Hampden Heritage

Workshop Tomorrow!

2009-04-21T17:43:00.000-07:00

Just a quick reminder that the Workshop on Material Culture is tomorrow, April 22nd, at 7 pm at the Roosevelt Recreation Center in Hampden. All of the details are in the flyer from the previous post.
Come out and see some of what was uncovered at the five sites excavated in Hampden and learn about what happens after excavations. Everything depicted on the blog over the last few weeks will be at the workshop so come out and see these artifacts and more!

Material Culture Workshop Wednesday

2009-04-17T14:50:00.001-07:00

Here is a copy of the flyer for the workshop we will be holding this Wednesday at 7 pm at the Roosevelt Recreation Center in Hampden. Stop by to see some of the artifacts you've seen on the blog and others while learning about the complete archaeological process and the Hampden project.

We hope to see you there!

A Different Type of Artifact

2009-04-13T14:58:00.000-07:00

Above is a small plaque that would have been attached to a house that had a mortgage. The plaque was a way for the City Trust and Banking Company to advertise. This is similar to the small plastic signs landscapers and other companies often require homeowners to place in their yard after completing some service for them. The above plaque is just a little more subtle.

Spring Walking Tour of Hampden

2009-04-06T18:15:00.000-07:00

Hi Folks,

Its Maryland Archaeology Month! I'll be leading another history and archaeology tour of Hampden beginning at 10:00 AM on Saturday April 11. Details below:

Tour: Archaeology Walking Tour of Hampden

Description: A 1-2 hour walking tour of Hampden, Baltimore's "Mill Village in an Urban Setting." Participants will tour the neighborhood's archaeological and historic sites, learning about the historical development of the industrial landscape, as well as HCAP's efforts to engage the community through archaeology. The tour will conclude in Hampden's 36th Street shopping district, where participants will be able to enjoy the neighborhood's eclectic assortment of retail establishments and restaurants. Participants should be able to negotiate moderately steep hills and moderately difficult on- or off- pavement terrain. Comfortable walking shoes a must.

Sponsor: The University of Maryland's Center for Heritage Resource Studies, and the Hampden Community Archaeology Project

Location: Tour begins at Roosevelt Recreation Center at 1121 W. 36th Street.

Time: 10:00 AM

Fee: Free

Contact: David Gadsby. More information can be found at: www.hampdenheritage.blogspot.com or at the Center for Heritage Resource Studies Website

Name that Artifact

2009-04-05T13:46:00.000-07:00

One of the more interesting items uncovered on Falls Road is a mystery item. I've done some internet searches, but I haven't found anything that matches what we have so I'm hoping someone out there knows what this is. If you do, please leave a comment!

The first picture is to provide the scale so you can see how small the face is in reality. The second provides a better shot of the face. It's a piece of darkly glazed stoneware and the poor guy is missing large chunks of his face. Hopefully someone recognizes him anyway.

Toys

2009-04-03T14:26:00.000-07:00

Quite a few toys were found at the various sites in Hampden. These range from more recent army men to clay marbles. Below are some interesting porcelain pieces with which some little girl in Hampden once played. Be sure to note their size as both items are quite small.

This is the head of a Frozen Charlotte doll. These dolls were small, solid items with no movable limbs. If you go to the following site and scroll down just a little, you can see a complete doll with some information about the history of the doll.
http://marketstreet.stanford.edu/2007/03/bones_seeds_and_shell_studying.html

Above is half of a toy porcelain saucer. This could have been part of a toy tea set.

Post-Excavation Artifacts

2009-03-31T18:28:00.001-07:00

Hello,

My name is Abbie and I am a graduate student at the University of Maryland. I have been interning with the Hampden project for approximately the last year. I and some undergraduates here at the University of Maryland have been working on washing, bagging, cataloging, and labeling the artifacts uncovered at the five sites in Hampden. This work has to be done after the excavation in order to prepare the collection for storage. As evidenced by the list of tasks that need to be done, the bulk of archaeological work actually takes place in the lab after the excavation.

As we wrap up this portion of the project, I wanted to share some of the artifacts with you. I will be posting various pictures over the next few weeks to lead up to a community workshop to be held April 22nd at the Roosevelt Rec Center in Hampden. The workshop will be at 7 pm and will allow you to see a sample of the artifacts from the various sites in person.

In working with the project, I have seen pretty much every artifact, which includes everything from bricks and coal to plastic army men and buttons. I have enjoyed seeing it all, but I am assisting with an analysis of the ceramics specifically. Due to this, I am going to start out with pictures of some of my favorite ceramic sherds from the primary Falls Road site.

This picture shows some lovely hand-painted whiteware sherds. If you look closely, you can see that these two portions of a tea cup are actually multiple sherds that have been mended.

In contrast to the decorated whiteware tea cup above is this plainer ironstone cup, which was most likely a local piece as there appears to be a matching plate that has a Baltimore stamp on the base.

Please check back between now and April 22nd as I share more images. I will also be posting a few images of items you might be able to help us identify. If you have information about any of the items pictured, please let us know in the comments section. Thank you.

Black History Event at the B&O Museum--February 14

2009-02-09T12:55:00.000-08:00

For those who may not have seen this article on the Sun's website:

www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-md.railroad02feb02,0,1840831.story

The B&O Museum currently has an exhibition on African-American railroad history, particularly the Pullman porters. On February 14, a former Pullman porter will give a presentation describing his life on the rails; if you wear red that day, you'll get a $1 discount off of the admission price.

Bob's Dissertation--Chapter 1, Part 6 (The End!)

2009-01-31T13:10:00.000-08:00

Hi folks,

Here at last is the final installment of the introduction chapter to my dissertation. (I left a couple of paragraphs of meaningless theory off the end, because no one but other academic archaeologists would be interested.) Enjoy, and as always, comments are more than welcome.
__________________________________________
The Idea of Community in Hampden-Woodberry

Despite the ways in which local history has been tied up with larger currents of city development and even global capitalism, one of the key elements of the myth-model that has shaped local identity in Hampden-Woodberry is the opposition between the community itself and the outside world, particularly "others" considered to pose dangers to the values of the community. Most often this insularity has taken the form of racism and a desire to keep the dangerous city at bay: recall the alleged agreement between mill owners and operatives in the 1870s to keep African-Americans and immigrants, particularly Jews, out of the community. More recently, the racial turmoil of the 1980s caused local residents to reflect explicitly on their fears. Following the 1988 incident in which a black family was chased out of their rented rowhouse, one resident told an African-American reporter from the Baltimore Sun that, while he had "nothing against black people," he nevertheless believed, "You bring in one black family and you spoil the whole pot of soup . . .You'll have cocaine and heroin and everything" (Martin C. Evans 1988). More recently, many middle-class newcomers have claimed that what attracted them to Hampden-Woodberry in the first place was a feeling of community, similar to what they imagine a small town would feel like, that is missing in the rest of the city (see chapter 7).

Community identity has thus been defined almost entirely in opposition to the larger city. Perhaps the only traditional symbolic tie with the city that Hampden-Woodberry residents have enjoyed is the annual Mayor's Christmas Parade through the neighborhood. People outside of the community have been all too happy to agree that Hampden-Woodberry does not quite fit with the rest of the city, as well. Throughout the 20th century, numerous newspaper articles repeated the trope of Hampden-Woodberry's uniqueness and isolation (Anonymous 1923; Beirne 1988; Brown 1982; Kelly 1976; McCardell 1940; Porter 1951; Smith 1987; Sussman 1978; Whitehead 1987; Yardley 1947), while city histories and coffee table books have frequently had little or nothing to say about the neighborhood (i.e. Middleton Evans 1988; Geary 2001; Greene 1980; Hall 1912; Hirschfeld 1941; Olson 1997; Rodricks and Miller 1997; Sandler 2002).

But, indeed, this is the area where the myth-model is perhaps most misleading, and not just because of the myriad ways in which Hampden-Woodberry's historical development has been tied up with the city's. Additionally, and more importantly, the myth-model constructs a Hampden-Woodberry largely free of internal conflict, due at least in part to the homogenous Anglo-Saxon, Protestant population. I argue instead, however, that Hampden-Woodberry's past development and present condition can only be understood when we realize that the construction of local identity has simultaneously been shaped by a series of struggles over value within the community as well as its relations with the larger world.

In defining "value," I follow ethnologist David Graeber, who has identified three different scholarly definitions of value. The first working definition concerns "values": what is considered to be good and proper and desirable in life is valuable. The second meaning of value is economistic: value is determined by how much people want something and how much they would be willing to give up to acquire it (or conversely, how much effort they would be willing to expend in order to keep it). Finally, value can be based on a structure of meaningful difference: conceptual distinctions imply a hierarchy of meanings, which then have value in relation to other meanings. While value can be materialized differently in each of these cases, the important point, according to Graeber, is that each of these kinds of value is a refraction of the same phenomenon, namely, the struggle not just over the acquisition and disposition of value, but the struggle to define what value is (Graeber 2001:1-22, 86-89).

As I will attempt to demonstrate in this dissertation, community identity in Hampden-Woodberry has undergone a number of transformations and modifications that have been the result of various competing groups' attempts to define and control all three kinds of value. Economic power and personal freedom (economistic value), the boundaries of local citizenship (a variable structure of meaningful difference based on the notion of "insiders" versus "outsiders"), and the rights, duties and privileges attendant upon membership in the community (communal values) have all been contested multiple times over the past century and a half in Hampden-Woodberry. What ties all these struggles together is that in each case, "community" has been the ultimate value. The specific nature of that value, however, has been constantly negotiated and contested by various individuals and groups within the neighborhood.

Bob's dissertation, Chapter 1, Part 5

2008-12-17T13:50:00.000-08:00

Just in time to keep all of our wonderful readers company over the holidays, another installment of my dissertation introduction. I have again skipped a short section summarizing the post-World War II boom and subsequent suburbanization of Baltimore.
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The Baltimore Urban Renewal and Housing Agency (BURHA) was established in 1956 to study the growing problem of blighted neighborhoods and to propose feasible actions for the city to take in response (Olson 1997:375). With its declining industrial employment base and aging housing stock, Hampden-Woodberry was the subject of one such study in 1963 (BURHA 1963). The Jones Falls Expressway had been built along the path of the river in the early 1960s (Olson 1997:360), providing a convenient route for white-collar suburbanites to commute to work in the city but essentially cutting Hampden and Woodberry off from each other.[1] According to the study's authors, the area west of the expressway (Woodberry) was devoted to light industry, whereas east of the road (Hampden), a mixture of land uses was "symptomatic of changing conditions and ensuing blight" (BURHA 1963:5). They suggested a renewal project in this part of the study area to coincide with the extension of a park strip along the Jones Falls River, a joint project of the mayor's office and the Greater Baltimore Committee, a private organization of land developers and businessmen working on the problem of urban renewal.

