Hampden Heritage

Workshop Tomorrow!

2009-04-21T17:43:00.000-07:00

Just a quick reminder that the Workshop on Material Culture is tomorrow, April 22nd, at 7 pm at the Roosevelt Recreation Center in Hampden. All of the details are in the flyer from the previous post.
Come out and see some of what was uncovered at the five sites excavated in Hampden and learn about what happens after excavations. Everything depicted on the blog over the last few weeks will be at the workshop so come out and see these artifacts and more!

Material Culture Workshop Wednesday

2009-04-17T14:50:00.001-07:00

Here is a copy of the flyer for the workshop we will be holding this Wednesday at 7 pm at the Roosevelt Recreation Center in Hampden. Stop by to see some of the artifacts you've seen on the blog and others while learning about the complete archaeological process and the Hampden project.

We hope to see you there!

A Different Type of Artifact

2009-04-13T14:58:00.000-07:00

Above is a small plaque that would have been attached to a house that had a mortgage. The plaque was a way for the City Trust and Banking Company to advertise. This is similar to the small plastic signs landscapers and other companies often require homeowners to place in their yard after completing some service for them. The above plaque is just a little more subtle.

Spring Walking Tour of Hampden

2009-04-06T18:15:00.000-07:00

Hi Folks,

Its Maryland Archaeology Month! I'll be leading another history and archaeology tour of Hampden beginning at 10:00 AM on Saturday April 11. Details below:

Tour: Archaeology Walking Tour of Hampden

Description: A 1-2 hour walking tour of Hampden, Baltimore's "Mill Village in an Urban Setting." Participants will tour the neighborhood's archaeological and historic sites, learning about the historical development of the industrial landscape, as well as HCAP's efforts to engage the community through archaeology. The tour will conclude in Hampden's 36th Street shopping district, where participants will be able to enjoy the neighborhood's eclectic assortment of retail establishments and restaurants. Participants should be able to negotiate moderately steep hills and moderately difficult on- or off- pavement terrain. Comfortable walking shoes a must.

Sponsor: The University of Maryland's Center for Heritage Resource Studies, and the Hampden Community Archaeology Project

Location: Tour begins at Roosevelt Recreation Center at 1121 W. 36th Street.

Time: 10:00 AM

Fee: Free

Contact: David Gadsby. More information can be found at: www.hampdenheritage.blogspot.com or at the Center for Heritage Resource Studies Website

Name that Artifact

2009-04-05T13:46:00.000-07:00

One of the more interesting items uncovered on Falls Road is a mystery item. I've done some internet searches, but I haven't found anything that matches what we have so I'm hoping someone out there knows what this is. If you do, please leave a comment!

The first picture is to provide the scale so you can see how small the face is in reality. The second provides a better shot of the face. It's a piece of darkly glazed stoneware and the poor guy is missing large chunks of his face. Hopefully someone recognizes him anyway.

Toys

2009-04-03T14:26:00.000-07:00

Quite a few toys were found at the various sites in Hampden. These range from more recent army men to clay marbles. Below are some interesting porcelain pieces with which some little girl in Hampden once played. Be sure to note their size as both items are quite small.

This is the head of a Frozen Charlotte doll. These dolls were small, solid items with no movable limbs. If you go to the following site and scroll down just a little, you can see a complete doll with some information about the history of the doll.
http://marketstreet.stanford.edu/2007/03/bones_seeds_and_shell_studying.html

Above is half of a toy porcelain saucer. This could have been part of a toy tea set.

Post-Excavation Artifacts

2009-03-31T18:28:00.001-07:00

Hello,

My name is Abbie and I am a graduate student at the University of Maryland. I have been interning with the Hampden project for approximately the last year. I and some undergraduates here at the University of Maryland have been working on washing, bagging, cataloging, and labeling the artifacts uncovered at the five sites in Hampden. This work has to be done after the excavation in order to prepare the collection for storage. As evidenced by the list of tasks that need to be done, the bulk of archaeological work actually takes place in the lab after the excavation.

As we wrap up this portion of the project, I wanted to share some of the artifacts with you. I will be posting various pictures over the next few weeks to lead up to a community workshop to be held April 22nd at the Roosevelt Rec Center in Hampden. The workshop will be at 7 pm and will allow you to see a sample of the artifacts from the various sites in person.

In working with the project, I have seen pretty much every artifact, which includes everything from bricks and coal to plastic army men and buttons. I have enjoyed seeing it all, but I am assisting with an analysis of the ceramics specifically. Due to this, I am going to start out with pictures of some of my favorite ceramic sherds from the primary Falls Road site.

This picture shows some lovely hand-painted whiteware sherds. If you look closely, you can see that these two portions of a tea cup are actually multiple sherds that have been mended.

In contrast to the decorated whiteware tea cup above is this plainer ironstone cup, which was most likely a local piece as there appears to be a matching plate that has a Baltimore stamp on the base.

Please check back between now and April 22nd as I share more images. I will also be posting a few images of items you might be able to help us identify. If you have information about any of the items pictured, please let us know in the comments section. Thank you.

Black History Event at the B&O Museum--February 14

2009-02-09T12:55:00.000-08:00

For those who may not have seen this article on the Sun's website:

www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-md.railroad02feb02,0,1840831.story

The B&O Museum currently has an exhibition on African-American railroad history, particularly the Pullman porters. On February 14, a former Pullman porter will give a presentation describing his life on the rails; if you wear red that day, you'll get a $1 discount off of the admission price.

Bob's Dissertation--Chapter 1, Part 6 (The End!)

2009-01-31T13:10:00.000-08:00

Hi folks,

Here at last is the final installment of the introduction chapter to my dissertation. (I left a couple of paragraphs of meaningless theory off the end, because no one but other academic archaeologists would be interested.) Enjoy, and as always, comments are more than welcome.
__________________________________________
The Idea of Community in Hampden-Woodberry

Despite the ways in which local history has been tied up with larger currents of city development and even global capitalism, one of the key elements of the myth-model that has shaped local identity in Hampden-Woodberry is the opposition between the community itself and the outside world, particularly "others" considered to pose dangers to the values of the community. Most often this insularity has taken the form of racism and a desire to keep the dangerous city at bay: recall the alleged agreement between mill owners and operatives in the 1870s to keep African-Americans and immigrants, particularly Jews, out of the community. More recently, the racial turmoil of the 1980s caused local residents to reflect explicitly on their fears. Following the 1988 incident in which a black family was chased out of their rented rowhouse, one resident told an African-American reporter from the Baltimore Sun that, while he had "nothing against black people," he nevertheless believed, "You bring in one black family and you spoil the whole pot of soup . . .You'll have cocaine and heroin and everything" (Martin C. Evans 1988). More recently, many middle-class newcomers have claimed that what attracted them to Hampden-Woodberry in the first place was a feeling of community, similar to what they imagine a small town would feel like, that is missing in the rest of the city (see chapter 7).

