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Maryland's Maritime Heritage

Since Maryland's earliest history, her citizens have had an integral relationship with the sea-so close in fact that Father White noted in his 1634 account of his Maryland voyage that some of the Native American Caucorouses or "great men….weare the forme of a fish of copper in their foreheads." Europeans arrived in Maryland by sea, settled near the sea, earned their living from the sea, traveled and traded by sea, and had their basic needs supplied by the sea. From the small fishing and trading settlements which dotted the shores of the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries in the 17th century to the Port of Baltimore today, the relationship between Maryland's inhabitants and the sea has shaped the history of the state and her people.

In 1634, the Ark and Dove sailed from Southampton, England, bringing the first European settlers to Maryland. Over the next century the colony grew, as tobacco became the region's main crop. In Maryland's small seaports, such as Oxford, English factors bought tobacco from local planters and filled orders for English manufactured goods. The tobacco economy fostered broad settlement patterns, discouraging the growth of any one major port.

In the mid-18th century Baltimore was still a tiny village, having been established as a tobacco port in 1729. However, the opening of overseas wheat markets revolutionized the future of the city. Local tobacco farmers switched to the new crop, mills were built along the Jones Falls and other tributaries of the Patapsco, and the city's boom was underway.

The early settlers need for vessels for transportation and commerce assured that Maryland would become a major shipbuilding center. Many people and trades were involved in the construction and outfitting of a ship and the prosperity and identity of whole communities were synonymous with their maritime activity.

During the Revolutionary War, Maryland's ports and ships played a crucial role in the defeat of Cornwallis at Yorktown. The ships moved soldiers from the North, out of the Elkton and Baltimore areas, down the Chesapeake to the battle site. At the same time, food, supplies, and military equipment that were desperately needed were gathered by Marylanders and shipped down the Bay to Washington's army enabling them to defeat Cornwallis.

After the Revolution, large mercantile houses began regular trade with Europe and the West Indies and John O'Donnell brought in the first cargo of exotic goods from China. Profits to be made by a "neutral" carrying trade during two decades of European warfare and the demand for warships by a new navy spurred local shipbuilding and led to the development of the famous Baltimore Clipper. By 1815 Baltimore had become the third largest city in the young nation, largely as a result of her maritime activities.

During the 19th century Baltimore ships traveled the world, making the fortune of many a Baltimore merchant and giving employment to generations of Baltimore sailors and shipbuilders. In the early years of the century Baltimore brigs and ships carried Maryland flour and tobacco to Europe returning with an immense variety of merchandise and the city's first influx of Irish and German immigrants.

During the gold rush, Clipper ships traveled to the California gold fields and then sailed on to China for cargoes of tea. After the Civil War the coffee trade with Brazil kept sailing ships active, but by century's end steam power had supplanted sail and the only spreads of commercial canvas left to be seen in Baltimore harbor belonged to coasting schooners and Bay boats.


In the 1840s, the canning of oysters in Baltimore was the start of the food processing and can manufacturing industries in the United States. Spurred by the transportation afforded by ships and the railroad, the industries by 1890 were employing 30,000 people. Over the course of the 19th century the oyster industry influenced the development of a variety of Bay craft. Local shipbuilding traditions, economic necessity, and advancing technology produced log canoes, pungies, sloops, schooners, bugeyes, skipjacks, and, finally power work boats. Today, only the skipjacks remain to carry on the age old tradition of working sail.

The days of steamboats on the Bay remains a fond memory for many Marylanders. Compared with today's expectations of rapid transport, traveling by steamer seems an impractical luxury of time only a more gracious age could afford. Steamboats, however, played a crucial role in building Maryland's economy by reliably and inexpensively moving foods to market and connecting isolated rural towns to cities like Baltimore, Washington, and Norfolk. One suspects, as well, that there was substance in the claim of a 1927 brochure that steamboat travel "possesses a charm, a magnetism, that will not be denied."

Baltimore achieved world port status in the decades after the Civil War with the development of modern railroad terminals to handle the transfer of goods and people to and from the Middle West and the South. During the next century Baltimore's extensive railroad linkages with western and southern markets and the continuing efforts to modernize terminal facilities made the port the sixth largest in the world. Today's commitment to containerization, rapid loading systems, and harbor dredging assures a bright future.