The very fact that the BURHA study was conducted in part to further a public-private initiative (the proposed park extension) is indicative of the shifting means by which urban revitalization was to be accomplished, as well as significant changes in the players involved. Political scientist Marion Orr has termed this shift, which occurred across the United States during the 1950s and 1960s, the "changing ecology of civic engagement." According to Orr, prior to World War II the movers and shakers in city-level politics were ward and district-level politicians who could trade personal and legislative favors for community support. Following the war, control of city governments became more centralized in the office of the mayor. By the end of the 1960s, however, city politics had become diffuse once again as mayors increasingly shared decision-making power with state authorities and began building strategic alliances with the private business sector, including large financial institutions, to revitalize the inner city. Such state-city-private sector arrangements still characterize city politics in the U.S. today, with the private sector taking over more and more responsibilities (or, one might say, privileges) including providing non-unionized contract workers for municipal services; operating charter schools; and even making zoning decisions (Orr 2007:12-15).

In the 1970s, Baltimore became one of the nation's best-known examples of this changing ecology of civic engagement through the revitalization of the downtown area. The city government and its private partners decided that a "turn to tourism" would be the best solution to Baltimore's economic problems. The Baltimore City Fair, an unabashed celebration of the power of the free market and unfettered consumption, was inaugurated in 1970. Before long, the waterfront along the Inner Harbor (creatively rechristened Harborplace) became what geographer David Harvey has described as "a permanent commercial circus" complete with "innumerable hotels, shopping malls, and pleasure citadels of all kinds." Far from solving the city's problems with economic decline, poverty and the lack of an adequate service infrastructure for disadvantaged communities, however, this move constituted the "rediscover[y of] the ancient Roman formula of bread and circuses as a means of masking social problems and controlling discontent" (Harvey 1991:236-237). Essentially, Baltimore reinvented its image as a tourist destination while ignoring the social consequences of redevelopment, such as the replacement of high-paying industrial jobs with low-paying service jobs and the wholesale condemnation of entire neighborhoods for the sake of economic "progress" (or their consignment as ghettos).

Harborplace and the surrounding downtown area continues to serve as Baltimore's economic engine by drawing tens of thousands of tourists each year. In other parts of the city, however, the physical and social infrastructure continues to crumble. In a growing number of formerly working-class neighborhoods gentrification has taken root. In these communities, revitalization has been driven primarily by the business community. In Hampden, Café Hon owner Denise Whiting is largely responsible for the transformation of the Avenue into an upscale shopping district, her success attracting many other small business owners to the area. Zoning decisions have been made primarily to benefit local businesses, with very little input from residents. The success of the Avenue, however, has drawn a sizable number of middle-class home buyers to the community. The result has been rapid development of open space for housing and drastic increases in property values and tax assessment rates, often pushing long-time working-class residents out of their homes (Gadsby and Chidester 2005:7). Similar processes of gentrification are taking place all over Baltimore in communities like Canton (in east Baltimore) and Locust Point (south of the Harbor).

[1] This separation continues today; many younger Hampden residents are unaware of the two neighborhoods' intertwined history.

December Labor History Events in Baltimore

2008-11-26T05:31:00.000-08:00

Hi folks,

To give all our readers a break from my dissertation, I thought I'd let everyone know about a couple of labor history events that are going on in Baltimore in December (courtesy of Bill Barry, Director of Labor Studies at CCBC):

Monday, December 8--6:15 pm--the Baltimore holiday party at The Baltimore Museum of Industry, featuring a discussion of the 1877 railroad strike, with a showing of the documentary Army of Starvation about the strike that took place at Camden Yards.

Saturday, December 13--10 am--a tour of the Irish railroad workers shrine, and a description of immigrant workers and the B & O railroad in the 1870’s, hosted by Tom Ward, followed by lunch at Hollins Market. Meet in front of the B & O Museum.

Both events are free and open to the public. You can contact Bill Barry at (443) 840-3563 for more info.

Bob's Dissertation, Chapter 1 Part 4

2008-11-05T08:41:00.000-08:00

**Note: I have left out a section of this chapter that comes between the end of my last post and the beginning of this one. The omitted section includes a brief outline of Hampden-Woodberry's 19th century history that would be familiar to anyone who has read Bill Harvey's excellent book, The People Is Grass, as well as some basic information on Hampden's ethnic/racial composition during this period.**

As with many northern and midwestern industrial cities, World War II pulled Baltimore out of the doldrums of the Great Depression. During and after the war, the federal government encouraged the consolidation of Baltimore industry into the shipbuilding, steel and airplane manufacturing industries. Large corporations such as Westinghouse, Bethlehem Steel, and the Martin Company retooled their physical plants for a peacetime war economy. By 1972, for instance, the aerospace industry in Maryland was worth $1 billion a year. The port of Baltimore continued to be a vital cog in international trade, connecting to new frontiers of global capital. At the same time, local corporations were swallowed up into ever larger global firms, and the federal government began directing military and transportation investments to other parts of the country. Geographer Sherry Olson has described Baltimore's situation thus: "Baltimore capital was being invested on the frontiers, and Baltimoreans received dividends, but the headquarters for channeling and managing these investments were not found in Baltimore. . . . Thus, Baltimore was neither frontier nor center, and its growth was hemmed in globally" (Olson 1997:350-355; quote on pg. 352).

The gleaming façade of industrial prosperity had already begun to crack, however, in the 1920s, when the textile industry began its slow withdrawal from the city. Following an enormously bitter and costly strike at the Mt. Vernon-Woodberry Mills in Hampden-Woodberry in 1923, which broke the local United Textile Workers of America union, the company began closing down its Baltimore operations in 1925 in favor of its southern plants in Alabama and South Carolina, which provided cheaper (i.e. non-unionized) labor (Bill Harvey 1988:34-35). The Hooper Sons' Manufacturing Company, successor to Wm. E. Hooper & Sons Co., attempted to revive its business by developing new cotton duck products, particularly "Fire Chief," a fire- and mildew-resistant form of cotton duck that the company patented in 1936 (Anonymous 1950:20-21). Nevertheless, and despite a brief renaissance during World War II (again due to wartime demands on industry), the local mills had mostly gone out of business by the mid-1950s. The Hooper mills shut their doors in 1961 and the last Mt. Vernon Mills operation in Hampden-Woodberry closed its doors in 1972, putting a mere 300 remaining employees out of work (Bill Harvey 1988:34-35).

At the same time as the metropolitan economy was being consolidated in particular industries, then, the industrial base in Hampden-Woodberry was diversifying in response to the closing of the mills. The Noxzema Chemical Company opened a plant on the southern edge of Hampden in 1926 (Chalkley 2006:45-58), as did Stieff Company, Silversmiths (Anonymous 1924). Also in the mid-1920s, the Woodberry Mill was bought by the Schenuit company and converted to a tire factory (Anonymous 1925a, 1926); the Park Mill became home to Bes-Cone, maker of ice cream cones (Anonymous 1925b, 1926); and yet another one of the old textile mills was converted to the manufacture of paper products (Anonymous 1925, 1927). The Park Mill later became home to the Commercial Envelope Corporation (Anonymous 1972). The Poole & Hunt Foundry was bought by the Balmar Corporation around mid-century, and it continued to produce railroad cars and missile components for several decades. By the 1970s the Clipper Mill had become the Sekine Brush Company. Meadow Mill, whose construction had signaled the beginning of Hampden-Woodberry's industrial prosperity in the early 1870s, was for a time inhabited by the Londontowne Corporation, manufacturer of the upscale London Fog brand of raincoats. Londontowne closed the factory in 1989. The old Druid Mill became home to Life Like Products, which still produces model train parts and Styrofoam coolers there (Chalkley 2006:45-58, 74-76, 117). Right next door, Pepsi installed a bottling and distribution plant. Many Hampden-Woodberry residents, however, had to find local service sector jobs or industrial jobs in other parts of the city, such as Sparrows Point.

Bob's Dissertation, Chapter 1 Part 3

2008-10-13T12:58:00.000-07:00

From Rural Mill Village to Urban Community: Hampden-Woodberry in Baltimore

While numerous other industries appeared in Maryland during the 19^th century, textiles soon became the state's most important product as the flour milling industry declined. Growing out of the colonial mode of household production, Baltimore's first cotton mills opened late in the first decade of the 19^th century; by 1810 there were 11 cotton or woolen mills listed in the state manufacturing census. As with the flour trade, the Baltimore City region was uniquely situated for a profitable textile industry, with the Jones Falls, the Gwynns Falls, and the Patapsco rivers all providing waterpower, and the Gunpowder Falls not far away. With the introduction of steam power in the 1810s, textile operations became even more widespread despite the national economic hardships of the decade. By the mid-1820s, the growth of the textile industry had made Maryland the largest manufacturing state in the South. About the same time, many of the cotton mills began specializing in the production of cotton duck, or sailcloth, to serve the local market created by the clipper ships that clogged Baltimore's harbor due to its status as a premier port of trade. In the 1850 Census of Manufactures, Maryland was ranked eighth among the 35 states in cotton manufacturing output (valued at $2 million), and fourth in the average number of employees per company (Clendenning 1992; Griffin 1966).

During the middle decades of the 19^th century Baltimore began to undergo dramatic expansion. Large-scale manufacturing activities began to emerge, and the city's spatial organization and social geography were altered accordingly. Whereas previously, Baltimore's spatial organization had been typical of a North American mercantile city, the growth of productive industries resulted in the increasing clustering of similar industries, commercial activities, and social groups (divided along class and ethnic lines) into discernible districts. Most of the industries that flourished were tied to the city's commercial economy, such as textile mills, iron goods, agricultural processing (flour before mid-century, canned oysters and vegetables later in the 1800s), brickyards, breweries, and tanneries, among others. By 1860, the single most important industry in Baltimore (both in terms of output and employment) was the production of ready-made clothing, which employed about one third of the city's industrial workforce. The needle trade operations were organized in a number of ways, including large-scale factories and the putting-out, or contracting, system, which resulted in the well-known phenomenon of sweatshops. Employing a cheap labor force of unskilled immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe beginning in the 1870s, Baltimore's men's clothing industry was ranked fourth in the United States by 1900 (Muller and Groves 1976, 1979).

Throughout the rest of the 19^th century and up through the 1950s, Baltimore experienced periodic booms during which the city's economy, population, and geographical area grew at a fast pace. Most of this development occurred in concentric rings around the core business district, just north and west of the harbor. Previous scholars have attributed this growth largely to periods of high capital investment following the introduction of new production and transportation technologies. Comparing the growth of Baltimore to the growth of a biological organism, geographer Sherry Olson noted, "In each generation a boost in the city's exchange with the outside world was matched by changes in its metabolism, and followed by changes in its morphology" (Olson 1979:561). The most important changes in physical morphology included annexations (two particularly important annexations occurred in 1888 and 1918; see Arnold 1978), the construction of more railroads, and the growth of industrial villages and company towns in surrounding Baltimore County in response to the increasing importance of extractive and productive industries there (Chidester 2004). European immigration was the largest factor in the changing social morphology of both the city and the county. Furthermore, during each investment boom and the subsequent period of "lean" years, as Olson demonstrated, the "redistributive impact of growth" resulted in the regeneration of a basic structure of social inequality, as previous immigrants to the city climbed the social ladder, only to be replaced by even more poor and desperate newcomers (Olson 1979:567-568).