Community identity has thus been defined almost entirely in opposition to the larger city. Perhaps the only traditional symbolic tie with the city that Hampden-Woodberry residents have enjoyed is the annual Mayor's Christmas Parade through the neighborhood. People outside of the community have been all too happy to agree that Hampden-Woodberry does not quite fit with the rest of the city, as well. Throughout the 20th century, numerous newspaper articles repeated the trope of Hampden-Woodberry's uniqueness and isolation (Anonymous 1923; Beirne 1988; Brown 1982; Kelly 1976; McCardell 1940; Porter 1951; Smith 1987; Sussman 1978; Whitehead 1987; Yardley 1947), while city histories and coffee table books have frequently had little or nothing to say about the neighborhood (i.e. Middleton Evans 1988; Geary 2001; Greene 1980; Hall 1912; Hirschfeld 1941; Olson 1997; Rodricks and Miller 1997; Sandler 2002).

But, indeed, this is the area where the myth-model is perhaps most misleading, and not just because of the myriad ways in which Hampden-Woodberry's historical development has been tied up with the city's. Additionally, and more importantly, the myth-model constructs a Hampden-Woodberry largely free of internal conflict, due at least in part to the homogenous Anglo-Saxon, Protestant population. I argue instead, however, that Hampden-Woodberry's past development and present condition can only be understood when we realize that the construction of local identity has simultaneously been shaped by a series of struggles over value within the community as well as its relations with the larger world.

In defining "value," I follow ethnologist David Graeber, who has identified three different scholarly definitions of value. The first working definition concerns "values": what is considered to be good and proper and desirable in life is valuable. The second meaning of value is economistic: value is determined by how much people want something and how much they would be willing to give up to acquire it (or conversely, how much effort they would be willing to expend in order to keep it). Finally, value can be based on a structure of meaningful difference: conceptual distinctions imply a hierarchy of meanings, which then have value in relation to other meanings. While value can be materialized differently in each of these cases, the important point, according to Graeber, is that each of these kinds of value is a refraction of the same phenomenon, namely, the struggle not just over the acquisition and disposition of value, but the struggle to define what value is (Graeber 2001:1-22, 86-89).

As I will attempt to demonstrate in this dissertation, community identity in Hampden-Woodberry has undergone a number of transformations and modifications that have been the result of various competing groups' attempts to define and control all three kinds of value. Economic power and personal freedom (economistic value), the boundaries of local citizenship (a variable structure of meaningful difference based on the notion of "insiders" versus "outsiders"), and the rights, duties and privileges attendant upon membership in the community (communal values) have all been contested multiple times over the past century and a half in Hampden-Woodberry. What ties all these struggles together is that in each case, "community" has been the ultimate value. The specific nature of that value, however, has been constantly negotiated and contested by various individuals and groups within the neighborhood.

Bob's dissertation, Chapter 1, Part 5

2008-12-17T13:50:00.000-08:00

Just in time to keep all of our wonderful readers company over the holidays, another installment of my dissertation introduction. I have again skipped a short section summarizing the post-World War II boom and subsequent suburbanization of Baltimore.
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The Baltimore Urban Renewal and Housing Agency (BURHA) was established in 1956 to study the growing problem of blighted neighborhoods and to propose feasible actions for the city to take in response (Olson 1997:375). With its declining industrial employment base and aging housing stock, Hampden-Woodberry was the subject of one such study in 1963 (BURHA 1963). The Jones Falls Expressway had been built along the path of the river in the early 1960s (Olson 1997:360), providing a convenient route for white-collar suburbanites to commute to work in the city but essentially cutting Hampden and Woodberry off from each other.[1] According to the study's authors, the area west of the expressway (Woodberry) was devoted to light industry, whereas east of the road (Hampden), a mixture of land uses was "symptomatic of changing conditions and ensuing blight" (BURHA 1963:5). They suggested a renewal project in this part of the study area to coincide with the extension of a park strip along the Jones Falls River, a joint project of the mayor's office and the Greater Baltimore Committee, a private organization of land developers and businessmen working on the problem of urban renewal.

The very fact that the BURHA study was conducted in part to further a public-private initiative (the proposed park extension) is indicative of the shifting means by which urban revitalization was to be accomplished, as well as significant changes in the players involved. Political scientist Marion Orr has termed this shift, which occurred across the United States during the 1950s and 1960s, the "changing ecology of civic engagement." According to Orr, prior to World War II the movers and shakers in city-level politics were ward and district-level politicians who could trade personal and legislative favors for community support. Following the war, control of city governments became more centralized in the office of the mayor. By the end of the 1960s, however, city politics had become diffuse once again as mayors increasingly shared decision-making power with state authorities and began building strategic alliances with the private business sector, including large financial institutions, to revitalize the inner city. Such state-city-private sector arrangements still characterize city politics in the U.S. today, with the private sector taking over more and more responsibilities (or, one might say, privileges) including providing non-unionized contract workers for municipal services; operating charter schools; and even making zoning decisions (Orr 2007:12-15).

In the 1970s, Baltimore became one of the nation's best-known examples of this changing ecology of civic engagement through the revitalization of the downtown area. The city government and its private partners decided that a "turn to tourism" would be the best solution to Baltimore's economic problems. The Baltimore City Fair, an unabashed celebration of the power of the free market and unfettered consumption, was inaugurated in 1970. Before long, the waterfront along the Inner Harbor (creatively rechristened Harborplace) became what geographer David Harvey has described as "a permanent commercial circus" complete with "innumerable hotels, shopping malls, and pleasure citadels of all kinds." Far from solving the city's problems with economic decline, poverty and the lack of an adequate service infrastructure for disadvantaged communities, however, this move constituted the "rediscover[y of] the ancient Roman formula of bread and circuses as a means of masking social problems and controlling discontent" (Harvey 1991:236-237). Essentially, Baltimore reinvented its image as a tourist destination while ignoring the social consequences of redevelopment, such as the replacement of high-paying industrial jobs with low-paying service jobs and the wholesale condemnation of entire neighborhoods for the sake of economic "progress" (or their consignment as ghettos).

Harborplace and the surrounding downtown area continues to serve as Baltimore's economic engine by drawing tens of thousands of tourists each year. In other parts of the city, however, the physical and social infrastructure continues to crumble. In a growing number of formerly working-class neighborhoods gentrification has taken root. In these communities, revitalization has been driven primarily by the business community. In Hampden, Café Hon owner Denise Whiting is largely responsible for the transformation of the Avenue into an upscale shopping district, her success attracting many other small business owners to the area. Zoning decisions have been made primarily to benefit local businesses, with very little input from residents. The success of the Avenue, however, has drawn a sizable number of middle-class home buyers to the community. The result has been rapid development of open space for housing and drastic increases in property values and tax assessment rates, often pushing long-time working-class residents out of their homes (Gadsby and Chidester 2005:7). Similar processes of gentrification are taking place all over Baltimore in communities like Canton (in east Baltimore) and Locust Point (south of the Harbor).

[1] This separation continues today; many younger Hampden residents are unaware of the two neighborhoods' intertwined history.

