. It has also been used to keep people apart. We tell both, because both happened here.

Where the accounts differ

We checked this story against archival, scholarly, encyclopedic and labor-movement sources. Where they disagree, here is what we found and what we wrote.

Sources

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