Bob's dissertation, Chapter 1 Part 2

2008-10-01T05:19:00.000-07:00

2007

It was a typical hot and muggy June day for Baltimore, but the "Avenue" was packed with thousands of tourists who had come to witness an event that had come to symbolize Baltimore's working-class heritage: HonFest. George and Thelma didn't use to mind HonFest so much when it was just one day on a Saturday, even if the "Best Hon" competition was a bit offensive to their friends and neighbors. Now that it had been expanded to two days, however, they were irritated--not so much because of the street festival itself, but rather because of the lack of respect that the event organizers had shown for the local community. Denise Whiting, owner of the Café Hon and the brains (and money) behind HonFest, had promised that the festivities would not interfere with church services on Sunday morning. Yet here George and Thelma were, sitting in the sanctuary unable to hear the minister's sermon clearly because of the festival music blaring outside.

Thelma's mind began to wander. She thought back to her youth, when Hampden was a different place. There had always been community conflicts, she knew, but when she was younger it seemed that at least everyone respected everyone else as part of the same community. Now, though, things were different. Ever since younger families and single professionals had begun moving into the neighborhood, it seemed that the newcomers had no respect for the older community. The Avenue had once been the place where everyone gathered to hang out, to shop, to see and be seen. Now, however, the Avenue was increasingly becoming the province of the rich yuppies, people who had the time and the money to shop at stores with names like "Atomic Pop" and "Mud and Metal." For Thelma and George, there just wasn't anything left on the Avenue worth doing or seeing.

The community history outlined in the preceding sketches belongs to Hampden-Woodberry, a traditionally white, working-class community in central Baltimore, Maryland. The trajectory that I describe—from mill village to deindustrializing community to economically devastated neighborhood to revitalized, gentrified community—closely matches the dominant narrative reproduced by a number of local historians, an underlying set of ideas about local history and experience that, until the mid-1990s, profoundly shaped the contours and boundaries of community identity in Hampden-Woodberry. Psychological anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere has labeled such narrative structures "myth-models," a term that I will borrow here (Obeyesekere 1991:10). In fact, there are several variations of the Hampden-Woodberry myth-model, but they all share the same broad outlines. Indeed, this myth-model (or portions of it) is still utilized by some local residents for culturally strategic purposes. The recent gentrification and revitalization of Hampden in particular has lead to a tendentious situation in which the long-time working-class residents of the neighborhood have withdrawn almost entirely from the public sphere. Nevertheless, local identity and the values of community are still very much fought over by the two communities that now inhabit the neighborhood. This dissertation is an exploration of the various manifestations of this struggle from the 1870s to the present.

Bob's dissertation--Chapter 1, Part 1

2008-09-19T06:24:00.001-07:00

Hi folks,

In an effort to get things started back up again on the blog, over the next few months I'll be posting excerpts from my actual dissertation (as opposed to just the proposal, which I posted back in the spring). As always, any and all comments (even, or perhaps especially, if you want to tell me that I'm dead wrong about Hampden's history) are welcome. Without further ado, here's part of my introduction.
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1874[1]

It was only 7 o'clock in the morning, but Jane had been up since 4 preparing for her family's day. After a small breakfast, the mill bells rang, and Jane, her husband and three children, ranging in age from ten to five, rushed out of the house so that they would not be late for work at the newly opened Meadow Mill in the Baltimore County hamlet known as Woodberry. While the walk from their small house, which they rented from Meadow Mill's owners, was only a quarter of a mile, Jane dreaded the trip as she knew that she would be wheezing by the time she arrived at work. At the ripe old age of 30, Jane had been working in one or the other of the local mills for 15 years, and she was already experiencing the respiratory problems that would come in time to be known as brown lung.

Thanks to a recently passed bill in the Maryland legislature, the children would only have to stay at work for ten hours. Jane was proud of the fact that she, her husband Sean and many of their neighbors had participated in marches and demonstrations that had helped to convince the lawmakers in Annapolis to pass the bill. Their oldest child, a son named Ian, was a spinner like his mother. Mary, 7, was just beginning the process of learning how to be a spinner too; Michael, the youngest at age 5, worked as a doffer, replacing the bobbins of thread that had been filled by the spinners with empty ones. This was only an intermittent activity, however, so when he wasn't replacing bobbins Michael swept up the cotton lint that multiplied endlessly on the factory floor. Like most of the women who worked in the mills, Jane could look forward to at least twelve hours of work. Sean, on the other hand, was a carpenter for the mill. While this work thankfully took him outside of the hot, dusty confines of the mill buildings, he frequently had to put in 14- or 16-hour workdays.

After such long days on top of six-day work weeks, most mill workers did not have much time for leisure activities, but then again, there were not that many leisure-time options in Hampden-Woodberry anyway. The mill owners had decreed that no taverns would be allowed within one mile of the mills. (Naturally, an enterprising soul had since opened a tavern exactly one mile north of the mills on the Falls Turnpike Road, just above Cold Spring Lane. Sean and many of the neighborhood men were known to patronize the establishment on occasion.) Mill workers played various sports, particularly the new game of base-ball. Ian played the game whenever he could, and he dreamed of growing up to play for a traveling team like the ones that occasionally visited his village. More widely enjoyed were the periodic tent revivals put on by traveling preachers in wooded spots and fields surrounding Hampden-Woodberry. It was not uncommon for a revival to draw several thousand residents from the area and to last upwards of two or even three weeks. Jane and the other neighborhood women particularly enjoyed these events, as it was one of their only opportunities to escape from the weariness of mill work and housekeeping, if only for a short time.

1925

It was the first heavy snow of the year. The children of Bay Street in Stone Hill rushed out of their homes, sleds in tow, and began the dangerous repeat trips down the nearby hill that they enjoyed so much. Their parents watched them with a mixture of joy and sadness. Joy, from the pleasure of watching the pure unsullied happiness of children at play; sadness, because they worried for their children's future. When they had been children, the parents had known that they would work in the mills when they grew up, and that lifetime employment would be virtually guaranteed. Their children's prospects were much less clear.

During the previous decade, things had seemed to be looking up: While the Great War had taken many of Hampden-Woodberry's sons to the fields of France (some never to return), it had also brought much increased business to the local textile mills and the Poole foundry, which managed to secure contracts with the federal government. At the same time, after more than 20 years of no labor activism in the neighborhood, the ascendant American Federation Labor had come to Hampden-Woodberry through the International Association of Machinists and the United Textile Workers of America. Local workers had joined these unions in large numbers and fought for their rights, demanding fewer hours, higher wages and cleaner, safer working conditions. After the war, however, the Red Scare had largely driven the unions away. The Textile Workers reorganized in 1923, but a disastrous strike at the Mt. Vernon Mills ruined the union and resulted in many blackballed strikers leaving the community, unable to find work in Hampden-Woodberry's mills. Mt. Vernon employees were already well aware that the company, owned by a large New York conglomerate, owned other textile plants in the Deep South; their fears had finally been realized this year when the company announced that it was shutting down some of its Baltimore operations and moving them to the southern mills. As the parents of Bay Street watched their children sledding, they fervently hoped that the other local mills would not follow suit.

[1] The vignettes presented here are fictional, and are intended solely as illustrative devices. Any similarity between the characters in these vignettes and actual persons is purely coincidental.

McGrain Lecture, May 22, 7:00 PM at Roosevelt Rec

2008-05-21T08:05:00.001-07:00

The Hampden Community Archaeology Project continues its spring workshop series with a lecture by noted industrial archaeologist John McGrain. Mr. McGrain is the author of the well-known book From Pig Iron to Cotton Duck, as well as other books and numerous articles on the history of Baltimore County. He spent many years as the County Historian for Baltimore County. He will entertain and educate us with a slide-illustrated talk about Hampden-Woodberry's industrial history. Q&A and discussion to follow. Please join us at 7:00 PM may 22, 2008 at the Roosevelt Park Recreation Center, located at 1121 W. 36th St. For questions or for further information, please call Dave Gadsby at 410-227-2578, or email dgadsby@anth.umd.edu.

Bob's Dissertation Proposal, Part II

2008-04-07T20:29:00.000-07:00

Again, any and all comments and criticisms are welcome and indeed, encouraged.
_________________________________________________________

My dissertation will be the result of interdisciplinary research, including archival, oral historical, archaeological, and ethnographic investigations. The research will engage with and attempt to bring together several disparate themes of recent scholarship in both anthropology and history, including the creation and contestation of the boundaries of community; local memory, identity, and heritage; and the materiality of social practices. As such, the dissertation will be an example of “archaeology” in two different senses: both in the traditional meaning of archaeology (the anthropological study of past cultures through the excavation and analysis of material remains) as well as French social theorist Michel Foucault's version of "archaeology" (the systematic examination of the genealogy of some social phenomenon; in this case, the creation and contestation of community identity in a working-class neighborhood).[1] Specifically, the dissertation will address how material practices, both mundane and spectacular, have been vital instruments in the ongoing struggle between the local working class and various groups of “outsiders” over the definition of and values attached to community in Hampden-Woodberry. By “material practices,” I mean to include a broad array of social phenomena, including production and consumption, theatrical performance and the performances of everyday life, and the strategic uses of public and private space. I propose to examine documents, public performances, local landscapes, and the artifacts of everyday life all together as material manifestations of this struggle.

In addition to an introduction, a theoretical chapter, and a conclusion, I plan to include five chapters in the dissertation. Each chapter will address a specific arena in which community identity has been forged and contested (the workplace, the public sphere, the domestic sphere, and the economic sphere), as well as the social categories that have shaped these struggles (class, race, gender, and religion). The chapters will be organized more or less chronologically beginning with the 1870s, with some necessary temporal overlap between topics. Each chapter, however, will explore some aspect of the materiality of insurgent practices used in the struggle over community identity.

. . .

In my dissertation, then, I will explore the various material strategies (the production and consumption of artifacts, spaces, landscapes, and representations) that have been deployed in the creation and contestation of different identities, or subjectivities, in Hampden-Woodberry. These subjectivities include those based on race, class, gender, and religion. The relationships between these different subjectivities (within both individuals and larger groups) have played a central role in the definition of and struggles over local citizenship in Hampden-Woodberry.

[1] See Matthew Johnson, An Archaeology of Capitalism (Cambridge, England: Blackwell Publishers, 1996) for an excellent example of this dual approach to archaeology.

