The history of Baltimore spans back to 1659, when the Baltimore County was declared erected by the General Assembly of Maryland. The area where the city now lays was settled by David Jones in 1661. While this has been inhabited by Indigenous people since the 10th millennium BCE, it was not until European settlers arrived that it was given the name Baltimore, after the Province of Maryland's founding proprietor.
The city of Baltimore was founded in 1729. Early on, it was largely populated by German immigrants. The city gained prominence as a major hub for trade and commerce after successfully fending off British forces during the War of 1812. Seeing to maintain this position, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was established in 1829, making it one of the first commercial railroad lines in the world.
Before the Civil War, Baltimore was home to the largest free Black community in the U.S. It became known as a "city of refuge" and a destination for many former slaves, including Frederick Douglass. However, the city's growing Black population caused unease among white residents, leading to increased racial tensions after the war.
Baltimore has been the site of early organization for social movements, including women's suffrage and the civil rights movement of the 20th century.
Native American settlement The Baltimore area had been inhabited by Native Americans since at least the 10th millennium BC, when Paleo-Indians first settled in the region. One Paleo-Indian site and several Archaic period and Woodland period archaeological sites have been identified in Baltimore, including four from the Late Woodland period.
During the Late Woodland period, the archaeological culture known as the "Potomac Creek complex" resided in an area from Baltimore to the Rappahannock River in Virginia, primarily along the Potomac River downstream from the Fall Line.
In the early 17th century, the immediate Baltimore vicinity was populated by Native Americans. The Baltimore County area northward was used as hunting grounds by the Susquehannocks living in the lower Susquehanna River valley who "controlled all of the upper tributaries of the Chesapeake" but "refrained from much contact with Powhatan in the Potomac region." Pressured by the Susquehannocks, the Piscataway tribe of Algonquians stayed well south of the Baltimore area and inhabited primarily the north bank of the Potomac River in what is now Charles and southern Prince George's south of the Fall LineAs depicted on a map of the Piscataway lands in Kenneth Bryson, Images of America: Accokeek (Arcadia Publishing, 2013) pp. 10-11, derived from Alice and Henry Ferguson, The Piscataway Indians of Southern Maryland (Alice Ferguson Foundation, 1960) pp. 8 (map) and p. 11: "By the beginning of Maryland settlement, pressure from the Susquehannocks had reduced...the Piscataway 'empire'...to a belt bordering the Potomac south of the falls and extending up the principal tributaries. Roughly, the 'empire' covered the southern half of present Prince Georges County and all, or nearly all, of Charles County." as depicted on John Smith's 1608 map which faithfully mapped settlements, mapped none in the Baltimore vicinity, while noting a dozen Patuxent River settlements that were under some degree of Piscataway suzerainty.
In 1608, Captain John Smith traveled from Jamestown to the uppermost Chesapeake Bay, leading the first European expedition to the Patapsco River, a word used by the Algonquin language natives who fished shellfish and hunted The name "Patapsco" is derived from pota-psk-ut, which translates to "backwater" or "tide covered with froth" in Algonquian dialect.
A quarter-century after John Smith's voyage, Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore led 140 colonists on the merchantman The Ark to settle in North America. The colonists were initially frightened by the Piscataway in southern Maryland because of their body paint and war regalia, incorrectly assuming they wished to attack the fledgling colonial settlement. However, the chief of the Piscataway tribe was quick to grant the colonists permission to settle within Piscataway territory and cordial relations were established between them and the Piscataway.
European settlement
Baltimore city is named for Cecil Calvert, second Lord Baltimore, (1605–1675), of the Irish House of Lords and founding proprietor of the Province of Maryland. Cecilius Calvert was the oldest son of Sir George Calvert, (1579–1632), who became the First Lord Baltimore of County Longford, Ireland in 1625. Previously, he had been a loyal agent of King Charles I of England (1600–1649) as his Secretary of State until declaring himself a follower of Roman Catholicism. Regardless, the King still gave his heir Cecil the 1632 grant for the Maryland colony, named after Charles's wife, Queen Henrietta Maria. The colony was a followup to his earlier settlement in Newfoundland, known as "Acadia" or "Avalon", (future Canada), which he found too cold and difficult for habitation.
