Mount Clare is considered to be the birthplace of American railroading. It holds the oldest passenger and freight station in the United States and the first railroad manufacturing complex in the country.
Mount Clare is considered to be the birthplace of American railroading. It holds the oldest passenger and freight station in the United States and the first railroad manufacturing complex in the country. The first Mount Clare Station building was erected in 1830 after Charles Carroll deeded the land to the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company. In May of that year, the first railroad was completed to Ellicott's Mills (now Ellicott City) at a distance of about 13 miles. The first passenger car to make the trip was the horse-drawn "Pioneer" which made the trip on May 25, 1830 in one hour and five minutes. On August 28 of that year, the first American locomotive, "Tom Thumb", made its debut run on the same route, but took ten minutes longer than the horse-drawn Pioneer. The manufacturing complex at Mount Clare became a leading innovator in locomotive technology. Phineas Davis and Ross Winans created the first commercially practical coal-driven American locomotives at the site. In 1850, the B&O erected an ironworks where the first iron railroad bridge was designed. The circular roundhouse was completed in 1884 and was at the time the largest circular building in the world. The Mount Clare Station is now part of the B&O Railroad Museum. The museum has the largest collection of 19th-century locomotives in the United States. Visitors can take take a train ride on the first mile of railroad tracks laid in the country.
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Small in size but featuring a nationally significant story, Baltimore's Irish Railroad Workers Museum on Lemmon Street offers a rare glimpse of immigrant home life in America in the middle of the 19th century.
An avalanche of Irish immigrants hit Baltimore in the 1840s and1850s, many escaping Ireland's Great Hunger Famine of 1845-1853. Many of these immigrants settled in southwest Baltimore and promptly went to work for the vibrant Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. The B&O had located in the countryside that was then West Baltimore in 1827 and quickly built a roundhouse, station, shops, and other buildings in the years that followed. All of this construction required human labor, as did the operation of the railroad itself, and Irish immigrants came to fill the need. The Irish Shrine consists of two renovated alley houses in 900 block of Lemmon Street that were built by carpenter Charles Shipley on land leased to him by John Howard McHenry, a grandson of Col. John Eager Howard. By September 1849, all the houses had been sold to Irish households, including many who worked for the B&O Railroad — Thomas McNew, a watchman; Thomas Medcalfe, a fireman; and Dennis McFadden and Cornelius McLaughlin, laborers. One of the houses is furnished as a period house museum, reflecting the lives of the Irish-immigrant family that lived there in the 1860s. The other house offers exhibits on Irish-American history and local neighborhood life. With a lot of hard work and a lengthy law suit, a number of dedicated Baltimoreans founded the Irish Shrine (now the Irish Railroad Workers Museum) in 1997 to save the buildings from proposed demolition.
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