Bob's Dissertation Proposal

2008-04-02T07:18:00.000-07:00

Hi folks,

Over a month after I promised it, here is the first exceprt from my own dissertation proposal. Although Dave and I have been working together on Hampden archaeology for three years, our dissertations are going to be very different, for a variety of reasons (but mostly due to the different Ph.D. programs we're in, as well as the fact that we need to be able to distinguish ourselves as scholars in order to get jobs). I'll skip the historical background section and begin with an excerpt that explains my general approach to interpreting Hampden history. Any comments are more than welcome.
___________________________

I believe that a common thread can be found running throughout each of the major periods of Hampden-Woodberry’s past: the theme of “insiders” versus “outsiders.” Specifically, working-class residents of the neighborhood have expressed, both verbally and through their actions, a consistent will to keep “outsiders” away, or at least to diminish their influence within the community. During the late 19th century the outsiders were ethnic and racial minorities, whereas by World War I the Mt. Vernon-Woodberry Mills Co., owned by a New York-based conglomerate, had taken over that role. After the mills began heading south, the newly independent petit bourgeois initiated a sustained effort to rewrite the community’s history, erasing the working class and nearly erasing the mills from the scene in an attempt to fill the power vacuum left by the mills’ departure. By the 1980s, the local working class community began fighting back, but once again against racial and ethnic outsiders rather than the local middle class. With the onset of gentrification, an outside middle class gained ascendancy but not without protest by working-class community “insiders.”

Furthermore, these localized actions (by both working-class community members and outsiders) represent instances of what anthropologist James Holston has called “insurgent citizenship.” According to Holston, insurgent citizenship consists of both grassroots mobilizations and practices of everyday life that work to subvert dominant agendas and contest the form of substantive citizenship (defined as the array of civil, political and social rights that are available to individuals within a polity or local community in varying degrees). Some individuals try to expand their claims to substantive membership in a given community, while others try to erode these claims. Insurgent citizenship is at “the intersection of these processes of expansion and erosion;” it is an activity in which both elite and subaltern groups engage. Thus, insurgent movements “create new kinds of rights, based on the exigencies of lived experience, outside the normative and institutional definitions of the state and its legal codes.”[1] The history of Hampden-Woodberry, then, can be seen as a history of insurgent citizenship in which the local working-class, which traces a cohesive and homogenous community identity to the late 1800s, has battled with a series of outsiders over the rights, duties, and values associated with local citizenship.

Hampden-Woodberry presents both advantages and obstacles as a case study in American working-class history. The local working community has maintained a closed, homogenous identity for well over 100 years, managing to retain a racially white, ethnically Anglo-Saxon character while most other industrial communities across the nation were continually reshaped by successive wages of immigration and internal migration. In this sense, Hampden-Woodberry is somewhat unique. On the other hand, local workers have been affected by and engaged with many historical developments that had similar impacts in other industrial communities: the shift from paternalistic industrial capitalism to corporate monopoly capitalism; the movement for industrial democracy; deindustrialization; desegregation; and gentrification. By examining the interaction of local struggles with these broader developments while simultaneously understanding the unique aspects of Hampden-Woodberry’s history, I hope to make a significant contribution to the study of localized forms of community identity and belonging in American working-class communities.

[1] James Holston, “Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship,” in James Holston, editor, Cities and Citizenship (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 167-170.

Spring Workshop I: This Thursday

2008-03-09T12:27:00.000-07:00

I'm just posting a reminder here that I'll be talking this Thursday at the Roosevelt Rec center. I plan to take about 30 minutes (or less) to talk about our ongoing archaeological research, followed by Q&A and/ or discussion. Hope you can make it - see info below.

Workshop I:
Hampden Community Archaeology: What We Found and What We’re Finding Out

Presenter: David Gadsby, HCAP co-director
Location: Roosevelt Recreation Center Auditorium
1121 W. 36th Street

Date: Thursday, March 13, 2008, 7:00p.m.

Gadsby will present a brief talk and slide show on the nearly three years of excavations at five Hampden sites. Discussion to follow, light refreshments to be served.

An interesting random tidbit

2008-02-23T08:26:00.001-08:00

Hi folks,

It's been a long time since I've posted anything, so I figured I'd better get back on track. In the next few weeks I will begin to follow Dave's lead by posting portions of my dissertation proposal, followed after that by portions of the first draft of my actual dissertation. In the meantime, however, I thought I'd share an interesting piece of information related to our field site from last season that I came across completely by accident while doing some background reading.

Recall that our site from last year (3833-3839 Falls Rd.) was once part of the large property holdings of developer Martin Kelly, who, upon his death, passed it to his sons Edward and Dennis. At some point thereafter, one or two of the individual lots were sold to Mr. Albert G. Eichelberger, a dry goods merchant, who lived there from the late 1870s into the early 1900s. We know a little bit about Eichelberger from a newspaper article we found describing a boycott of his store by local labor activists who were upset that Eichelberger refused to sell only union-made cigars. So, Eichelberger was clearly no friend of the working class.

Well, while perusing a history of Baltimore published way back in 1912, I came across a single line reference to a Mr. A.G. Eichelberger of Baltimore. In 1896, alcohol prohibition was becoming a huge national issue, and a political party was formed for the purpose of running a candidate for President on a prohibition platform. This party, however, was split between two factions: one that believed in the gold standard for the monetary system, and one that believed in the silver standard for the monetary system. Generally speaking, both of these issues--prohibition and the gold-standard vs. silver-standard debate--broke down along class lines, with the middle class supporting prohibition and the gold standard while the working class supported the opposite. To get back to Mr. Eichelberger, he is named in this history of Baltimore as being Maryland's representative to the national committee for the pro-gold standard faction of the National Prohibition Party--like his refusal to sell only union-made cigars, two public stances in one that were sure to arouse the ire of Hampden's workers.

Here are some references for more information:

Hall, Clayton Colman. 1912. Baltimore: Its History and Its People. 3 vols. Lewis Historical Publishing Company, New York and Chicago. (The reference to Eichelberger is in volume 1, pg. 301.)

For more information about the politics of 1896, including both the National Prohibition party and the gold-standard vs. silver-standard debate, see http://projects.vassar.edu/1896/1896home.html.

Dissertation Proposal, the good parts. Part 2

2008-02-15T04:40:00.001-08:00

Here is the second in an occasional series abridging my dissertation proposal. I feel like I've said this a lot before - one begins to feel like a bit of a broken record - but I think it bears repeating. The point here is not to slam anyone in particular (well maybe 1 person in particular), but to shine some light on the process of gentrification, which has its good and bad points, but seems to me to be inherently unfair to a lot of people. As far as my dissertation proposal goes, this is section in which I build a context for my research and try to demonstrate why I think the project is necessary.
Enjoy! (or get mad. whatever).

Contemporary Hampden

Beginning in the 1980s, area developers began to renovate the old mill buildings as artist studios and offices. The influx of artists, according to Zukin (1995: 23), places a neighborhood squarely on the road to gentrification, and that gentrification has occurred with increasing intensity over the past several years. Housing prices are on the rise as affluent families (often referred to as “yuppies” by longtime residents) move into the area. A merchant’s association, with the aid of a large federal Main Streets grant, has altered the look and character of the city’s main shopping street, installing expensive boutiques, restaurants, and bars, meant to attract visitor consumers from elsewhere. An annual street festival known as “Honfest” purports to be a celebration of working-class women, but can be read alternatively as a minstrel show that lampoons all working class people (Gadsby 2006). A recent issue of National Geographic Traveler (Stables 2005:20), showcasing Hampden as an “up and coming neighborhood” attests to the increasing draw of places like this as tourist destinations. Recently the Hampden Village merchants association has paid to have the neighborhood listed as a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places (City of Baltimore 2005).

Thus, Hampden has begun to transform into a caricature of itself. It has not reached the state of a fully consumption-based ”pleasure citadel” (Harvey 1991a: 237) such as Baltimore’s Inner Harbor (Harvey 1994: 247-248) or New York’s Times Square (Zukin 1995: 133-145). It is instead something between the “genuine article” of a working class neighborhood – working class people still, to an extent which remains largely undetermined, live and shop there – and a complete fake. The direction of development seems to be headed toward the latter however, and as developers and merchants march gentrification forward, a new symbolic economy based around the neighborhood’s working class image has begun to evolve. Events such as “Honfest,” and restaurants and shops on Hampden’s main street lampoon an imaginary blue-collar experience by disseminating inaccurate and cartoon-like images of working class men and women. They capitalize on the “kitsch” of working-class lives and homes and parody the styles of working class people in public performance. In this new Hampden, working class people are abstracted, sketched as cartoons, and relegated to the no-man’s land of Hampden’s working past. They are thus safe and unthreatening, but retain an illusion of authenticity. The commodification of Hampden’s working-class heritage cannot be seen as some kind of passive process. It is detrimental to the public political voice of working people and thus has material and political and economic consequences.

Zukin’s analysis of urban gentrification is based on the symbolic economy, in which agents of gentrification and commerce in American cities rely on “culture” and “style”, including art, heritage and history, to create urban spaces where citizens can consume commodities and businesspeople can conduct their business (Zukin 1995:13). This has meant the transformation of public places such as parks and streets into public-private places. In turn, the democratic processes that formerly governed the management of such places has been co-opted by private interests, and that the voices of developers, businesspeople, and other elites are privileged over those of most citizens. Additionally, elites, under the auspices of the historic preservation movement, have taken control of the histories of those transformed places, and used those histories as tools to further gentrification (Zukin 1995:124).

History and heritage, then, become no small problem for people in Hampden. As Zukin (1995: 124-5) notes, historic designations can raise the cost of living in a neighborhood dramatically. University of Texas anthropologist John Hartigan (2000) has written about the propensity of working class whites to regard history in terms of people and events in the past, while middle class whites tend to regard it as being related to material culture, particularly houses. In the second formulation, houses are of course also imbued with elevated monetary value because of their possession of (any) history. Thus what was once particular history – the history of working class struggle, or alternately of neighborhood unity– is transformed into a generic kind of history that is assumed to exist in old houses. Places become worth something not because they are associated with a particular person or event, but because they have “something about them,” “character” or “style” that speaks to the aesthetic sensibilities of middle class gentrifiers.

Most importantly, history of this kind can be marketed, as in the case of the multi-million dollar Clipper Mill redevelopment in the nearby neighborhood of Woodberry. Here, developers have explicitly used the heritage of a nineteenth century foundry as a selling point for their new luxury condominiums:

In 1853, a modest machine plant was born on Woodberry Road, just north of a nameless branch of the Jones Falls at the foot of Tempest Hill. The new plant, coined Union Machine Shops, housed Poole & Hunt's general offices, an iron foundry, erecting and pattern shops, a melting house and stables. Instantly it became the backbone of the Woodberry/Hamden community, employing thousands of men as it grew to become the country's largest machine manufacturing plants.

Today, Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse, Inc. is redeveloping Clipper Mill and the surrounding area, including the beloved Woodberry Forest. Their aim is to create a new urban corporate campus and upscale residential community (Streuyver Brothers, Eccles and Rouse 2005).

This kind of marketing simultaneously elides the role of working people in the creation of the neighborhood now being gentrified and hijacks their history as a history of place over people. People who live in surrounding neighborhoods – people with a stake in how redevelopment goes, are left out of the process.

The work performed in preparation for this dissertation has been done under the auspices of the Hampden Community Archaeology Project. The goal of our project is to increase awareness of the historical agency of the working class, particularly with regard to its role in the development of the political and social institutions of the neighborhood. The project is self-consciously activist, advocating for democratic participation in real estate development and other private sector incursions into the public sphere.

