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W
ith the Port as its economic epicenter and the city’s heavier
industrial presence, Baltimore boomed as never before. By
the turn of the 20th century, the city was home to half of Mary-
land’s population. Baltimore’s percentage of the total value of
Maryland’s industrial production peaked at 83 percent in 1890.
New York, Philadelphia and Boston may have exuded more cos-
mopolitan appeal, but Baltimore bellowed with the commercial
appeal of a workingman’s town.
Baltimore’s heavy industry was heavily invested in the region’s
human capital. Tens of thousands were hired by factories like Balti-
more Smelting and Refining, Baltimore Drydock and Shipbuilding,
Maryland Steel Company and the Fell’s Point operations of Isaac
Tyson, known as the “Chrome King of the World” until deposits of
high-grade ore found abroad destroyed his monopoly. After Allied
Chemical took over, the chrome plant, on the tip of William Fell’s
H
eavy Industry
Founded in 1815 as
Baltimore Copper Smelting
and Rolling Co., the 15-acre
plant, pictured above in
1861, was a major industrial
presence and job driver.
original land tract that
gave Fell’s Point its
name, dominated the
entranceway of the
Inner Harbor until it
was demolished in
the late 1980s.
America’s first submarine, the
Argonaut
, 33 feet long and nine feet wide, was built in 1897
at the Columbian Iron Works, one of three ship repair yards with
drydocks on Locust Point. The sub was designed to move across
the seabed by means of two giant cogwheels, one fore and one
aft. Power was supplied by a 30-horsepower gasoline engine whose
fumes were vented to the surface through a 20-foot pipe, capable
of being extended as needed; another pipe supplied fresh air.
