insurance and transportation. Johns Hopkins, who put his name
on Baltimore’s world-class hospital system and university, also
grew rich through assorted maritime-related investments. The
Walters and Peabody families, benefactors of two beacons of
Baltimore’s high culture — the midtown museum and musical
conservatory — sailed similar paths to great wealth.
Of course, the impact of merchants enriched by trade also
reverberated throughout Maryland’s social life. Baltimore was still
in its formative stage, with little sense of identity, enviously eyeing
its more cosmopolitan neighbors like Philadelphia and New York
to the north. The city’s captains of industry, if only by default,
were the role models and arbiters of taste for many upwardly
mobile Baltimoreans.
The Port’s footprint extends further to the state’s transpor-
tation network. The first Colonial roads were nothing more than
animal paths and routes worn bare by the foot traffic of Native
Americans. Long before any white man ever laid eyes on the
prize real estate at the northern reaches of the Patapsco River,
the Nanticoke, Piscataway and Susquehannock tribes were
plying the estuary’s brackish waters for food. Indians named the
Port’s essential waterways: “Patapsco,” which first appears on
1655 land grants, is said to refer to a bevy of sandstone rocks
rising 20 feet above the surface off Rock Creek near the river’s
mouth. “Chesapeake,” ascribed to the Algonquin tribe, means
“great shellfish water.”
Time always has been of the essence in maritime trade, since
ships turn no profit dockside. Land arteries were the weak link in
Colonial Maryland’s maritime chain; many shippers died a slow
death awaiting cargoes mired in muddy, narrow pathways.
As traffic thickened on byways into Baltimore, particularly
from the state’s western frontier area, tolls were exacted to develop
Maryland’s transportation infrastructure. But as the business
community kept agitating to bring Maryland’s land transport
up to par with ocean transport, legislators acted: by 1809, three
great toll roads or turnpikes — Frederick, York and Reisterstown
— had been built. Freight now could be hauled year-round. Falls
Road, Harford Road, Washington Road and a road to Havre de
Grace soon followed.
Above, from left, Johns
Hopkins grew rich from
maritime investments and
put his name on a world-class
hospital system; Baltimore’s
well-known musical
conservatory is named for
George Peabody, who was
said to have remarked that
Hopkins was the only man he
ever knew who enjoyed mak-
ing money more then he
did; William F. Walters was a
benefactor for whom a mid-
town art museumwas named.
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