Gadsby, D. A.
2006 Remembering and Forgetting Baltimore’s Industrial Heritage: Archaeology, History and Memory . In American Anthropological Association, San Jose, CA.

Harvey, D.
1994 A View from Federal Hill. In The Baltimore Book, pp. 227-250. Temple University Press, Philadelphia.

Stables, E.
2005 [Neighborhood Watch] Hampden Baltimore, MD. National Geographic Explorer 22(3):20.

Zukin, S.
1995 The Culture of Cities. Blackwell, Malden Massachusets.

Spring Workshop Series planned for 2008

2008-02-08T11:49:00.000-08:00

The Hampden Community Archaeology Project (HCAP) announces its Spring 2008 series in public history and archaeology. Following hot on the heels of our January oral history workshop comes a series of three workshops designed to educate and foster discussion about Hampden’s rich heritage. The first workshop will focus on the ongoing archaeological project, with a brief lecture and slide show depicting the project’s ongoing activities. The second workshop will consist of a “Historic Hampden” walking tour, to be held in conjunction with Maryland Archaeology Month. The spring series will culminate with a workshop hosted by noted Hampden scholar and industrial archaeologist, Mr. John McGrain. Mr. McGrain will discuss his many years as a researcher of Hampden and Baltimore history. All workshops are free of charge and open to the public.

Workshop I:
Hampden Community Archaeology: What We Found and What We’re Finding Out

Presenter: David Gadsby, HCAP co-director
Location: Roosevelt Recreation Center Auditorium
1121 W. 36th Street

Date: Thursday, March 13, 2008, 7:00p.m.

Gadsby will present a brief talk and slide show on the nearly three years of excavations at five Hampden sites. Discussion to follow, light refreshments to be served

Workshop II:
Walking Tour: Historic and Industrial Hampden

Presenter: David Gadsby
Location: Meet in front of the Roosevelt Rec. Center
1121 W. 36th Street
Date: Saturday, April 19, 2008, 11:00 A.M.

April is Maryland Archaeology Month. Celebrate by taking a one-hour walking tour of Hampden’s historic landscape. Bring comfy walking shoes and be ready to some fairly long distances. Rain or shine, and bring your own refreshment.

Workshop III:
Researching Hampden’s Industrial History
Presenter: John McGrain
Location: Roosevelt Recreation Center Auditorium
1121 W. 36th Street
Date: May 22, 2008, 7:00 PM

John McGrain has spent many years researching the history of Hampden and its industrial past. He will present a brief talk on his research, and then lead discussion.

More to come - stay tuned.

Dissertation Proposal, the good parts. Part 1

2008-02-05T17:12:00.000-08:00

I've decided that, in order to have some stuff to post in the low season, I'm going to post some of the less boring parts of my dissertation proposal, which my committee approved early last December. The whole thing's nearly 70 pages long, and a lot of it is academic drival, so I'm just excerpting the good bits. Here's the history part.

Hampden is a neighborhood of Baltimore City, situated on the slopes and ridge between the Jones Falls (rivers and streams in and around Baltimore are often named “Falls”) and Stony Run approximately three miles north of the city’s Central Business district. It lies along the transition between the coastal plain and piedmont regions known in the mid-Atlantic as the “fall line.” The area lies within the Upland Section of the Piedmont Province, specifically Maryland Archaeological Research Unit 14: Patapsco-Back-Middle Drainages (Hall 1999: xii; Shaffer and Cole 1994: 77). Soils in the area are generally well-drained sandy loams, primarily Legore, Joppa, and other urban land complexes.

Nineteenth-Century Hampden: Class, Paternalism and Industry

Hampden’s early economy depended upon its topography, and particularly the ready supply of hydrologic energy available to run machinery. The “suburban factory village” of Hampden began in the 1820’s as a series of water-driven grist mills in the valley of the Jones Falls about three miles upstream of the booming shipping town of Baltimore. In the early years of the nineteenth century, while Baltimore’s waterborne commerce was booming, farmers interested in bringing their goods to market in Baltimore suffered the perils of poor roads: “miery sloughs, dreadful precipices…impassible streams” and other difficulties (Federal Gazette 1804 cited in Olson 1997).

To aid inland trade, Maryland’s government began the construction of a series of turnpike roads. Included among these was the Falls Turnpike Road, which, after 1809, connected mills along the Jones Falls grist mills to the hub of international trade a few miles to the south (Olson 1997: 47-48). By the 1830’s, the construction of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad not only improved this link, but also fueled real estate speculation throughout the region and spurred construction along the Falls Turnpike (Olson 1997: 71-77). In 1833, Lloyd Norriss and William Tyson advertised the sale of a 238-acre parcel on the Jones Falls. The parcel contained a mansion house, a farmhouse, a tavern, and a brick and stone gristmill capable of producing 120 barrels of wheat per day (Baltimore American 1833). Ten years later that Woodberry Mill was one of 18 in the Baltimore area and one of at least three in the immediate locality. Another, White Hall Cotton Factory, was still water-driven (Baltimore American 1843) . However, by 1850, Gambrill Carroll and Co.,White Hall’s owners, had begun the conversion to steam drive. By this time, there were also 27 dwelling houses for mill workers erected on mill property (Baltimore American 1850). The paternalist system that would flourish in Hampden after 1870 was already putting down roots (Baltimore American 1850).

By 1860, Hampden-Woodberry hosted a large foundry and the area was sufficiently populated to warrant the construction, by mill workers, of a library (Baltimore Sun 1860). In the early 1870’s the village had blossomed into a full-fledged mill town, albeit a rustic one. Simultaneously, an apex of industrial development and a backward suburb lacking even paved streets, Hampden played host to no less than five steam-powered cotton duck, or canvas mills, and supported as many as 8,000 inhabitants (Baltimore Sun 1874; Baltimore Sun 1872). It was in this condition that the Maryland’s cotton mill labor delegates found the town on the night of their meeting:

Saturday night, while everything was activity in Woodberry, the people on their several errands were walking up steep and unpaved streets and groping in the dark, the only light in the place being that coming down from the windows of the cottages. With 8.000 inhabitants, large churches of various denominations, a daily newspaper, public halls, numerous large cotton factories and engine works and stores of all descriptions, Woodberry, situated three miles from the heart of Baltimore City has no gas, little or no supply of water, and the most meager kind of communication with the city, to which of necessity one half of the population have business every day (Baltimore Sun 1874)

That meeting signals the beginning of real labor consciousness in Hampden-Woodberry. Throughout the 1880’s and 1890’s, organized labor gained strength, particularly under the auspices of the Knights of Labor, and won a series of strikes, culminating in a successful strike of 1918. This era, from the 1880’s through 1920, can be viewed as the era in which labor was most successful in Hampden. Despite its victories, however, mill operatives continued to make what seem like impossibly low wages: in 1885, men working in the picking room of Maryland cotton duck mills made real wages of just over $1 per day. Women and children made substantially less (Weeks 1886: 167) and the era of labor activism seems to have ended in Hampden in 1923. After a winning a lengthy strike in that year, mill corporations began the slow process of closing their operations and moving them south. While the twentieth century saw the introduction of some light industry to the region, even that began to dissipate by the 1970’s. During that period, Hampden lost all but a few of its manufacturing jobs and much of its service sector.

A series of transformations in world capitalism, famously described by Harvey (1991) including the gradual transformation of the American economy from one centered on production to one centered on consumption, made their mark on Hampden. The movement of the textile mills to the Southern piedmont has altered the neighborhood’s character over the last several decades. Between the 1950’s and the 1970’s, the mills’ decline forced many of Hampden’s blue-collar residents to take jobs outside of the neighborhood. Others set up businesses in the neighborhood - pharmacies, beauty parlors, grocery stores, and so forth, to provide services for the neighborhood’s residents. This constituted a first phase in the transformation of Hampden into an economy driven by consumption.

References:

1804 . In Federal Gazette triweekly vols, Baltimore.

A Library at Woodberry
1860 . In Baltimore Sun, Baltimore.

[Description of Baltimore Mills]
1843 . In Baltimore American, Baltimore.

Hall, C. L. a. L. M. V.
1999 Yearbook of Archaeology 1999, edited by S. H. A. Maryland Department of Transportation. Office of Planning and Preliminary Engineering, Project Planning Division, Environmental Planning Section.

Labor Meeting at Woodberry: The Ten Hour System in the Factories - Speeches by the workingmen, etc.
1874 . In Baltimore Sun, Baltimore.

Olson, S. H.
1997 Baltimore : the building of an American city. Rev. and expanded bicentennial ed. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Md.

Shaffer, G. D. and E. Cole
1994 Standards and Guidelines for Archaeological Investigations in Maryland, edited by D. o. H. a. C. Development. Maryland Historical Trust Technical Report.

The Rockdale Factory for Sale at Public Auction
1850 .

Tour of Woodberry Mills
1872 . In Baltimore Sun.

Valuable Mill and Farm for Sale
1833 . In Baltimore American, Baltimore.

Weeks, T. C.
1886 First Biennial Report of the Bureau of Industrial Statistics and Information of Maryland, 1884-1885, edited by B. o. I. S. a. Information. Guggenheimer, Weil and Co, Printers.

Community History Workshop on January 24

2008-01-02T11:21:00.000-08:00

PRESS RELEASE—12/29/2007

The Hampden Community Archaeology Project, in conjunction with the Hampden Community Council and the Center for Heritage Resource Studies of the University of Maryland, announces a community history workshop to discuss our oral history project in Hampden. This workshop will consist of a short presentation by Jolene Smith, coordinator of oral history for HCAP, followed by an open discussion of what these kinds of stories mean for the Hampden community. HCAP Co-director, David Gadsby will also be available to discuss June and July excavations on Falls Road and Hampden’s heritage.

The workshop will be held at the Roosevelt Recreation Center, 1221 W. 36th Street in Baltimore, from 7:00 to 8:30 pm on Thursday, January 24. Light refreshments will be provided. Join us if you’ve got stories to tell, or are just interested in the history of the neighborhood. All are welcome.

After the successful excavation of six sites over the past three summers, we have got a lot of amazing information to share. You can see what we’ve done and get regular updates on our progress from our website, located at http://www.heritage.umd.edu/CHRSWeb/AssociatedProjects/Hampden.htm, and our weblog, at http://hampdenheritage.blogspot.com.

The Hampden Community Archaeology Project is sponsored by the Hampden Community Council and the Center for Heritage Resource Studies at the University of Maryland-College Park. Additional funding for 2007 has been provided by the Sociological Initiatives Foundation, the firm of Struever Brothers, Eccles and Rouse, and the Rackham Graduate School of the University of Michigan.

Labor Day Parade in Dundalk

2007-08-20T10:05:00.000-07:00

Here's an announcement that I received from Bill Barry, Director of Labor Studies at Community College of Baltimore County (and one of the featured speakers at our public history workshop series back in 2004):

Don’t forget the biggest and best Labor Day Parade in Maryland—Monday, September 3, 2007—meet at CCBC Dundalk at 9 a.m. and we’ll walk through Dundalk to Heritage Park, where we can share our experiences in building the union movement.