December Labor History Events in Baltimore

2008-11-26T05:31:00.000-08:00

Hi folks,

To give all our readers a break from my dissertation, I thought I'd let everyone know about a couple of labor history events that are going on in Baltimore in December (courtesy of Bill Barry, Director of Labor Studies at CCBC):

Monday, December 8--6:15 pm--the Baltimore holiday party at The Baltimore Museum of Industry, featuring a discussion of the 1877 railroad strike, with a showing of the documentary Army of Starvation about the strike that took place at Camden Yards.

Saturday, December 13--10 am--a tour of the Irish railroad workers shrine, and a description of immigrant workers and the B & O railroad in the 1870’s, hosted by Tom Ward, followed by lunch at Hollins Market. Meet in front of the B & O Museum.

Both events are free and open to the public. You can contact Bill Barry at (443) 840-3563 for more info.

Bob's Dissertation, Chapter 1 Part 4

2008-11-05T08:41:00.000-08:00

**Note: I have left out a section of this chapter that comes between the end of my last post and the beginning of this one. The omitted section includes a brief outline of Hampden-Woodberry's 19th century history that would be familiar to anyone who has read Bill Harvey's excellent book, The People Is Grass, as well as some basic information on Hampden's ethnic/racial composition during this period.**

As with many northern and midwestern industrial cities, World War II pulled Baltimore out of the doldrums of the Great Depression. During and after the war, the federal government encouraged the consolidation of Baltimore industry into the shipbuilding, steel and airplane manufacturing industries. Large corporations such as Westinghouse, Bethlehem Steel, and the Martin Company retooled their physical plants for a peacetime war economy. By 1972, for instance, the aerospace industry in Maryland was worth $1 billion a year. The port of Baltimore continued to be a vital cog in international trade, connecting to new frontiers of global capital. At the same time, local corporations were swallowed up into ever larger global firms, and the federal government began directing military and transportation investments to other parts of the country. Geographer Sherry Olson has described Baltimore's situation thus: "Baltimore capital was being invested on the frontiers, and Baltimoreans received dividends, but the headquarters for channeling and managing these investments were not found in Baltimore. . . . Thus, Baltimore was neither frontier nor center, and its growth was hemmed in globally" (Olson 1997:350-355; quote on pg. 352).

The gleaming façade of industrial prosperity had already begun to crack, however, in the 1920s, when the textile industry began its slow withdrawal from the city. Following an enormously bitter and costly strike at the Mt. Vernon-Woodberry Mills in Hampden-Woodberry in 1923, which broke the local United Textile Workers of America union, the company began closing down its Baltimore operations in 1925 in favor of its southern plants in Alabama and South Carolina, which provided cheaper (i.e. non-unionized) labor (Bill Harvey 1988:34-35). The Hooper Sons' Manufacturing Company, successor to Wm. E. Hooper & Sons Co., attempted to revive its business by developing new cotton duck products, particularly "Fire Chief," a fire- and mildew-resistant form of cotton duck that the company patented in 1936 (Anonymous 1950:20-21). Nevertheless, and despite a brief renaissance during World War II (again due to wartime demands on industry), the local mills had mostly gone out of business by the mid-1950s. The Hooper mills shut their doors in 1961 and the last Mt. Vernon Mills operation in Hampden-Woodberry closed its doors in 1972, putting a mere 300 remaining employees out of work (Bill Harvey 1988:34-35).

At the same time as the metropolitan economy was being consolidated in particular industries, then, the industrial base in Hampden-Woodberry was diversifying in response to the closing of the mills. The Noxzema Chemical Company opened a plant on the southern edge of Hampden in 1926 (Chalkley 2006:45-58), as did Stieff Company, Silversmiths (Anonymous 1924). Also in the mid-1920s, the Woodberry Mill was bought by the Schenuit company and converted to a tire factory (Anonymous 1925a, 1926); the Park Mill became home to Bes-Cone, maker of ice cream cones (Anonymous 1925b, 1926); and yet another one of the old textile mills was converted to the manufacture of paper products (Anonymous 1925, 1927). The Park Mill later became home to the Commercial Envelope Corporation (Anonymous 1972). The Poole & Hunt Foundry was bought by the Balmar Corporation around mid-century, and it continued to produce railroad cars and missile components for several decades. By the 1970s the Clipper Mill had become the Sekine Brush Company. Meadow Mill, whose construction had signaled the beginning of Hampden-Woodberry's industrial prosperity in the early 1870s, was for a time inhabited by the Londontowne Corporation, manufacturer of the upscale London Fog brand of raincoats. Londontowne closed the factory in 1989. The old Druid Mill became home to Life Like Products, which still produces model train parts and Styrofoam coolers there (Chalkley 2006:45-58, 74-76, 117). Right next door, Pepsi installed a bottling and distribution plant. Many Hampden-Woodberry residents, however, had to find local service sector jobs or industrial jobs in other parts of the city, such as Sparrows Point.

Bob's Dissertation, Chapter 1 Part 3

2008-10-13T12:58:00.000-07:00

From Rural Mill Village to Urban Community: Hampden-Woodberry in Baltimore

While numerous other industries appeared in Maryland during the 19^th century, textiles soon became the state's most important product as the flour milling industry declined. Growing out of the colonial mode of household production, Baltimore's first cotton mills opened late in the first decade of the 19^th century; by 1810 there were 11 cotton or woolen mills listed in the state manufacturing census. As with the flour trade, the Baltimore City region was uniquely situated for a profitable textile industry, with the Jones Falls, the Gwynns Falls, and the Patapsco rivers all providing waterpower, and the Gunpowder Falls not far away. With the introduction of steam power in the 1810s, textile operations became even more widespread despite the national economic hardships of the decade. By the mid-1820s, the growth of the textile industry had made Maryland the largest manufacturing state in the South. About the same time, many of the cotton mills began specializing in the production of cotton duck, or sailcloth, to serve the local market created by the clipper ships that clogged Baltimore's harbor due to its status as a premier port of trade. In the 1850 Census of Manufactures, Maryland was ranked eighth among the 35 states in cotton manufacturing output (valued at $2 million), and fourth in the average number of employees per company (Clendenning 1992; Griffin 1966).

During the middle decades of the 19^th century Baltimore began to undergo dramatic expansion. Large-scale manufacturing activities began to emerge, and the city's spatial organization and social geography were altered accordingly. Whereas previously, Baltimore's spatial organization had been typical of a North American mercantile city, the growth of productive industries resulted in the increasing clustering of similar industries, commercial activities, and social groups (divided along class and ethnic lines) into discernible districts. Most of the industries that flourished were tied to the city's commercial economy, such as textile mills, iron goods, agricultural processing (flour before mid-century, canned oysters and vegetables later in the 1800s), brickyards, breweries, and tanneries, among others. By 1860, the single most important industry in Baltimore (both in terms of output and employment) was the production of ready-made clothing, which employed about one third of the city's industrial workforce. The needle trade operations were organized in a number of ways, including large-scale factories and the putting-out, or contracting, system, which resulted in the well-known phenomenon of sweatshops. Employing a cheap labor force of unskilled immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe beginning in the 1870s, Baltimore's men's clothing industry was ranked fourth in the United States by 1900 (Muller and Groves 1976, 1979).

