Four generations of South Baltimore Shipbuilding

General Ship Repair maintains the rich shipbuilding tradition so long associated with the South Baltimore neighborhoods of Federal Hill and Locust Point. Charles “Buck” Lynch founded the company in 1924, moved to this location in 1929, lost the company to bankruptcy during the Great Depression and managed to buy it back at auction. Today, the fourth generation of the Lynch family operates the company at one of the last remaining industrial sites along Key Highway.

General Ship has repaired a variety of vessels through the years, including schooners, steamships, paddle wheelers, and supertankers. Among the notable vessels that have been worked on recently are the Pride of Baltimore II and Mr. Trash Wheel. Workers perform maintenance work on ships in dry docks at this site in addition to sending crews out to other facilities. As of 2020 the facility, which includes a 17,300 square foot shed and two 1000-ton floating docks, repairs mostly workboats. The company serves as the tug and barge repair facility for the Port of Baltimore. The machine shop on site allows General Ship crews to weld and fabricate steel parts here.

Key Highway was once home to a variety of industries including molasses production, oil reprocessing, canning, and locomotive repair. While access to the waterfront remains more limited here than around other parts of the Inner Harbor, residential and mixed-use development has boomed in South Baltimore for the past decade. The Lynch family has considered relocating the business for the past few years, selling the waterfront property to be redeveloped into luxury housing. However, as of October 2020, General Ship Repair remains a bastion of shipbuilding in South Baltimore. What do you predict the Locust Point peninsula will be known for in the 21st century?

1449 Key Highway, Baltimore, MD 21230

Once Baltimore's "largest and most important" shipyard

The Key Highway Yards along the southern side of the Inner Harbor played a pivotal role in Baltimore’s shipbuilding industry from the 1820s until 1982. Passersby today see almost no traces of this industrial history at the upscale Ritz Carlton and HarborView communities. One of the only remnants of shipbuilding along this stretch of Baltimore’s waterfront lies underneath the 30-story HarborView Towers, completed in 1992: the dry docks used for ship repair were converted to become a parking garage.

Boatbuilding brothers William Skinner Jr. and Jeremiah Skinner moved from Dorchester County to Baltimore in the 1820s to establish the Skinner yard at the base of Federal Hill. William later sold his share of the company to his brother and purchased his own shipyard on Cross Street specializing in sailing ships and steamboats. The Skinners contributed greatly to the city’s prominence in American shipbuilding, with William remembered as having built the first Baltimore clipper ship. The for this site describes the Skinner yard as “the largest and most important of the period.”

William’s descendants carried on the family business and consolidated other small shipyards, eventually creating a 35-acre complex at Key Highway. Business boomed during the Civil War and continued through the turn of the century. Although World War I brought another wave of activity to these shipbuilding operations, the company went into receivership and Bethlehem Steel Company acquired this yard in 1921. 

During the Bethlehem era, this was known as the “upper yard.” The “lower yard” referred to the shipyard adjacent to Fort McHenry, which is still in operation today. Workers at Bethlehem’s shipyards at Locust Point as well as Sparrows Point and Fairfield—together the largest ship repair operation in the United States—participated in the. Baltimore shipyards churned out a record-setting number of Liberty and Victory Ships between 1941-1945. The Key Highway yards repaired over 2,500 ships during WWII. 

Enjoying a stroll along the harbor today, one could almost miss the fact that this place was once a hub of heavy industry, lined with massive equipment and bustling with workers. Although the shipyards are no longer visible at this location, you can experience this chapter of history at the Baltimore Museum of Industry. The 1942 Clyde Model 17 DE 90 whirley crane outside the museum, restored and painted bright green in 2019, worked on Pier 3 between the 1940s-1980s. Can you imagine the sense of awe one would have experienced seeing a whole fleet of these massive cranes hard at work along the shipyard?

The Key Highway yards repaired over 2,500 ships during WWII.

326-284 Pierside Dr, Baltimore, MD 21230

While some of this area is accessible via the pedestrian promenade and water taxi, some of the area is private property.

Electrical maintenance, environmental remediation, and mixed-use development

The General Electric (GE) Apparatus Service Center did not support private consumers in maintaining their individual household appliances. Rather, this service center maintained large electrical transformers, electrical motors, and turbine engines which helped supply electrical energy to the city and surrounding area. From 1946-1993, these huge pieces of equipment arrived and departed the Service Center by rail.