Once again, we will feature the Labor Day band from Musicians Local 40-543, led by Ed Goldstein and Jack Hook.

Bring your friends, your union banners and your belief in solidarity.

For more pictures of last year’s parade, courtesy of Doug Schmenner, check out
http://student.ccbcmd.edu/~wbarry/revlaborsday/index.htm

Official end of the field season

2007-08-05T11:39:00.001-07:00

Well, the official end of the 2007 field season was on Friday. Most of our kids stuck it out until the end, and we celebrated with a barbecue. We have some more pictures that we'll be posting soon.

Also, Jolene and the kids have conducted three oral history interviews; she'll be sharing some of the interesting things that they learned as well.

Dave and I will be out finishing up some things Monday and Tuesday this week, so if you're walking by and see us there, be sure to stop and say hi.

Public Dig Day this Weekend!

2007-07-24T14:13:00.000-07:00

Wow, it's hard to believe that we're already in the middle of the fourth week of our field season! Our second Public Dig Day of the summer will be held this Saturday, July 28th, from 10 am-2 pm at our site at 3835-3839 Falls Rd. (between McCabe's and Sirkis Hardware). As usual, we'll be offering site tours, a close-up look at some of the more interesting artifacts that we've found so far this summer, and even the opportunity for visitors to do a little screening for artifacts themselves.

Our first Dig Day on the 14th was a huge success, and we want to make this one even better. So be sure to bring all your friends and neighbors!

Some quick photos of ongoing fieldwork

2007-07-19T17:45:00.000-07:00

Fieldwork this season is proceeding apace. We have opened up two major areas for investigation. The first is within the footprint of 19th-century household. The second, on the southern portion of the site, is in a midden or trash pit area with a dense concentration of artifacts from the late 19th and early twentieth-century. Beneath that lays a thick, homogeneous deposit full of 19th century artifacts. This deposit may represent a privy for the two known houses on the site, or may in fact constitute evidence of a third major structure. Continued excavation will help to answer this question.

Project Co-Director Bob Chidester examines a hand-blown bottle recovered from the site while young Hampden residents Jonathan Ingram and Tyrek Greene begin work on a new excavation unit.

Tarrell Stokes of the Independence Local 1 School in Hampden listens to some tunes while he screens for artifacts.

Here, a makers mark on the base of an Ironstone vessel reads, "warranted Balt.", indicating the pot's local origins.

A transfer-printed tea vessel located beneath what was once the floor of the house in Area 1 speaks not only about the habits of Victorian people, but also hints at the class identity of the site's inhabitants. A number of artifacts have been recovered from fairly pristine deposits in this area, which Bob is expertly excavating.

Here, excavation of a partial unit reveals the stone foundations of a standing house in an attempt to locate information about the construction date of the house being excavated.

Oral History and Hampden Archaeology

2007-07-11T17:52:00.001-07:00

First, to introduce myself. I'm Jolene Smith, a grad student at the University of Maryland-College Park working on my Masters in Applied Anthropology. I'm working with Dave, Bob, and the kids on the Hampden Community Archaeology Project this field season as part of an internship. I'm helping with the excavations and day-to-day operations of the project, and additionally, I'm working on an oral history component.

Oral history involves designing and conducting interviews of living people; in our case, we will be interviewing older Hampden residents about their experiences in the community. I've designed this program so that the young fieldworkers are co-contributors. I've been leading them through training sessions teaching oral history methods. Within the next several weeks, we'll work together to develop good interview questions and conduct several recorded interviews in teams. When the interviews are complete, we'll analyze and present our results together.

So, what does oral history have to do with archaeology?

In our opinions, the past and the present are strongly linked. Even though the people we interview were not alive in the early years of Hampden, their insights may provide clues to how Hampden residents have related to the physical place over time- they may tell us about important landmarks, stories about events, and family histories in the area. We're interested in how people in Hampden perceive their heritage and the past, and how the neighborhood has come to be what it is today.

I'll be posting updates from time to time about how the oral history project is going, as well as some details from excavations on my corner of the site- we've been finding some great stuff...more to come!

Also, if you're interested in being interviewed or know someone who would make a good subject, please comment. And come by the first Public Dig Day on Saturday!

Public Dig Day this weekend!

2007-07-11T15:55:00.001-07:00

As promised, here is the info on our Public Dig Days this summer. The first one will be held this Saturday from 10-2. (The text below is from the press release that we are sending out to various media outlets.)

The Hampden Community Archaeology Project, in conjunction with the Hampden Community Council and the Center for Heritage Resource Studies of the University of Maryland, is pleased to announce its third season of archaeological excavations in Hampden. Co-directors David Gadsby and Bob Chidester are again directing a team of high school archaeologists funded by the Baltimore Youthworks Program and the Hampden Community Council in the excavation of an archaeological site in the 3800 block of Falls Road, between Sirkis Hardware and McCabe’s Tavern.

Public Dig Days will be held on July 14th and July 28th, from 9 AM to 2 PM. During these events, we welcome members of the Hampden and larger Baltimore communities to visit the site, learn about the process of archaeology and about Hampden’s past, and even take part in the excavations themselves.

Archaeological fieldwork began on June 25th and will continue through August 3rd. Members of the public are invited to visit the excavations at any time that we are in the field (Monday to Friday, 8:30 AM to 2:30 PM) to learn about archaeology—and why we are doing archaeology in Hampden, —ask questions, and share information about local history. Additionally, we welcome volunteers to help us with field and lab work.

After the successful excavation of five sites over the past two summers, we are looking forward to another productive round of digging this year. You can get regular updates on our progress from our website, located at http://www.heritage.umd.edu/CHRSWeb/AssociatedProjects/Hampden.htm, and our weblog, at http://hampdenheritage.blogspot.com.

The Hampden Community Archaeology Project is sponsored by the Hampden Community Council and the Center for Heritage Resource Studies at the University of Maryland-College Park. Additional funding for 2007 has been provided by the Sociological Initiatives Foundation, the firm of Struever Brothers, Eccles and Rouse, and the Rackham Graduate School of the University of Michigan.

Results from the first two weeks

2007-07-05T14:01:00.000-07:00

Hi everybody. Now that we've been doing fieldwork for a couple of weeks, Dave and I, along with our intern Jolene, with start posting several times a week to keep you updated on our progress at the 3835-3839 Falls Road site. Each day our interpretation of what once happened at this site changes as we find more and more stuff. Dave and Jolene are working on several units on the southernmost lot; I'll allow them to describe their findings in future posts. For now I'll describe the two units that we've opened in the interior of the former house on the northermost lot.

In three units inside the house last summer, we discovered a large number of really cool artifacts, including dozens of buttons and a large amount of butchered pig and chicken bone. In one of the first units to be opened up this summer, we encountered an interesting feature along one wall of the unit. While the function of the feature is still unclear (it may have simply been some spilled trash), it certainly yielded some interesting artifacts. Most impressive was an intact wine bottle. We could tell that the bottle was made with a two-piece mold and that the lip was hand-shaped, meaning that it dates to sometime during the 19th century. Nearby, we also unearthed several sherds of a transfer-printed pearlware pitcher or creamer, which would most likely date to sometime during the years 1820 to 1850--much earlier than the time of the structure whose remains are now on the property.

We are now working on another unit closer to the edge of the lot next to 3841 Falls Road. Just today we uncovered another feature that consisted of a thin strip of loose, dark soil with chunks of decaying wood. It appears that the wood may once have been part of a floor joist or a building footer, but we still need to excavate the surrounding strata before we can be sure.

Sometime next week we'll post pictures of all the cool artifacts we've been finding.

Interesting article

2007-06-16T18:32:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to an interesting article on the impacts of neoliberal economic practices on U.S. workers that I stumbled upon recently. Kim Scipes, the author, is a noted labor sociologist; this is a topic that is very relevant to the situation of the working class in Hampden.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?sectionID=19&itemID=12018

Also, keep your eyes out--the third field season of the Hampden Community Archaeology Project will officially begin next Monday, so the posts are sure to come more frequently for the duration of the summer! As always, we welcome anyone who wants to volunteer, either in the field or in the lab washing artifacts--just let us know.

Hampden Workers and Labor Legislation, Part III

2007-06-07T08:06:00.000-07:00

At last, here is my final installment on labor activism in Hampden-Woodberry in the 1880s. A few weeks ago I discussed a visit by some lawmakers from Annapolis to the mills in January 1884, and the favorable impression they were given by both the mill owners and the operatives themselves. But this was not the whole story.

In response to the public proclamations of hardship in business coupled with goodwill toward the working people of the city on the part of the mill owners, the Federation of Trades of Baltimore City (then the umbrella labor organization, much like the AFL-CIO today) sent a delegation to Annapolis to meet directly with the governor. This trip occurred one week after the visit by lawmakers to the mills. Mr. Thomas Weeks, legal counsel for the Federation, made the argument that given the national monopoly on domestic production of cotton duck enjoyed by the Hampden-Woodberry mills, it was preposterous for the mill owners to claim that their continued prosperity depended on either reducing wages (should a maximum hour law be passed) or increasing the number of daily work hours. Another official of the Federation, Mr. Alexander Camper, furthered the workingmen’s argument by noting that years earlier when a 10-hour law had been passed and the mill owners had made the same dire predictions about being driven out of the state, nothing of the sort came to pass. Camper attributed any decline in cotton production in Maryland to the existence of competing factories in the South, right in the heart of King Cotton country. (To be fair, it could be argued that the very existence of cotton mills in the South was due to their transplantation from other states, since most Southern states did not have the kind of protective labor legislation that Northern states did at that time.)

While Weeks and Camper were representing a Baltimore-wide delegation of workingmen, Hampden-Woodberry workers were certainly involved. Fifteen members of the Druid Assembly (the Woodberry chapter of the national of the Knights of Labor organization) were active members of the Federation of Trades delegation to Annapolis, with one G. Jones as their marshal. Furthermore, both the Federation and the Druid Assembly delivered petitions supporting the proposed legislation to Governor McLane and each member of the Baltimore County delegation to the state legislature; the Federation of Trades petition reportedly contained over 7,000 names. So clearly, not all of the mill employees agreed that their work environment was excellent and that they couldn’t be happier (see my previous post on this topic).

What was the outcome of all of this? In mid-February of 1884, the state legislature failed to pass a bill that would have established a state bureau of labor statistics, but apparently a similar bill had been passed by the beginning of 1886—Thomas Weeks is reported to have begun his job as state labor statistician in January of that year. Equally importantly, the 1884 push for workplace legislation did result in the legalization of unions in Maryland, a significant victory. At this time, I am unfortunately unaware of the fate of the rest of the articles of the proposed legislation.

(Sources: Baltimore Sun, February 6, 1884, “A Federation of Trades. The Excursion to Annapolis. An Interview with the Governor,” pg. 1; February 15, 1884, “Legislature of Maryland,” pg. 4; and January 8, 1886, “Labor Statistics,” pg. 1.)