Throughout the rest of the 19^th century and up through the 1950s, Baltimore experienced periodic booms during which the city's economy, population, and geographical area grew at a fast pace. Most of this development occurred in concentric rings around the core business district, just north and west of the harbor. Previous scholars have attributed this growth largely to periods of high capital investment following the introduction of new production and transportation technologies. Comparing the growth of Baltimore to the growth of a biological organism, geographer Sherry Olson noted, "In each generation a boost in the city's exchange with the outside world was matched by changes in its metabolism, and followed by changes in its morphology" (Olson 1979:561). The most important changes in physical morphology included annexations (two particularly important annexations occurred in 1888 and 1918; see Arnold 1978), the construction of more railroads, and the growth of industrial villages and company towns in surrounding Baltimore County in response to the increasing importance of extractive and productive industries there (Chidester 2004). European immigration was the largest factor in the changing social morphology of both the city and the county. Furthermore, during each investment boom and the subsequent period of "lean" years, as Olson demonstrated, the "redistributive impact of growth" resulted in the regeneration of a basic structure of social inequality, as previous immigrants to the city climbed the social ladder, only to be replaced by even more poor and desperate newcomers (Olson 1979:567-568).

Bob's dissertation, Chapter 1 Part 2

2008-10-01T05:19:00.000-07:00

2007

It was a typical hot and muggy June day for Baltimore, but the "Avenue" was packed with thousands of tourists who had come to witness an event that had come to symbolize Baltimore's working-class heritage: HonFest. George and Thelma didn't use to mind HonFest so much when it was just one day on a Saturday, even if the "Best Hon" competition was a bit offensive to their friends and neighbors. Now that it had been expanded to two days, however, they were irritated--not so much because of the street festival itself, but rather because of the lack of respect that the event organizers had shown for the local community. Denise Whiting, owner of the Café Hon and the brains (and money) behind HonFest, had promised that the festivities would not interfere with church services on Sunday morning. Yet here George and Thelma were, sitting in the sanctuary unable to hear the minister's sermon clearly because of the festival music blaring outside.

Thelma's mind began to wander. She thought back to her youth, when Hampden was a different place. There had always been community conflicts, she knew, but when she was younger it seemed that at least everyone respected everyone else as part of the same community. Now, though, things were different. Ever since younger families and single professionals had begun moving into the neighborhood, it seemed that the newcomers had no respect for the older community. The Avenue had once been the place where everyone gathered to hang out, to shop, to see and be seen. Now, however, the Avenue was increasingly becoming the province of the rich yuppies, people who had the time and the money to shop at stores with names like "Atomic Pop" and "Mud and Metal." For Thelma and George, there just wasn't anything left on the Avenue worth doing or seeing.

The community history outlined in the preceding sketches belongs to Hampden-Woodberry, a traditionally white, working-class community in central Baltimore, Maryland. The trajectory that I describe—from mill village to deindustrializing community to economically devastated neighborhood to revitalized, gentrified community—closely matches the dominant narrative reproduced by a number of local historians, an underlying set of ideas about local history and experience that, until the mid-1990s, profoundly shaped the contours and boundaries of community identity in Hampden-Woodberry. Psychological anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere has labeled such narrative structures "myth-models," a term that I will borrow here (Obeyesekere 1991:10). In fact, there are several variations of the Hampden-Woodberry myth-model, but they all share the same broad outlines. Indeed, this myth-model (or portions of it) is still utilized by some local residents for culturally strategic purposes. The recent gentrification and revitalization of Hampden in particular has lead to a tendentious situation in which the long-time working-class residents of the neighborhood have withdrawn almost entirely from the public sphere. Nevertheless, local identity and the values of community are still very much fought over by the two communities that now inhabit the neighborhood. This dissertation is an exploration of the various manifestations of this struggle from the 1870s to the present.

Bob's dissertation--Chapter 1, Part 1

2008-09-19T06:24:00.001-07:00

Hi folks,

In an effort to get things started back up again on the blog, over the next few months I'll be posting excerpts from my actual dissertation (as opposed to just the proposal, which I posted back in the spring). As always, any and all comments (even, or perhaps especially, if you want to tell me that I'm dead wrong about Hampden's history) are welcome. Without further ado, here's part of my introduction.
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1874[1]

It was only 7 o'clock in the morning, but Jane had been up since 4 preparing for her family's day. After a small breakfast, the mill bells rang, and Jane, her husband and three children, ranging in age from ten to five, rushed out of the house so that they would not be late for work at the newly opened Meadow Mill in the Baltimore County hamlet known as Woodberry. While the walk from their small house, which they rented from Meadow Mill's owners, was only a quarter of a mile, Jane dreaded the trip as she knew that she would be wheezing by the time she arrived at work. At the ripe old age of 30, Jane had been working in one or the other of the local mills for 15 years, and she was already experiencing the respiratory problems that would come in time to be known as brown lung.

Thanks to a recently passed bill in the Maryland legislature, the children would only have to stay at work for ten hours. Jane was proud of the fact that she, her husband Sean and many of their neighbors had participated in marches and demonstrations that had helped to convince the lawmakers in Annapolis to pass the bill. Their oldest child, a son named Ian, was a spinner like his mother. Mary, 7, was just beginning the process of learning how to be a spinner too; Michael, the youngest at age 5, worked as a doffer, replacing the bobbins of thread that had been filled by the spinners with empty ones. This was only an intermittent activity, however, so when he wasn't replacing bobbins Michael swept up the cotton lint that multiplied endlessly on the factory floor. Like most of the women who worked in the mills, Jane could look forward to at least twelve hours of work. Sean, on the other hand, was a carpenter for the mill. While this work thankfully took him outside of the hot, dusty confines of the mill buildings, he frequently had to put in 14- or 16-hour workdays.

After such long days on top of six-day work weeks, most mill workers did not have much time for leisure activities, but then again, there were not that many leisure-time options in Hampden-Woodberry anyway. The mill owners had decreed that no taverns would be allowed within one mile of the mills. (Naturally, an enterprising soul had since opened a tavern exactly one mile north of the mills on the Falls Turnpike Road, just above Cold Spring Lane. Sean and many of the neighborhood men were known to patronize the establishment on occasion.) Mill workers played various sports, particularly the new game of base-ball. Ian played the game whenever he could, and he dreamed of growing up to play for a traveling team like the ones that occasionally visited his village. More widely enjoyed were the periodic tent revivals put on by traveling preachers in wooded spots and fields surrounding Hampden-Woodberry. It was not uncommon for a revival to draw several thousand residents from the area and to last upwards of two or even three weeks. Jane and the other neighborhood women particularly enjoyed these events, as it was one of their only opportunities to escape from the weariness of mill work and housekeeping, if only for a short time.