The County of Baltimore was "erected" around 1659 in the records of the General Assembly of Maryland one of the earliest divisions of the Maryland Colony into counties when a warrant was issued to be served by the "Sheriff of Baltimore County." The area constituting the modern City of Baltimore and its metropolitan area was settled by David Jones in 1661, his claim covering in the area known today as Harbor East on the east bank of the Jones Falls river, which flows south into Baltimore's Inner Harbor. The following year, shipwright Charles Gorsuch settled Whetstone Point, the present location of Fort McHenry. In 1665, the west side of the Jones Falls on the Inner Harbor was settled when 550 acres of land, thereafter named Cole's Harbor, was granted to Thomas Cole and later sold to David Jones in 1679. Old Saint Paul's Parish of Baltimore County was one of the "Original Thirty" parishes designated for the Colony. It included the county of Baltimore and the future Baltimore Town and was part of the "established" or "state" Church of England, also known as the Anglican Church. It was the first church built in the metro area, erected in 1692 on the Patapsco Neck peninsula in southeastern Baltimore County, along the Colgate Creek which flowed into the Patapsco River (present site of today's Dundalk Marine Terminal of the Port of Baltimore). Jones's stepson James Todd resurveyed Cole's Harbor in 1696. The tract was renamed Todd's Range, which was then sold off in progressively smaller parcels, thereby forming the land that would become the Town of Baltimore thirty years later.
Another "Baltimore" existed on the Bush River as early as 1674. That first county seat of Baltimore County is known today as "Old Baltimore". It was located on the Bush River on land that in 1773 became part of Harford County. In 1674, the General Assembly passed "An Act for erecting a Court-house and Prison in each County within this Province." The site of the courthouse and jail for Baltimore County was evidently "Old Baltimore" near the Bush River. In 1683, the General Assembly passed "An Act for Advancement of Trade" to "establish towns, ports, and places of trade, within the province." One of the towns established by the act in Baltimore County was "on Bush River, on Town Land, near the Court-House." The courthouse on the Bush River referenced in the 1683 Act was in all likelihood the one created by the 1674 Act. "Old Baltimore" was in existence as early as 1674, but we don't know with certainty what if anything happened on the site prior to that year. The exact location of Old Baltimore was lost for years. It was certain that the location was somewhere on the site of the present-day Aberdeen Proving Ground (APG), a U.S. Army testing facility. in the 1990s, APG's Cultural Resource Management Program took up the task of finding Old Baltimore. The firm of R. Christopher Goodwin & Associates was contracted for the project. After Goodwin first performed historical and archival work, they coordinated their work with existing landscape features to locate the site of Old Baltimore. APG's Explosive Ordnance Disposal personnel went in with Goodwin to defuse any unexploded ordnance. Working in 1997 and 1998, the field team uncovered building foundations, trash pits, faunal remains, and 17,000 artifacts, largely from the 17th century. The Bush River proved to be an unfortunate location because the port became silted and impassable to ships, forcing the port facilities to relocate. By the time Baltimore on the Patapsco River was established in 1729, Old Baltimore Town had faded away.
Maryland's colonial General Assembly created and authorized the Port of Baltimore in 1706 at the Head of the Northwest Branch of the Patapsco River in what was later known as "the Basin" (today's Inner Harbor) and later expanded east and southeast down-river to the settlement later known as Fells Point to the east near the mouth of the Jones Falls and further in the nineteenth century to what became known as Canton.
The Port of Baltimore began to take shape in the mid-eighteenth century. While Thomas Cole owned the parcel at the northwest of the Patapsco River, he had not yet settled it. William and Edward Fells negotiated a good price for the unused land and developed the harbor in the 1740s. This port attracted traffic from southern Pennsylvania and western Maryland.
Also around the Basin to the southeast along the southern peninsula which ended at Whetstone Point—today South Baltimore, Federal Hill, and Locust Point—the funding for new wharves and slips came from individual wealthy ship-owners and brokers and from the public authorities through the town commissioners by means of lotteries, for the tobacco trade and shipping of other raw materials overseas to the Mother Country, for receiving manufactured goods from England, and for trade with other ports being established up and down the Chesapeake Bay and in the other burgeoning colonies along the Atlantic coast.
Early development of Baltimore Town: 1729–1796 The Maryland General Assembly established the Town of Baltimore in 1729. Unlike many other towns established around that time, Baltimore was more than just existence on paper. German immigrants began to settle along the Chesapeake Bay by 1723, living in the Baltimore area. The General Assembly enlarged Baltimore Town in 1745 and incorporated David Jones's original settlement known as Jones Town. Baltimore sent representatives to the Assembly, and over the next two decades it acquired nine parcels of land and annexed neighboring villages including Fells Point to become an important community on the head of the Patapsco River. As the Town grew, increasing numbers of German Lutheran immigrants established Zion Church in 1755, and later also a German Reformed congregation was organized as the first among the Protestants to be represented which also attracted more of these "Pennsylvania Dutch" settlers to the region. Early German settlers also later established the German Society of Maryland in 1783 in order to foster the German language and German culture in Baltimore.
The first printing press was introduced to the city in 1765 by a German immigrant, Nicholas Hasselbach, whose equipment was later used in the printing of Baltimore's first newspapers, The Maryland Journal and The Baltimore Advertiser, first published by William Goddard in 1773.