Call for interview subjects

2007-06-04T09:50:00.000-07:00

Hi folks,

Sorry about the lag between posts again--I got busier than I expected preparing for vacation, and then was gone for two weeks. Sometime this week I'll finish my series on Hampden workers and labor legislation.

But first, I would like to ask for your help. This summer, in addition to HCAP’s usual archaeological work, I would like to conduct between 10 and 15 interviews with residents of Hampden-Woodberry about the issues of heritage and gentrification, and attitudes toward HonFest in particular. I am looking to interview people who fall across the whole demographic spectrum of Hampden-Woodberry—young and old, long-time residents and newcomers. The only requirements are that interviewees must be at least 18 years old and have lived in Hampden-Woodberry for a minimum of one year.

The interviews will be conducted according to scholarly standards of anthropological research, including protection of interviewees’ identities. I plan to record the interviews using digital audio recording equipment. The data collected from this research will be used in my dissertation about Hampden-Woodberry, for the University of Michigan.
If you are interested in participating in this research, or have any further questions, please contact me by email at rchidest@umich.edu or by phone at (734) 474-0296.

IRB: Behavioral Sciences; IRB Number: HUM00012814; Document Approved on: 5/2/2007

(That last line is just some technical stuff that the University of Michigan requires I include in all published advertisements for this particular project.)

Hampden Workers and Labor Legislation, Part II

2007-05-11T11:42:00.000-07:00

So how did the workers of Hampden-Woodberry feel about the proposed labor legislation? Apparently, there were two camps among the mill workers: on the one hand, some felt that things were going swimmingly at work, and that no laws protecting workers were needed; on the other, a significant number felt that the legislation was badly needed.

A fascinating article appeared in the Baltimore Sun on January 31, 1884. This article described the visit of a special delegation from the state legislature to the mills in Hampden-Woodberry. The purpose of the visit was to gather information germane to the legislation, namely, working conditions and child labor. This delegation first visited the mills of the Mt. Vernon Company in Hampden. They questioned a number of workers, including young boys who were employed as floor sweepers. According to the article, members of the delegation were particularly concerned that some of these boys could not read or write. When the adults were questioned on their opinion of the eight-hour law, the general response was that it would only be beneficial if it could ensure that workers would continue to earn the same daily or monthly wages as they already earned. (Needless to say, the mill owners felt that a decrease in hours should be accompanied by a decrease in pay, despite the fact that current wages were already barely sufficient to support a family, even with multiple wage earners in a single household.) Despite these apparently negative findings, one state senator proclaimed that he was “highly pleased with the condition of the mills and the happy, healthy look of the operatives.”

The delegation proceeded to Clipper Mill, owned by the Hooper family. Apparently, the conditions there were much the same as at Mt. Vernon Mills. The Hoopers claimed that they never employed boys under the age of 11, and insisted that all prospective young male employees could read and write before being hired. The delegation proceeded to have lunch at the Clipper Hotel (the boarding house for young female employees of the Hooper mills) and to tour Meadow Mill (another Hooper operation) and the Druid Mills (owned by the Gambrill family).

Returning to the Clipper Hotel, the delegation listened to an appeal by the mill owners and managers. Having already proclaimed their disadvantage compared to the emerging textile industry in the South (where the workday was 12 hours long and wages were considerably lower), the mill contingent claimed that the only aspect of the legislation they opposed was the eight-hour bill. They even went so far as to say that they had no objection to the bill that would legalize trades unions! Nevertheless, in their opinion an eight-hour law would simply either drive them out of business or force them to relocate, most likely to Georgia or Alabama. (As it turned out, the Mt. Vernon Mills Company did later purchase a mill operation in Tallassee, Alabama in 1906; in 1925 it began the process of shutting down its Baltimore operations. The mill in Tallassee remained in operation until 2006; the Mt. Vernon Mills Co. is now headquartered in Mauldin, South Carolina.) Furthermore, they claimed that they only employed young boys out of charity, and would in fact rather do without them. They disavowed any responsibility for the boys’ lack of education, and argued that a bill outlawing child labor would not, in any case, ensure that the boys would be in school rather than on the street and become “vagabonds or worse.” As one spokesman for the manufacturers put it, “Here we are a happy family; we live together, work together, and we do not want any legislation. Our cry is, ‘Hands off!’”

This whole exchange between the manufacturers and the legislative delegation was witnessed by a contingent of factory operatives as well. According to the reporter, about fifty young ladies “showed their appreciation whenever anything was said in favor of the present system by vigorously clapping their hands.” A male employee also claimed that the operatives had generally spoken in support of the present system free from coercion on the part of the employers, and did not desire to see any changes made.

From this article, one could easily get the impression that life in the mills was peachy keen, and that Hampden-Woodberry’s mill workers truly were happy with their lot in life. Fortunately for us, however, more evidence exists that such was not necessarily the case for all of the workers in the neighborhood. Next week I’ll discuss the contingent of dissatisfied workers and their actions in support of the protective labor legislation.

(Source: Baltimore Sun, “Inspecting Cotton Mills. Visit of the Special Committee on Labor to Hampden and Woodberry,” January 31, 1884, pg. 4.)

Hampden Workers and Labor Legislation, Part I

2007-05-02T07:16:00.001-07:00

Well, now that I haven’t posted since the beginning of February when I announced that we would start posting on a regular basis again, I’ve finally had the time to actually sit and write something.

Way back in January, I had the opportunity to do a few hours of research in the archives at the University of Maryland—specifically, looking at newspaper clippings from the 1880s. Previous newspaper research from the 1870s had already told us that Hampden-Woodberry’s workers were quite active politically in the 1870s, but we didn’t know much about the 1880s other than that there was apparently a local chapter of the Knights of Labor in Woodberry. (The Knights were a utopian cross-class organization devoted to establishing a system whereby the products and profits of industry would be shared equally among all members of society.) My January research revealed even more fascinating information about organized working-class activity in Hampden-Woodberry during this decade. Perhaps most intriguing, however, was evidence that there was a schism within the local working class community over issues of workplace treatment, workers’ rights, and other such things.

In early 1884, Governor McLane was considering protective labor legislation that would have had far-reaching effects in the factories of Baltimore. In addition to setting a maximum workday of eight hours for women and restricting the use of child labor, the proposed legislation would have legalized trade unions in Maryland and mandated sanitation inspections for factories, among other things. All indications were that the governor would sign the legislation. Not surprisingly, Maryland’s captains of industry were none too pleased with this prospect. A committee of the Merchants & Manufacturers Association of Baltimore, including Theodore Hooper of Hooper Manufacturing (one of the two primary mill companies in Hampden-Woodberry), was appointed to draft resolutions against the legislation to be sent to the governor and state legislators in Annapolis.

They apparently had two primary arguments. First, they claimed that since the annual profit margin in the textile industry was so low, any additional restrictions on their operations would drive textile companies out of the state. (They did not explain how, if the industry’s profit margin was so low, all of the textile magnates managed to amass significant personal fortunes.) Their second argument was that since the proposed legislation would restrict the working hours of women, it would practically restrict the working hours of men as well: the mills could not run without the women (who made up a large percentage of the workforce), so if the women had to go home after eight hours it would be impossible for the men to continue to work for another two hours beyond that. (The lawyer for the Federation of Trades of Baltimore City, then the umbrella labor organization for the city, inconveniently pointed out in response that the textile industry was not doing so badly that mill owners could not afford to hire enough extra women and children to effectively have two staggered shifts, thereby accommodating the men’s 10-hour workday.)

In the interests of keeping my blog posts short, I’ll pause my story for now. Next week I’ll discuss the reaction of Hampden-Woodberry’s workers to the proposed legislation.

(Sources: Baltimore Sun, January 22, 1884, “Labor Bills Discussed. The Eight-Hour Law Opposed. Protests from the Manufacturers,” page 1; Sun, February 6, 1884, “A Federation of Trades. The Excursion to Annapolis. An Interview with the Governor,” pg. 1.)

The Return of the Blog

2007-02-01T10:34:00.000-08:00

Hi folks. The blog has been on a long hiatus as Dave and I had crazy fall semesters, but we're gearing up for our third season of archaeology this summer, so we're going to start to try to blog more frequently for the next few months.

We do have some exciting news to share--the Hampden Community Council and the Center for Heritage Resource Studies have been awarded a $15,000 grant for the Hampden Community Archaeology Project from the Sociological Initiatives Foundation (SIF)! We're positively giddy. SIF is a private foundation that funds community-based collaborative research projects aimed at addressing contemporary social issues and initiating positive social change in local communities. This grant will allow us to expand the scope of our activities, and we will be able to hire more local high-schoolers to assist us in excavations over the summer. Furthermore, now that we have the grant from SIF, we anticipate that it will help us to obtain other grants from organizations that require matching funds.

For my next time, I'm working on trying to post some pictures of an awesome archaeology cake my lovely wife made for me when I returned to Michigan from Baltimore at the end of last summer.

Congratulations to Dave!

2006-10-13T08:19:00.000-07:00

I am probably not the first to congratulate Dave on his new job, but may be the first to do so publicly--

Dave is the new Assistant Director of the Center for Heritage Resource Studies at the University of Maryland-College Park (www.heritage.umd.edu). Fortunately for us, this does not mean that Dave will have to quit working on the Hampden Community Archaeology Project. If anything, it will only enhance our relationship with CHRS, which is already one of our institutional sponsors (along with the Hampden Community Council).

So, three cheers for Dave!

Colombian Labor Leaders to Visit U.S.

2006-08-24T18:38:00.000-07:00

Please check out this post from Rob at AAAUnite. Baltimore is one of his target cities and he could use our help.

The issues faced by Colombians on a daily basis include
assassination, displacement from their land, threats of
violence, arbitrary imprisonment, and tremendous poverty.
Nearly half the population earns less than the Colombian
minimum wage of roughly $2/day. Over 4,000 trade unionists
have been assassinated in the past ten years. Teachers make
up the largest percentage of those killed. Colombia has over
2 million internally displaced people (second only to
Rwanda).

End of the Excavation Season

2006-08-05T17:50:00.000-07:00

Well, we have finally reached the official end of our excavation season. Dave and I will be out a couple of days this next week to finish up some last minute business at our sites, but our last day working with our Youthworks interns was yesterday.

While the Falls Rd. site will be the first of our five sites at which we will have actually finished excavation, we wish we could dig there longer. On Thursday Dave and I saw a copy of the 1876 Hopkins Atlas of Baltimore that showed this property with another structure up front on the lots that comprise 3835-3837 Falls Rd. (the house ruins that are there now are on lot 3839), which tells us two things: (a) people were living here as early as the 1870s, when Hampden experienced its first population boom as people moved here to work in the mills, and (b) at least one house was gone by 1896, as we have another map showing only the house that was on lot 3839 and the house that is currently on lot 3837, at the back of the property well away from the road.