1925

It was the first heavy snow of the year. The children of Bay Street in Stone Hill rushed out of their homes, sleds in tow, and began the dangerous repeat trips down the nearby hill that they enjoyed so much. Their parents watched them with a mixture of joy and sadness. Joy, from the pleasure of watching the pure unsullied happiness of children at play; sadness, because they worried for their children's future. When they had been children, the parents had known that they would work in the mills when they grew up, and that lifetime employment would be virtually guaranteed. Their children's prospects were much less clear.

During the previous decade, things had seemed to be looking up: While the Great War had taken many of Hampden-Woodberry's sons to the fields of France (some never to return), it had also brought much increased business to the local textile mills and the Poole foundry, which managed to secure contracts with the federal government. At the same time, after more than 20 years of no labor activism in the neighborhood, the ascendant American Federation Labor had come to Hampden-Woodberry through the International Association of Machinists and the United Textile Workers of America. Local workers had joined these unions in large numbers and fought for their rights, demanding fewer hours, higher wages and cleaner, safer working conditions. After the war, however, the Red Scare had largely driven the unions away. The Textile Workers reorganized in 1923, but a disastrous strike at the Mt. Vernon Mills ruined the union and resulted in many blackballed strikers leaving the community, unable to find work in Hampden-Woodberry's mills. Mt. Vernon employees were already well aware that the company, owned by a large New York conglomerate, owned other textile plants in the Deep South; their fears had finally been realized this year when the company announced that it was shutting down some of its Baltimore operations and moving them to the southern mills. As the parents of Bay Street watched their children sledding, they fervently hoped that the other local mills would not follow suit.

[1] The vignettes presented here are fictional, and are intended solely as illustrative devices. Any similarity between the characters in these vignettes and actual persons is purely coincidental.

McGrain Lecture, May 22, 7:00 PM at Roosevelt Rec

2008-05-21T08:05:00.001-07:00

The Hampden Community Archaeology Project continues its spring workshop series with a lecture by noted industrial archaeologist John McGrain. Mr. McGrain is the author of the well-known book From Pig Iron to Cotton Duck, as well as other books and numerous articles on the history of Baltimore County. He spent many years as the County Historian for Baltimore County. He will entertain and educate us with a slide-illustrated talk about Hampden-Woodberry's industrial history. Q&A and discussion to follow. Please join us at 7:00 PM may 22, 2008 at the Roosevelt Park Recreation Center, located at 1121 W. 36th St. For questions or for further information, please call Dave Gadsby at 410-227-2578, or email dgadsby@anth.umd.edu.

Bob's Dissertation Proposal, Part II

2008-04-07T20:29:00.000-07:00

Again, any and all comments and criticisms are welcome and indeed, encouraged.
_________________________________________________________

My dissertation will be the result of interdisciplinary research, including archival, oral historical, archaeological, and ethnographic investigations. The research will engage with and attempt to bring together several disparate themes of recent scholarship in both anthropology and history, including the creation and contestation of the boundaries of community; local memory, identity, and heritage; and the materiality of social practices. As such, the dissertation will be an example of “archaeology” in two different senses: both in the traditional meaning of archaeology (the anthropological study of past cultures through the excavation and analysis of material remains) as well as French social theorist Michel Foucault's version of "archaeology" (the systematic examination of the genealogy of some social phenomenon; in this case, the creation and contestation of community identity in a working-class neighborhood).[1] Specifically, the dissertation will address how material practices, both mundane and spectacular, have been vital instruments in the ongoing struggle between the local working class and various groups of “outsiders” over the definition of and values attached to community in Hampden-Woodberry. By “material practices,” I mean to include a broad array of social phenomena, including production and consumption, theatrical performance and the performances of everyday life, and the strategic uses of public and private space. I propose to examine documents, public performances, local landscapes, and the artifacts of everyday life all together as material manifestations of this struggle.

In addition to an introduction, a theoretical chapter, and a conclusion, I plan to include five chapters in the dissertation. Each chapter will address a specific arena in which community identity has been forged and contested (the workplace, the public sphere, the domestic sphere, and the economic sphere), as well as the social categories that have shaped these struggles (class, race, gender, and religion). The chapters will be organized more or less chronologically beginning with the 1870s, with some necessary temporal overlap between topics. Each chapter, however, will explore some aspect of the materiality of insurgent practices used in the struggle over community identity.

. . .

In my dissertation, then, I will explore the various material strategies (the production and consumption of artifacts, spaces, landscapes, and representations) that have been deployed in the creation and contestation of different identities, or subjectivities, in Hampden-Woodberry. These subjectivities include those based on race, class, gender, and religion. The relationships between these different subjectivities (within both individuals and larger groups) have played a central role in the definition of and struggles over local citizenship in Hampden-Woodberry.

[1] See Matthew Johnson, An Archaeology of Capitalism (Cambridge, England: Blackwell Publishers, 1996) for an excellent example of this dual approach to archaeology.

Bob's Dissertation Proposal

2008-04-02T07:18:00.000-07:00

Hi folks,

Over a month after I promised it, here is the first exceprt from my own dissertation proposal. Although Dave and I have been working together on Hampden archaeology for three years, our dissertations are going to be very different, for a variety of reasons (but mostly due to the different Ph.D. programs we're in, as well as the fact that we need to be able to distinguish ourselves as scholars in order to get jobs). I'll skip the historical background section and begin with an excerpt that explains my general approach to interpreting Hampden history. Any comments are more than welcome.
___________________________

I believe that a common thread can be found running throughout each of the major periods of Hampden-Woodberry’s past: the theme of “insiders” versus “outsiders.” Specifically, working-class residents of the neighborhood have expressed, both verbally and through their actions, a consistent will to keep “outsiders” away, or at least to diminish their influence within the community. During the late 19th century the outsiders were ethnic and racial minorities, whereas by World War I the Mt. Vernon-Woodberry Mills Co., owned by a New York-based conglomerate, had taken over that role. After the mills began heading south, the newly independent petit bourgeois initiated a sustained effort to rewrite the community’s history, erasing the working class and nearly erasing the mills from the scene in an attempt to fill the power vacuum left by the mills’ departure. By the 1980s, the local working class community began fighting back, but once again against racial and ethnic outsiders rather than the local middle class. With the onset of gentrification, an outside middle class gained ascendancy but not without protest by working-class community “insiders.”

Furthermore, these localized actions (by both working-class community members and outsiders) represent instances of what anthropologist James Holston has called “insurgent citizenship.” According to Holston, insurgent citizenship consists of both grassroots mobilizations and practices of everyday life that work to subvert dominant agendas and contest the form of substantive citizenship (defined as the array of civil, political and social rights that are available to individuals within a polity or local community in varying degrees). Some individuals try to expand their claims to substantive membership in a given community, while others try to erode these claims. Insurgent citizenship is at “the intersection of these processes of expansion and erosion;” it is an activity in which both elite and subaltern groups engage. Thus, insurgent movements “create new kinds of rights, based on the exigencies of lived experience, outside the normative and institutional definitions of the state and its legal codes.”[1] The history of Hampden-Woodberry, then, can be seen as a history of insurgent citizenship in which the local working-class, which traces a cohesive and homogenous community identity to the late 1800s, has battled with a series of outsiders over the rights, duties, and values associated with local citizenship.