Maintenance of this kind of equipment required all manner of industrial substances. Beginning in 1988, poor internal regulation of substance disposal caught up with the facility when a soil test confirmed polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)—a group of highly toxic carcinogens—in the surrounding soil. For the next 23 years various environmental cleanups have removed PCBs, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), chlorinated solvents, petroleum, and various toxic metals from contaminated soil and groundwater.

The original Service Center was demolished between 2002 and 2003. Three underground storage tanks of petroleum substances were removed in 2007, likely remnants from a historic gas station which occupied part of the lot during the 1950s and 1960s. GE Power Systems submitted an official Voluntary Cleanup Program application to the Maryland Department of the Environment in 2003, indicating their intention to eventually sell the land for residential development.

The land was held off the market for just under a decade for environmental cleanup until GE sold it to Solstice Partners in 2012. Solstice Partners, a development company, partnered with The Bozzuto Group and War Horse Cities to build Anthem House, a “healthy-lifestyle, luxury residential community” on the corner of E. Fort Avenue and Lawrence Street. Scott Plank, brother of Under Armour founder Kevin Plank, launched War Horse Cities in 2010. The $100 million development, which opened in 2017, includes 292 rental units as well as 20,000 square feet of street-level shops and restaurants.

GE continues to have an impact on Maryland industries. In 2017, the subsidiary GE Healthcare closed a plant in Laurel which manufactured “incubators and warmers for hospital neonatal intensive care units.” GE Aviation owned Middle River Aircraft Systems (MRAS) in Middle River until early 2019 when it was sold to ST Engineering, a Singapore-based aerospace conglomerate. MRAS has pioneered many innovations in airplane engine nacelle and thrust reverse systems.

As buildings are used and reused, remnants of a building’s former life sometimes appear. Those industrial legacies are baked into the character of a place. How do you feel that the transition from industrial to residential has changed the character of Locust Point?

900 E Fort Ave, Baltimore, MD 21230

From paper recycling to luxury apartments

All that remains of the Chesapeake Paperboard Co. complex today is the water tower. The site is now known as McHenry Row, a 90,000 square foot mixed use development project that contains 250 luxury apartments, offices, and street level shops at the end of Woodall Avenue.

From 1910 until the company's closure in the mid-1990s, Chesapeake Paperboard was the sole recycler of paper waste from Baltimore City's curbside recycling program, processing over 15,000 tons of paper waste annually. The company processed this paper waste into pulp, then into paperboard which it would then export to other manufacturers. Paperboard is the harder, less flexible cousin to regular printer paper. Lightweight and strong, paperboard can most easily be found in consumer product packaging. One of the most recognizable examples of paperboard are breakfast cereal boxes.

The Chesapeake Paperboard Company was acquired in 2005 by Green Bay Packaging and moved operations to Hunt Valley. Today, the Baltimore Division of Green Bay Packaging produces plain brown and color printed cardboard boxes for companies in Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Virginia. The Baltimore Division is certified by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) and the Maryland Green Registry.

As with so many changes in technology, there are both pros and cons to recycling modernization. The loss of this local industry impacts job opportunities here in South Baltimore, but an upgraded recycling infrastructure means a cleaner, greener world for all. The give and take of advancing technology, changing consumer tastes and policy and regulation is rarely as simple as it looks at first glance.

Chesapeake Paperboard was the sole recycler of paper waste from Baltimore City's curbside recycling program for most of the 20th century.

1001 E Fort Ave, Baltimore, MD 21230

A dumping ground for toxic waste

The Allied Chemical and Dye Corporation manufactured chemical components for many industrial applications. Quaker merchant Isaac Tyson Jr. established the company that became Allied Chemical in 1828, mining chromium ore and supplying chrome pigment to England which he refined at his Baltimore Chrome Works plant. The operation became Mutual Chemical Company in 1908, merged with Allied in 1954, and became part of Honeywell in 1999. This site, used for dumping the toxic waste produced in chemical manufacturing, is now occupied by a row of houses.

Sites across Baltimore—including this location in Locust Point as well as Harbor Point—were toxic dumping grounds for Allied and its successor company, Honeywell. Chromium, produced here, was used to make stainless steel and certain paints. Tom Pelton of the Baltimore Sun wrote that, “During the city's industrial zenith in the mid-20th century, Allied dumped tons of chrome waste and other pollutants in more than a dozen locations around Baltimore's harbor, both into the Patapsco River and along the shore, according to state records. Chrome waste was often used as landfill under buildings and parking lots.” He pointed out that its “lemon hue lurks under the parking lot of the Baltimore Museum of Industry” nearby.

