Meadowmill Clocktower

John McGrain

Hampden-Woodberry is the creation of the textile industry that in the nineteenth century took root in the middle stretch of the Jones Falls Valley, starting with White Hall Factory in 1837, the Rockdale Silkworks in 1838, Woodberry Factory in 1843, Mount Vernon Mills in 1845, and Rockdale Factory in 1846. The valley was full of merchant flour mills dating from the late eighteenth century, but the flour millers gradually sold their valuable water-powered sites to investors interested in spinning cotton with the free energy of the falls. Textile companies usually built housing for their workers, and the earliest cluster was at White Hall Factory.

The first cotton mill investors were David Carroll, Horatio Nelson Gambrill, and Richard W. Hook, who built a plant 40 x 140 feet on the grounds of the old White Hall Flour Mill. They also built housing for workers; some of those sturdy stone duplexes survive today along Clipper Mill Road. There are even traces of the terraced garden of the mill manager's mansion. In 1850, the original investors offered the business for sale; twenty-seven houses were mentioned as part of the package.

When White Hall Factory burned on April 6, 1854, its replacement was the 500-foot-long, two-story Clipper Mill completed the next year. Clipper Mill, in turn, burned on November 4, 1865, and was rebuilt as the 698-foot long brick building that still stands. The main product at Clipper was sail cloth or cotton duck made for the clipper ships by its owner William E. Hooper. Company envelopes bore an engraving of a full-rigged ship.

The Rockdale Silk Works started by the Maryland Silk Company was not a success; the only investor listed in the incorporation papers was Edward A. Roberts. In 1840 the silk company sold out to the downstream flour miller Hugh Jenkins. In 1847, S.D. Tongue and Ebenezer Pyle built Rockdale Cotton Factory on "the old silkworks" site and had it under roof by January of that year, five stories of stone. The Sun described the plant in great detail in October 1847 and mentioned that a powerful air blast sucked the torn-apart cotton fibers upstairs through a chute. Rockdale's worker housing area was on the high ground on the east bank of the falls, an area now known as Brick Hill. Rockdale's disastrous fire took place in 1855. Its grounds and residences passed to the mills downstream, owned by the Mount Vernon company.

Four investors, David Carroll, Horatio N. Gambrill, Captain William Mason, and Henry Leaf, started Woodberry Factory on the grounds of the Woodberry Flour Mill in 1843. When the flour mill burned in September 1843, the new cotton plant survived. The Woodberry company's housing was entered in the 1845 county transfer book as newly taxable assets of the business. Those fieldstone houses are mostly intact on Clipper Road and Seneca Street, duplexes with an air both old English and Dickensian.

The Poole & Hunt Foundry (1853) and the Druid Mill of 1846 brought more people to the valley than the cotton lords and foundry owners could house, opening the way for developers to provide the shelter. In 1875, the Hooper company built a very large dormitory called the Park Hotel on Clipper Mill Road at the foot of Ash Street. Housing single girls and women, it was an elegant brick building with civilized features many plain people lacked at home.

Hampden-Woodberry has at least 45 unique place names, ranging from Flicker Bottom to Good Husband's Row and Hard-Drinking Row. The mill village had at least 14 churches, some started at small meetings in the company's halls or store rooms. Some groups flourished and built large chapels and churches. Many millhands belonged to the local churches, fraternal orders, and Civil War veterans' groups. The cotton town supported the Union in the Civil War, although Union Avenue's name predated that conflict. Woodberry's population was mostly white, mostly native-born, the result of the mill owners' hiring rural Carroll and Baltimore countians rather than immigrants. Somewhat later, they recruited rural Virginians.

The first non-company housing was Slabtown on Falls Road built by Martin Kelly in the late 1850s to shelter his workmen on the Hampden Reservoir project. "Kellysville" appeared on Thomas Chiffle's 1852 water supply map at present Falls Road and 41st Street. Kelly supposedly suggested renaming the shanty area and its environs "Hampden," which was the name of Gen. Henry Mankin's nearby estate. Mankin's farm had been Mount Pleasant as recently as 1849, but a plat made in 1856 showed it as Hampden, supposedly in honor of John Hampden of England, famous for refusing to pay the "ship tax" to Charles I. Martin Kelly had a mansion on Hickory Avenue, and it survived into the 1950s. Local Catholics attended mass at the Kelly house until they could open Saint Thomas Aquinas Church on the same street.

Economic forces shut many of the mills in the early-to-mid-twentieth century as the cotton industry moved to the southern states in search of cheaper labor. Other new businesses started in the old mills: Woodberry Factory became the Schenuit tire factory, and envelopes were made in Park Mill, ice cream boxes and plastic brushes at the Clipper Mill. Poole and Hunt, once the foundry for gigantic machinery, was making washing machines in the 1930s. The companies gradually sold the company town houses to their former tenants. The cheap shelter of 1845 in many cases has become upscale real estate. In the 1960s and onward, artists came to work in the surplus factory spaces. By 2004, the Sun could suggest that Hampden was becoming too expensive for people whose ancestors had performed all the work, spinning, weaving, and iron-founding, in times gone by

Hampden-Woodberry was the largest urban area in Baltimore County until 1888, when the city line was pushed out to approximately 43rd Street from its 1818 location at Boundary (or North) Avenue. Hampden celebrated its 100th anniversary as part of the city in 1988 and gave a round of applause to the city's African American mayor, Kurt L. Schmoke. The citizens were not always that cordial to outsiders, and a number of old-timers interviewed in a television documentary in 1982 gave vent to old prejudices and unfashionable folkways. A circa 1935 term paper stored in the Enoch Pratt Free Library reported on the attitudes of the cotton employees and blamed the town's xenophobia on strangers: the last-hired batch of people from Virginia who were supposedly still involved in inter-family blood feuds they brought with them. Today Hampden's folkways are the subject of films and musical comedies. Hampden women revive the once reviled "Bee-Hive" hairdo, people delight in the local variety of Baltimorese speech, and there are beauty pageants of costumed "hons" in 1950s regalia.

Hayward, Mary Ellen and Shivers, Frank R. Jr. "Mills in the Valley." The Architecture of Baltimore: An Illustrated History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Pp. 154-60.

Harvey, Bill. The People Is Grass: A History of Hampden-Woodberry, 1802-1945. Baltimore: Della Press, 1988.

McGrain, John W. "Hampden-Woodberry Bibliography-Listed Chronologically." MS, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Maryland Department.