Hampden-Woodberry presents both advantages and obstacles as a case study in American working-class history. The local working community has maintained a closed, homogenous identity for well over 100 years, managing to retain a racially white, ethnically Anglo-Saxon character while most other industrial communities across the nation were continually reshaped by successive wages of immigration and internal migration. In this sense, Hampden-Woodberry is somewhat unique. On the other hand, local workers have been affected by and engaged with many historical developments that had similar impacts in other industrial communities: the shift from paternalistic industrial capitalism to corporate monopoly capitalism; the movement for industrial democracy; deindustrialization; desegregation; and gentrification. By examining the interaction of local struggles with these broader developments while simultaneously understanding the unique aspects of Hampden-Woodberry’s history, I hope to make a significant contribution to the study of localized forms of community identity and belonging in American working-class communities.

[1] James Holston, “Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship,” in James Holston, editor, Cities and Citizenship (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 167-170.

Spring Workshop I: This Thursday

2008-03-09T12:27:00.000-07:00

I'm just posting a reminder here that I'll be talking this Thursday at the Roosevelt Rec center. I plan to take about 30 minutes (or less) to talk about our ongoing archaeological research, followed by Q&A and/ or discussion. Hope you can make it - see info below.

Workshop I:
Hampden Community Archaeology: What We Found and What We’re Finding Out

Presenter: David Gadsby, HCAP co-director
Location: Roosevelt Recreation Center Auditorium
1121 W. 36th Street

Date: Thursday, March 13, 2008, 7:00p.m.

Gadsby will present a brief talk and slide show on the nearly three years of excavations at five Hampden sites. Discussion to follow, light refreshments to be served.

An interesting random tidbit

2008-02-23T08:26:00.001-08:00

Hi folks,

It's been a long time since I've posted anything, so I figured I'd better get back on track. In the next few weeks I will begin to follow Dave's lead by posting portions of my dissertation proposal, followed after that by portions of the first draft of my actual dissertation. In the meantime, however, I thought I'd share an interesting piece of information related to our field site from last season that I came across completely by accident while doing some background reading.

Recall that our site from last year (3833-3839 Falls Rd.) was once part of the large property holdings of developer Martin Kelly, who, upon his death, passed it to his sons Edward and Dennis. At some point thereafter, one or two of the individual lots were sold to Mr. Albert G. Eichelberger, a dry goods merchant, who lived there from the late 1870s into the early 1900s. We know a little bit about Eichelberger from a newspaper article we found describing a boycott of his store by local labor activists who were upset that Eichelberger refused to sell only union-made cigars. So, Eichelberger was clearly no friend of the working class.

Well, while perusing a history of Baltimore published way back in 1912, I came across a single line reference to a Mr. A.G. Eichelberger of Baltimore. In 1896, alcohol prohibition was becoming a huge national issue, and a political party was formed for the purpose of running a candidate for President on a prohibition platform. This party, however, was split between two factions: one that believed in the gold standard for the monetary system, and one that believed in the silver standard for the monetary system. Generally speaking, both of these issues--prohibition and the gold-standard vs. silver-standard debate--broke down along class lines, with the middle class supporting prohibition and the gold standard while the working class supported the opposite. To get back to Mr. Eichelberger, he is named in this history of Baltimore as being Maryland's representative to the national committee for the pro-gold standard faction of the National Prohibition Party--like his refusal to sell only union-made cigars, two public stances in one that were sure to arouse the ire of Hampden's workers.

Here are some references for more information:

Hall, Clayton Colman. 1912. Baltimore: Its History and Its People. 3 vols. Lewis Historical Publishing Company, New York and Chicago. (The reference to Eichelberger is in volume 1, pg. 301.)

For more information about the politics of 1896, including both the National Prohibition party and the gold-standard vs. silver-standard debate, see http://projects.vassar.edu/1896/1896home.html.

Dissertation Proposal, the good parts. Part 2

2008-02-15T04:40:00.001-08:00

Here is the second in an occasional series abridging my dissertation proposal. I feel like I've said this a lot before - one begins to feel like a bit of a broken record - but I think it bears repeating. The point here is not to slam anyone in particular (well maybe 1 person in particular), but to shine some light on the process of gentrification, which has its good and bad points, but seems to me to be inherently unfair to a lot of people. As far as my dissertation proposal goes, this is section in which I build a context for my research and try to demonstrate why I think the project is necessary.
Enjoy! (or get mad. whatever).

Contemporary Hampden

Beginning in the 1980s, area developers began to renovate the old mill buildings as artist studios and offices. The influx of artists, according to Zukin (1995: 23), places a neighborhood squarely on the road to gentrification, and that gentrification has occurred with increasing intensity over the past several years. Housing prices are on the rise as affluent families (often referred to as “yuppies” by longtime residents) move into the area. A merchant’s association, with the aid of a large federal Main Streets grant, has altered the look and character of the city’s main shopping street, installing expensive boutiques, restaurants, and bars, meant to attract visitor consumers from elsewhere. An annual street festival known as “Honfest” purports to be a celebration of working-class women, but can be read alternatively as a minstrel show that lampoons all working class people (Gadsby 2006). A recent issue of National Geographic Traveler (Stables 2005:20), showcasing Hampden as an “up and coming neighborhood” attests to the increasing draw of places like this as tourist destinations. Recently the Hampden Village merchants association has paid to have the neighborhood listed as a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places (City of Baltimore 2005).

Thus, Hampden has begun to transform into a caricature of itself. It has not reached the state of a fully consumption-based ”pleasure citadel” (Harvey 1991a: 237) such as Baltimore’s Inner Harbor (Harvey 1994: 247-248) or New York’s Times Square (Zukin 1995: 133-145). It is instead something between the “genuine article” of a working class neighborhood – working class people still, to an extent which remains largely undetermined, live and shop there – and a complete fake. The direction of development seems to be headed toward the latter however, and as developers and merchants march gentrification forward, a new symbolic economy based around the neighborhood’s working class image has begun to evolve. Events such as “Honfest,” and restaurants and shops on Hampden’s main street lampoon an imaginary blue-collar experience by disseminating inaccurate and cartoon-like images of working class men and women. They capitalize on the “kitsch” of working-class lives and homes and parody the styles of working class people in public performance. In this new Hampden, working class people are abstracted, sketched as cartoons, and relegated to the no-man’s land of Hampden’s working past. They are thus safe and unthreatening, but retain an illusion of authenticity. The commodification of Hampden’s working-class heritage cannot be seen as some kind of passive process. It is detrimental to the public political voice of working people and thus has material and political and economic consequences.