The term “brownfield” refers to a formerly industrial property that requires environmental remediation for redevelopment efforts—sites tainted by toxic waste. One study by Johns Hopkins University researchers estimated that Baltimore alone has about 1,000 brownfield sites. Environmentalists at local, state, and federal levels have gone to enormous efforts to oversee the cleanup process, to ensure public health at sites such as this one.

Think about the benefits of environmental regulations as you walk through the neighborhood. Although you can’t see it, arsenic and chromium lie beneath our feet in many locations along the harbor. Cleanup efforts remain underway across Baltimore.

Although you can’t see it, arsenic and chromium lie beneath our feet in many locations along the harbor.

1232 E Fort Ave, Baltimore, MD 21230

Under Armour's world headquarters

Today the site of Under Armour's world headquarters, five of these buildings used to house Procter & Gamble's Baltimore Plant: Process Building (1929), the Soap Chip Building (1929), the Bar Soap Building (1929), the Warehouse (1929), and the Tide Building (1949). The company selected this Locust Point site to build a soap manufacturing plant because of its proximity to cargo shipping routes and the city’s transportation infrastructure along the Atlantic seaboard.

The plant was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999. According to the Registration Report held at the National Archives, “The size of the Procter & Gamble Plant and the timing of its opening in the early years of the Depression made the plant an important local source of employment and economic stability.” The Plant’s architectural construction and importance in industrial history were also factors in its inclusion.

Local development company Struever Bros, Eccles & Rouse transformed the Procter & Gamble campus into the Tide Point office park in 2004. Construction costs for this 15-acre adaptive reuse project totaled $66 million. Under Armour continues the legacy of Baltimore’s once-dominant garment industry, although the actual manufacturing mostly takes place overseas. Founder Kevin Plank began the company, focusing on wickable athletic shirts, from his grandmother’s rowhouse in Washington D.C. in 1996 before moving its headquarters to Baltimore in 1998. As of 2019, the company employed 14,500 staff worldwide and brought in an annual revenue of $5.3 billion.

The architecture represents only one portion of the peninsula’s significance, however. Between 1800 and the outbreak of World War I, nearly two million immigrants first stepped foot on U.S. soil from this location at Locust Point--second only to Ellis Island in New York. Immigration from Europe, and particularly Germany, rose dramatically after the B&O Railroad and the North German Lloyd Company established an agreement in 1867 that brought ship passengers to the immigration pier along the B&O Railroad. The federal government established an immigration station here in 1887, on land belonging to the railroad. The outbreak of World War I ended the heyday of Baltimore as an immigration hub. The Baltimore Immigration Memorial, located on the site of the Locust Point Immigration Depot, interprets this history today. Imagine arriving in Baltimore by steamship in the late 19th century. How might it feel to see landmarks such as Fort McHenry or Federal Hill?

1030 Hull St, Baltimore, MD 21230

Some of the UA campus is closed to the public.

In south Baltimore, Latrobe Park still has traces of Olmsted design elements. Originally only 6 acres in size, this park was created to serve the working class neighborhoods on the Locust Point peninsula. Unlike much larger plans for Patterson and Clifton Parks also begun in 1904, what distinguishes Latrobe Park was the amount of active recreation that had to fit in a tight space.

In 1904, the Board of Park Commissioners retained the Olmsted Brothers firm to provide a plan that would accommodate a children’s play area, a men’s running track, and a small women’s fitness section. A broad promenade would overlook the park with trees and plantings while a grand stair with a fountain at its base would be the central entrance. In the middle of a wide lawn a grove of trees would provide a shaded haven for the public to sit and relax, or listen to band concerts. This design combined old sensibilities of parks as natural retreats with new ideas that parks could promote recreation.

Construction began in 1905 and much of the Olmsted design materialized. Over the years, the park has grown and added tennis courts and a baseball field. Today, a berm constructed for the I-395 Fort McHenry Tunnel obscures the view of the water, but the shipping cranes of the marine terminal are visible. Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in Latrobe Park. Through great community effort, neighbors upgraded the playground and planted trees.

Friends of Maryland's Olmsted Parks and Landscapes

1627 E. Fort Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21230

Francis Scott Key in Allegorical Form

The massive bronze sculpture of Orpheus at Fort McHenry represents an early 20th century celebration of the man who wrote the Star-Spangled Banner.

One of the most striking monuments related to the Battle of Baltimore is the nearly forty-foot tall statue of the Greek god Orpheus greeting visitors to Fort McHenry since 1922. Dedicated to Francis Scott Key as well as the Old Defenders, the sculpture takes a more allegorical approach than monuments to others involved in the Battle of Baltimore.