Zukin’s analysis of urban gentrification is based on the symbolic economy, in which agents of gentrification and commerce in American cities rely on “culture” and “style”, including art, heritage and history, to create urban spaces where citizens can consume commodities and businesspeople can conduct their business (Zukin 1995:13). This has meant the transformation of public places such as parks and streets into public-private places. In turn, the democratic processes that formerly governed the management of such places has been co-opted by private interests, and that the voices of developers, businesspeople, and other elites are privileged over those of most citizens. Additionally, elites, under the auspices of the historic preservation movement, have taken control of the histories of those transformed places, and used those histories as tools to further gentrification (Zukin 1995:124).

History and heritage, then, become no small problem for people in Hampden. As Zukin (1995: 124-5) notes, historic designations can raise the cost of living in a neighborhood dramatically. University of Texas anthropologist John Hartigan (2000) has written about the propensity of working class whites to regard history in terms of people and events in the past, while middle class whites tend to regard it as being related to material culture, particularly houses. In the second formulation, houses are of course also imbued with elevated monetary value because of their possession of (any) history. Thus what was once particular history – the history of working class struggle, or alternately of neighborhood unity– is transformed into a generic kind of history that is assumed to exist in old houses. Places become worth something not because they are associated with a particular person or event, but because they have “something about them,” “character” or “style” that speaks to the aesthetic sensibilities of middle class gentrifiers.

Most importantly, history of this kind can be marketed, as in the case of the multi-million dollar Clipper Mill redevelopment in the nearby neighborhood of Woodberry. Here, developers have explicitly used the heritage of a nineteenth century foundry as a selling point for their new luxury condominiums:

In 1853, a modest machine plant was born on Woodberry Road, just north of a nameless branch of the Jones Falls at the foot of Tempest Hill. The new plant, coined Union Machine Shops, housed Poole & Hunt's general offices, an iron foundry, erecting and pattern shops, a melting house and stables. Instantly it became the backbone of the Woodberry/Hamden community, employing thousands of men as it grew to become the country's largest machine manufacturing plants.

Today, Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse, Inc. is redeveloping Clipper Mill and the surrounding area, including the beloved Woodberry Forest. Their aim is to create a new urban corporate campus and upscale residential community (Streuyver Brothers, Eccles and Rouse 2005).

This kind of marketing simultaneously elides the role of working people in the creation of the neighborhood now being gentrified and hijacks their history as a history of place over people. People who live in surrounding neighborhoods – people with a stake in how redevelopment goes, are left out of the process.

The work performed in preparation for this dissertation has been done under the auspices of the Hampden Community Archaeology Project. The goal of our project is to increase awareness of the historical agency of the working class, particularly with regard to its role in the development of the political and social institutions of the neighborhood. The project is self-consciously activist, advocating for democratic participation in real estate development and other private sector incursions into the public sphere.

Gadsby, D. A.
2006 Remembering and Forgetting Baltimore’s Industrial Heritage: Archaeology, History and Memory . In American Anthropological Association, San Jose, CA.

Harvey, D.
1994 A View from Federal Hill. In The Baltimore Book, pp. 227-250. Temple University Press, Philadelphia.

Stables, E.
2005 [Neighborhood Watch] Hampden Baltimore, MD. National Geographic Explorer 22(3):20.

Zukin, S.
1995 The Culture of Cities. Blackwell, Malden Massachusets.

Spring Workshop Series planned for 2008

2008-02-08T11:49:00.000-08:00

The Hampden Community Archaeology Project (HCAP) announces its Spring 2008 series in public history and archaeology. Following hot on the heels of our January oral history workshop comes a series of three workshops designed to educate and foster discussion about Hampden’s rich heritage. The first workshop will focus on the ongoing archaeological project, with a brief lecture and slide show depicting the project’s ongoing activities. The second workshop will consist of a “Historic Hampden” walking tour, to be held in conjunction with Maryland Archaeology Month. The spring series will culminate with a workshop hosted by noted Hampden scholar and industrial archaeologist, Mr. John McGrain. Mr. McGrain will discuss his many years as a researcher of Hampden and Baltimore history. All workshops are free of charge and open to the public.

Workshop I:
Hampden Community Archaeology: What We Found and What We’re Finding Out

Presenter: David Gadsby, HCAP co-director
Location: Roosevelt Recreation Center Auditorium
1121 W. 36th Street

Date: Thursday, March 13, 2008, 7:00p.m.

Gadsby will present a brief talk and slide show on the nearly three years of excavations at five Hampden sites. Discussion to follow, light refreshments to be served

Workshop II:
Walking Tour: Historic and Industrial Hampden

Presenter: David Gadsby
Location: Meet in front of the Roosevelt Rec. Center
1121 W. 36th Street
Date: Saturday, April 19, 2008, 11:00 A.M.

April is Maryland Archaeology Month. Celebrate by taking a one-hour walking tour of Hampden’s historic landscape. Bring comfy walking shoes and be ready to some fairly long distances. Rain or shine, and bring your own refreshment.

Workshop III:
Researching Hampden’s Industrial History
Presenter: John McGrain
Location: Roosevelt Recreation Center Auditorium
1121 W. 36th Street
Date: May 22, 2008, 7:00 PM

John McGrain has spent many years researching the history of Hampden and its industrial past. He will present a brief talk on his research, and then lead discussion.

More to come - stay tuned.

Dissertation Proposal, the good parts. Part 1

2008-02-05T17:12:00.000-08:00

I've decided that, in order to have some stuff to post in the low season, I'm going to post some of the less boring parts of my dissertation proposal, which my committee approved early last December. The whole thing's nearly 70 pages long, and a lot of it is academic drival, so I'm just excerpting the good bits. Here's the history part.

Hampden is a neighborhood of Baltimore City, situated on the slopes and ridge between the Jones Falls (rivers and streams in and around Baltimore are often named “Falls”) and Stony Run approximately three miles north of the city’s Central Business district. It lies along the transition between the coastal plain and piedmont regions known in the mid-Atlantic as the “fall line.” The area lies within the Upland Section of the Piedmont Province, specifically Maryland Archaeological Research Unit 14: Patapsco-Back-Middle Drainages (Hall 1999: xii; Shaffer and Cole 1994: 77). Soils in the area are generally well-drained sandy loams, primarily Legore, Joppa, and other urban land complexes.

Nineteenth-Century Hampden: Class, Paternalism and Industry

Hampden’s early economy depended upon its topography, and particularly the ready supply of hydrologic energy available to run machinery. The “suburban factory village” of Hampden began in the 1820’s as a series of water-driven grist mills in the valley of the Jones Falls about three miles upstream of the booming shipping town of Baltimore. In the early years of the nineteenth century, while Baltimore’s waterborne commerce was booming, farmers interested in bringing their goods to market in Baltimore suffered the perils of poor roads: “miery sloughs, dreadful precipices…impassible streams” and other difficulties (Federal Gazette 1804 cited in Olson 1997).