The U.S. Congress appropriated $75,000 for a sculpture at this site in 1914 to mark the centennial of the Star-Spangled Banner-though the song did not become the national anthem until 1931. The Fine Arts Commission hosted a national contest to select the design, with Charles Niehaus' twenty-four-foot depiction of the Greek god of music and poetry selected as the most fitting memorial to Key. The bronze statue of a nude Orpheus playing the lyre stands atop a white marble base fifteen feet high. The low relief frieze on the base include a likeness of Key as well as other figures from mythology.

World War I delayed the project for a eight years. President Warren G. Harding dedicated the monument on Flag Day in 1922 with a live broadcast from WEAR—the first time a president had been heard on the radio. Congress paid Niehaus $33,121 (above the original appropriation) for Orpheus with the Awkward Foot.

Fort McHenry continued to serve as a military installation into the twentieth century. The Fort was briefly used as a city park from 1914 to 1917, when it returned to federal service as General Hospital No. 2 around World War I. When President Harding visited the Fort to dedicate the monument, the buildings had grown increasingly dilapidated. The Baltimore News American described the contrast between the empty fort and the new statue in August 1924:

"Deserted barracks and shacks gradually sink into ruin and weeds flourish where a great American victory of arms was won in the War of 1812. A movement is gaining headway to restore the ancient fort and transform it into a Federal park, worthy of its traditions and sightly to the tourists who come from distant places to visit the spot where a brilliant chapter of American history was written."

The movement to restore the fort, with vocal support from locals in Baltimore, successfully reinvigorated the site. President Calvin Coolidge signed legislation in 1925 preserving Fort McHenry as a national park under the War Department--the first national park related to the War of 1812. Baltimoreans and visitors could stroll the grounds, walk along the water, and access this historic site freely once again. The National Park Service assumed stewardship in 1933.

Six years later, the fort became the only NPS site with the dual designation of National Monument and Historic Shrine. Park service officials sought to distinguish historic sites of military importance with expansive natural landscapes in the west by using the categories of "National Monument" and "National Park." Outspoken locals pushed for the inclusion of "Historic Shrine" as it described the fort as a place of inspiration (for Key). James Hancock, President of the Society of the War of 1812, explained his position in a 1938 letter to Congressman Stephen Gambrill. The Fort, he argued, was "a distinctly historical place where people can go to review and renew those patriotic impulses that had much to do in making the national character."

The defense of Baltimore took place both on land, at North Point, as well as by sea at Fort McHenry. However, interest in the Star-Spangled Banner story in the twentieth century—embodied by Orpheus—came at the expense of North Point. Decades of federal resources have focused public attention to the Battle of Baltimore on Fort McHenry.

2400 E. Fort Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21230

The grounds of Fort McHenry are open 9:00 am to 6:00 pm during the summer (Memorial Day to Labor Day) and 9:00 am to 5:00 pm the rest of the year.

Christian Mission Turned Immigration Museum

Baltimore’s Locust Point was a rapidly growing neighborhood between the Civil War and 1920. One major factor in the neighborhood’s growth was an immigration pier and depot built in 1867 by the B&O Railroad and the North German Lloyd Shipping Company. Over 1.2 million immigrants landed at the pier between 1868 and 1914, making Baltimore the third largest port of entry in the U.S. at the time (after New York and Boston). B&O extended their railroad tracks up to the pier for the many travellers who purchased a combination ship and rail passage. Most of the earliest immigrants came from Germany but, by the 1890s, a larger number of people came from the Russian and Austrian Empires.

Seeing the ever growing number of immigrants, the local German United Evangelical Christ Church decided in 1904 to build a mission house, known as Immigrant House. The mission offered immigrants room and board, clothing, help in finding work, English lessons, and religious ministry. Sailors from the North German Lloyd ships could also stay there when their ships were in port. By 1916, the pastor reported that 3,710 people had stayed at the mission since it opened 12 years earlier.

While “The Great Wave of Immigration” from Europe ended in Baltimore with the outbreak of the first World War, Immigrant House remained a boarding home for sailors until the 1930s and truck drivers until the 1950s. Since then, the building has been used for church offices, storage, daycare, and Sunday school. The original boarding rooms on the second and third floors remained unoccupied and unchanged, though in deteriorating condition. Baltimore City designated both the church and Immigrant House as local landmarks in 2006.

The Baltimore Immigration Memorial, Inc. (BIM), formerly the Baltimore Immigration Project, was established to preserve and publicize the history of the 1.2 million immigrants who came here. In 2006, this group led the effort to design and install a sculpture garden, Liberty Garden, at the end of Hull Street on the grounds of what is now the property of Under Armour. The immigrants had disembarked at Piers 8 and 9, which were once located nearby.

BIM and the Locust Point Community UCC have since worked together for the creation of the Baltimore Immigration Museum on the ground floor of Immigrant House on Beason Street, not far from the Liberty Garden. The museum’s initial exhibit tells the story of global immigration in the nineteenth century, with an emphasis on the U.S. and Baltimore between 1830 and 1914. The stories of Baltimore’s major immigrant groups are told, as well as the story of anti-immigrant movements of the past.

Future projects at the Baltimore Immigration Museum will focus on migration and immigration since 1914, including the history of the migration of African Americans to Baltimore from 1914 to 1970, as well as the “new” immigrants, both Latino and Asian, who have arrived in Baltimore since the liberalization of U.S. immigration laws in 1965.

1308 Beason Street, Baltimore, MD 21230

Few places demonstrate the radical transformation of the Baltimore waterfront from the early nineteenth century through the present as vividly as the site of the Battery Babock, a short distance south of where Fort Look-Out once stood in Riverside Park. The area of the battery is marked by a small memorial—a 6-pounder cannon mounted on a granite base erected during the centennial celebrations in 1914. The canon sits between the Gould Street Generating Station built in 1907 and the elevated roadway of I-95, cutting the area off from the Pataspco which served as the route of the British attack nearly 200 years ago.

In May 1813, Maj. General Samuel Smith, who commanded the defenses of Baltimore and went on to serve as a U.S. Senator and Baltimore Mayor, declared it “absolutely necessary to erect a small Battery” along the edge of the Patapsco Ferry Branch. The United States government, however, proved unwilling to pay for the new installation. The City of Baltimore then moved to pay for Captain Samuel Babcock of the U.S. Engineers to design the battery and direct twenty or thirty men in digging the foundation.

Battery Babcock, also known as the Six Gun Battery or the Sailor’s Battery, was made of sod and laid out in an arc facing towards the water. Construction was complete by summer 1813 and a company of U.S. Sea Fencibles under Capt. William H. Addison garrisoned at the site. By the fall 1814, the battery was manned by seventy-five sailors from the U.S. Chesapeake Flotilla, a collection of barges and gunboats organized by privateer Captain Joshua Barney who had been forced to scuttle their fleet just a few weeks before. Sailing Master John Adams Webster (1786-1877), who commanded the battery at the time and subsequently left an account in 1853, opens a window onto the night when Battery Babcock, together with Forts Covington and Fort McHenry, repulsed a British barge offensive on Baltimore:

“…Day and night we were on the alert, until hope was nearly extinct, when on the night of the 13th, about eleven o’clock, the bomb vessels appeared to renew their fire with redoubled energy. It was raining quite fast, and cold for the season. The rapid discharge of the bombs from the enemy’s shipping excited great vigilance among my officers and men. I had the cannon double shotted with 18-pound balls and grape shot and took a blanket and laid on the breastworks, as I was much exhausted. About midnight I could hear a splashing in the water. The attention of the others was aroused and we were convinced it was the noise of the muffled oars of the British barges. Very soon afterwards we could discern small gleaming lights in different places. I felt sure then that it was the barges, which at that time were not more than two hundred yards off…”

Canons along the Patapsco opened fire and caught the British flotilla in a cross-fire, destroying two of the barges. Captain Charles Napier, RN who commanded the British flotilla soon called for a retreat.

Scott S. Sheads,

2105 Gould Street, Baltimore, MD 21230

Fort McHenry's history began in 1776 when the citizens of Baltimore Town feared an attack by British ships. An earthen star fort known as Fort Whetstone was quickly constructed. The fort, like Baltimore, was never attacked during our first conflict with England. In 1793, France declared a war on England that became known as the Napoleonic Wars. In 1794, Congress authorized the construction of a series of coastal forts to protect our maritime frontier. Construction began on Fort McHenry in 1798 and, by 1803, the masonry walls we view today were completed. The fort was named for James McHenry, our second Secretary of War. In 1809, the U.S. Army's first light artillery unit was organized here. On June 18, 1812, the United States declared war on England, in part to "preserve Free Trade & Sailor's Rights." In August 1814, British forces marched on Washington, defeated U.S. forces, and burned the Capitol. Then, on September 13-14, the British attacked Fort McHenry. The failure of the bombardment and sight of the American flag inspired Francis Scott Key to compose "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Watch on this site!

2400 E. Fort Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21230