To aid inland trade, Maryland’s government began the construction of a series of turnpike roads. Included among these was the Falls Turnpike Road, which, after 1809, connected mills along the Jones Falls grist mills to the hub of international trade a few miles to the south (Olson 1997: 47-48). By the 1830’s, the construction of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad not only improved this link, but also fueled real estate speculation throughout the region and spurred construction along the Falls Turnpike (Olson 1997: 71-77). In 1833, Lloyd Norriss and William Tyson advertised the sale of a 238-acre parcel on the Jones Falls. The parcel contained a mansion house, a farmhouse, a tavern, and a brick and stone gristmill capable of producing 120 barrels of wheat per day (Baltimore American 1833). Ten years later that Woodberry Mill was one of 18 in the Baltimore area and one of at least three in the immediate locality. Another, White Hall Cotton Factory, was still water-driven (Baltimore American 1843) . However, by 1850, Gambrill Carroll and Co.,White Hall’s owners, had begun the conversion to steam drive. By this time, there were also 27 dwelling houses for mill workers erected on mill property (Baltimore American 1850). The paternalist system that would flourish in Hampden after 1870 was already putting down roots (Baltimore American 1850).

By 1860, Hampden-Woodberry hosted a large foundry and the area was sufficiently populated to warrant the construction, by mill workers, of a library (Baltimore Sun 1860). In the early 1870’s the village had blossomed into a full-fledged mill town, albeit a rustic one. Simultaneously, an apex of industrial development and a backward suburb lacking even paved streets, Hampden played host to no less than five steam-powered cotton duck, or canvas mills, and supported as many as 8,000 inhabitants (Baltimore Sun 1874; Baltimore Sun 1872). It was in this condition that the Maryland’s cotton mill labor delegates found the town on the night of their meeting:

Saturday night, while everything was activity in Woodberry, the people on their several errands were walking up steep and unpaved streets and groping in the dark, the only light in the place being that coming down from the windows of the cottages. With 8.000 inhabitants, large churches of various denominations, a daily newspaper, public halls, numerous large cotton factories and engine works and stores of all descriptions, Woodberry, situated three miles from the heart of Baltimore City has no gas, little or no supply of water, and the most meager kind of communication with the city, to which of necessity one half of the population have business every day (Baltimore Sun 1874)

That meeting signals the beginning of real labor consciousness in Hampden-Woodberry. Throughout the 1880’s and 1890’s, organized labor gained strength, particularly under the auspices of the Knights of Labor, and won a series of strikes, culminating in a successful strike of 1918. This era, from the 1880’s through 1920, can be viewed as the era in which labor was most successful in Hampden. Despite its victories, however, mill operatives continued to make what seem like impossibly low wages: in 1885, men working in the picking room of Maryland cotton duck mills made real wages of just over $1 per day. Women and children made substantially less (Weeks 1886: 167) and the era of labor activism seems to have ended in Hampden in 1923. After a winning a lengthy strike in that year, mill corporations began the slow process of closing their operations and moving them south. While the twentieth century saw the introduction of some light industry to the region, even that began to dissipate by the 1970’s. During that period, Hampden lost all but a few of its manufacturing jobs and much of its service sector.

A series of transformations in world capitalism, famously described by Harvey (1991) including the gradual transformation of the American economy from one centered on production to one centered on consumption, made their mark on Hampden. The movement of the textile mills to the Southern piedmont has altered the neighborhood’s character over the last several decades. Between the 1950’s and the 1970’s, the mills’ decline forced many of Hampden’s blue-collar residents to take jobs outside of the neighborhood. Others set up businesses in the neighborhood - pharmacies, beauty parlors, grocery stores, and so forth, to provide services for the neighborhood’s residents. This constituted a first phase in the transformation of Hampden into an economy driven by consumption.

References:

1804 . In Federal Gazette triweekly vols, Baltimore.

A Library at Woodberry
1860 . In Baltimore Sun, Baltimore.

[Description of Baltimore Mills]
1843 . In Baltimore American, Baltimore.

Hall, C. L. a. L. M. V.
1999 Yearbook of Archaeology 1999, edited by S. H. A. Maryland Department of Transportation. Office of Planning and Preliminary Engineering, Project Planning Division, Environmental Planning Section.

Labor Meeting at Woodberry: The Ten Hour System in the Factories - Speeches by the workingmen, etc.
1874 . In Baltimore Sun, Baltimore.

Olson, S. H.
1997 Baltimore : the building of an American city. Rev. and expanded bicentennial ed. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Md.

Shaffer, G. D. and E. Cole
1994 Standards and Guidelines for Archaeological Investigations in Maryland, edited by D. o. H. a. C. Development. Maryland Historical Trust Technical Report.

The Rockdale Factory for Sale at Public Auction
1850 .

Tour of Woodberry Mills
1872 . In Baltimore Sun.

Valuable Mill and Farm for Sale
1833 . In Baltimore American, Baltimore.

Weeks, T. C.
1886 First Biennial Report of the Bureau of Industrial Statistics and Information of Maryland, 1884-1885, edited by B. o. I. S. a. Information. Guggenheimer, Weil and Co, Printers.

Community History Workshop on January 24

2008-01-02T11:21:00.000-08:00

PRESS RELEASE—12/29/2007

The Hampden Community Archaeology Project, in conjunction with the Hampden Community Council and the Center for Heritage Resource Studies of the University of Maryland, announces a community history workshop to discuss our oral history project in Hampden. This workshop will consist of a short presentation by Jolene Smith, coordinator of oral history for HCAP, followed by an open discussion of what these kinds of stories mean for the Hampden community. HCAP Co-director, David Gadsby will also be available to discuss June and July excavations on Falls Road and Hampden’s heritage.

The workshop will be held at the Roosevelt Recreation Center, 1221 W. 36th Street in Baltimore, from 7:00 to 8:30 pm on Thursday, January 24. Light refreshments will be provided. Join us if you’ve got stories to tell, or are just interested in the history of the neighborhood. All are welcome.

After the successful excavation of six sites over the past three summers, we have got a lot of amazing information to share. You can see what we’ve done and get regular updates on our progress from our website, located at http://www.heritage.umd.edu/CHRSWeb/AssociatedProjects/Hampden.htm, and our weblog, at http://hampdenheritage.blogspot.com.

The Hampden Community Archaeology Project is sponsored by the Hampden Community Council and the Center for Heritage Resource Studies at the University of Maryland-College Park. Additional funding for 2007 has been provided by the Sociological Initiatives Foundation, the firm of Struever Brothers, Eccles and Rouse, and the Rackham Graduate School of the University of Michigan.

Labor Day Parade in Dundalk

2007-08-20T10:05:00.000-07:00

Here's an announcement that I received from Bill Barry, Director of Labor Studies at Community College of Baltimore County (and one of the featured speakers at our public history workshop series back in 2004):

Don’t forget the biggest and best Labor Day Parade in Maryland—Monday, September 3, 2007—meet at CCBC Dundalk at 9 a.m. and we’ll walk through Dundalk to Heritage Park, where we can share our experiences in building the union movement.

Once again, we will feature the Labor Day band from Musicians Local 40-543, led by Ed Goldstein and Jack Hook.

Bring your friends, your union banners and your belief in solidarity.

For more pictures of last year’s parade, courtesy of Doug Schmenner, check out
http://student.ccbcmd.edu/~wbarry/revlaborsday/index.htm