This map information dovetails nicely with the artifacts that we've been finding, both within the ruined house foundation and across the site underneath the sheet midden. Within the last few days we've recovered a number of kaolin pipe stems and pipe bowl fragments and various easily-datable ceramics, such as Rockingham ware, pearlware, blue feather-edge plates, and transfer-printed whitewares in green and black. While some of these ceramics were most popular from roughly 1780-1840, it is certainly possible that the people living in the houses on this site could have inherited them as family heirlooms, or that they are reproductions of antique ceramic styles that were popular during the Arts and Crafts movement of the early 20th century. Since we recovered all of these artifacts from undisturbed contexts, once we have been able to catalogue them and digest the data in the lab, they will tell us much about the daily lives of the former occupants of these lots.

After next week, Dave and I will both be taking some time off, so while we will post some pictures next week (I promise!), there likely won't be any activity on this blog for a couple of weeks after that. However, we will try to put up posts regularly through the fall, winter and spring as we continue to conduct archival research.

Dig Day #2

2006-08-02T13:35:00.000-07:00

Well, our second Public Dig Day of the summer this past Saturday was slightly better attended than our first one, but it was still not as successful as we had hoped. Perhaps the heat kept people away. In any event, we did have a great time with the people who did stop by, explaining what we've been doing at the Falls Rd. site and showing off some of our best finds. We'll post some pictures in the near future.

Now half-way through our last week of excavation for the summer, we're almost finished with the Falls Rd. site (although we could probably spend another 6 weeks excavating there if we had the time and money). On Saturday we opened up a unit in the area of the midden that we discovered while doing shovel test pits a few weeks ago. In addition to tons of glass, we've found lots of other stuff that attests to the archaeologist's motto: "One person's trash is another person's treasure." Buttons, ceramic vessel fragments, marbles and other items are leading us to believe that this area was a trash dump for at least one of the houses on the site, if not both (and even maybe a house that once stood next door, as well).

Over within the foundation of the burned-down house, we are in the midst of excavating our third unit. After discovering all those buttons in the top layer of the unit right in front of the hearth, we came down on a trench that was dug for the purpose of laying in a water pipe (which is still in place). Unfortunately, there were no artifacts in the trench, which would have allowed us to date the installation of the pipe. However, in our third unit, which is roughly in the middle of the house, we found the pipe trench continuing, and this time it had plenty of artifacts. None of them are easily datable, however, so it may be a trick trying to find out when this property got its running water.

Visitors; upcoming dig day.

2006-07-27T12:25:00.000-07:00

We continued excavations in front of the hearth today finishing up an artifact rich first strat and moving on to the second. We also completed unit two, exposing an exterior wall of unknown function and recovering a few more nineteenth-century artifacts.

If yesterday was a day for new finds, today was a day for site visitors and public outreach. Early in the morning we were pleasantly surprised when Joe Powell dropped by to volunteer. Joe recently moved to Hampden, and has a history degree from University of Maryland. He helped us to screen soil and map until about noon, and plans to come back tomorrow to help out some more. Here's Joe at work at the screen.

Later, we got a visit from Maryland State Terrestrial Archaeologist Charlie Hall, who, after a site tour, offered us some good advice and support.

A couple of other folks wandered by in the afternoon as well, including Suzannah, Charlotte, and Eric Lipstien, pictured below, who stopped in for a site tour.

We invited all of our visitors to come back to our dig day this Saturday. In fact, anybody is welcome to come see what we're up to, screen some dirt, or just take a site tour on Saturday July 29, 2006, from 10:00 A.M. - 2:00 P.M. Our current excavation is at 3839 Falls Road, between Sirkis Hardware and McCabe’s Restaurant, so please stop by.

New Finds

2006-07-26T12:24:00.000-07:00

At the first place I ever did archaeology - Historic St. Mary's City in Southern Maryland - the lid of the site water cooler was decorated with the following motto: "Archaeology has been very good to me." I don't know who wrote it there, but I suspect my great teacher and friend Tim Riordan, who know that archaeology, even as it is full of frustrations, difficulties, and even boredom, has a way of renewing your faith in it just as you are about to plunge over the brink of dispair. During the first summer I worked with Tim, we spent weeks finding nearly nothing in a series of test pits that were meant to help locate new sites at the museum Tim, ever the exemplar of patience, taught me that summer that when you aren't finding anything, you have to console yourself with the satisfaction of practicing your craft well and the knowledge that, as any archaeologistst who hasn't been finding much lately will tell you, "negative information is good information."

This kind of succor only goes so far however. Eventually working hard and not finding much begins to wear on you. Today was just such a day for me. I have to admit, I've been feeling a bit low about the project lately, questioning whether it was worth spending my summer making almost no money for a pursuit that may or may not produce enough usable data to allow me to write my dissertation. Indeed, I've also been digging in the same 1x1 meter unit for several days, and not finding very much besides large rocks which have to be mapped in place frequently - to my great frustration. So I, although I'm not a religious person, I was about to raise a prayer of anguish to St. Damisus this morning when the wall I was cleaning produced a length of pipe stem, which, to me, seemed like evidence that I wasn't totally wasting my time. From the same fairly deep stratum came a number of other good nineteenth century artifacts, including a piece of teapot, a bottleneck, and a fragment of wooden button. These are the sorts of artifacts that tell us a lot about what people did that they might not have ever written down. Artifacts are traces of the past, and it is the task of archaeologsts and other students of the past to piece those traces into meaningful statements about how people lived.

After lunch, Bob, who had been profiling his very deep unit with two of our student workers, began excavation of a 1x1 in front of the hearth of the ruined foundation on the site. They had only been digging for a few moments when they found a mother of pearl button, and by the time the afternoon was over, they had assembled a pretty large bag of the kinds of artifacts that archaeologists of domestic sites like to see - buttons (15 of them!), animal bone, ceramics, tobacco pipe fragments, glass container fragments, and even some bits of newspaper.

Commenter ID?

2006-07-25T17:14:00.000-07:00

Back in March when Dave first began digging at the Pacific St. site, someone posted a comment to Dave's message listing a number of items that he/she had found underneath his/her home in Brick Hill during renovation the comment can be viewed at http://hampdenheritage.blogspot.com/2006/03/further-pacific-avenue-excavations.html#comments). We'd like to contact this person about taking a look at the collection. Unfortunately, the blog is not set up to give any way of identifying people who post comments. So, if the person who posted this comment is still reading the blog, could you please contact us at hampdenarchy@yahoo.com? Thanks in advance.

Falls Rd. Mysteries

2006-07-25T17:05:00.000-07:00

After two full weeks of excavation at our site on Falls Rd., we can confidently report that we are somewhat confused as to what is going on in the ground. Ok, so it's not quite that bad, but we are finding some mighty odd things. In my last blog I wrote about a circular feature that we had uncovered in the unit where I am working. We excavated it through two different stratigraphic layers and uncovered . . . nothing. Practically no artifacts came out of it, and those few that did will not provide us with a date. Thus, we decided to take down the two layers (stratigraphic levels 3 and 4) of gravelly sand that the feature cut through. In each of these layers we found . . . nothing. Well, almost nothing, and certainly nothing that will help us to date the layers. At this point it became clear that a strip of dark orangish clay running along the south edge of the unit was even with level 3 and above level 4, so we made that Feature 3 and excavated it. Finally, we found some stuff! It appears that Feature 3 is the result of runoff deposition in a channel cut through the ground by running water, and the runoff was transporting something--tin cans. In addition to the numerous small fragments of can, we were able to recover several larger chunks, including an entire can bottom. We'll have to take a closer look at the cans in the lab before we will know if we can date them, but we also recovered a partial bottle base with embossed lettering that should prove datable, as well as a piece of sponge-decorated whiteware ceramic. We are fairly confident that the feature dates to the first quarter of the 20th century.

After finishing the feature and levels three and four, today Jacinda and I worked our way through level five and a good way into level six. Both of these layers consist of pale, silty sand streaked with orange silty sand. After excavating a good foot or so of soil without finding any artifacts, we used an augur to dig a core straight down through the soil in the hopes of finding out if there are any other layers beneath the silty deposits, or if the silt continues right on down to subsoil. When we had dug about two feet down with the augur and detected no change whatsoever in the soil, we made a judgment call that there was probably nothing else down there before subsoil, and given that there are no artifacts in the silty sediments, it would be a waste of time and effort to keep digging any further in this unit. While it would be really interesting to know why there are several feet of silt deposits in this yard, we don't think that further excavation in this unit will be able to tell us anything about the occupation of this lot. Tomorrow we'll draw profiles of two or three of the unit walls so that we have a record of the stratigraphy, and then we will start on a new unit.

Falls Rd. Feature

2006-07-20T19:06:00.000-07:00

After taking a day off on Wednesday to go visit the Baltimore Museum of Industry and the Visionary Arts Museum (it's only a coincidence that we also got to avoid the sweltering heat--honest!), we resumed work at the Falls Rd. site today. Dave and Jacinda finished up most of the mapping with the laser transit, and they are quite happy about it--it can be something of a boring job, especially for the prism-holder. they then opened a test unit adjacent to the foundation of the addition to the burned-down house; hopefully, they'll be able to find a builder's trench and determine an age for the addition. In my unit, Diamond and I continued troweling through several layers, before coming down upon what appears to be a circular feature. We're not sure yet what it might be, but our best guess is that it is a post mold (the area where a fence post was once inserted into the ground) surrounded by a post hole (the hole that was dug so the post could be inserted, and then filled back in to stabilize the post). We mapped it today, and tomorrow we'll dig into it to see if we can find any diagnostic (datable) artifacts or other clues as to the nature of this feature.

On another note, we will be holding another Public Dig Day soon--we'll post details on the blog soon, but you can also keep your eyes out for our fliers around Hampden!

update from Falls Rd.

2006-07-18T18:42:00.000-07:00

Well, we've been at the site on Falls Rd. for a week now, and while we're really just getting started, we think that this will turn out to be a great site. We spent the first several days digging shovel test pits (STPs) all over the property. Unlike our usual 1x1 meter test units, STPs are round holes about a foot and half in diameter that we excavate non-stratigraphically. (That just means that we don't separate the artifacts we find in STPs based on the level they came from.) While most archaeologists don't really like digging STPs (including our Youthworks interns), they are a very useful tool for quickly exploring a site and examining the hot spots where we are likely to find really good stuff.

In this case, the STPs have indeed given us a good idea about where we should (and should not) concentrate our efforts. Fortunately, there are at least a couple of areas that seem to have intact deposits from the late 19th/early 20th century, and we've even found some artifacts that seem to be quite a bit older, which we weren't expecting. We opened up our first 1x1 meter unit today, so we haven't gotten very far yet, but in the next few days we should have another update, hopefully with exciting news.

An update with photos

2006-07-10T15:59:00.000-07:00

As much as we continue to have fun this summer, we are experiencing a few rough patches in the road. As regular readers know, a major part of our project involves getting the local Hampden community involved in our work. However, this is often difficult given a limited budget, constraints on our time, unpredictable working conditions, and a less than stellar ability to promote ourselves.

With that said, we are still somewhat disappointed with the turnout at our public dig day last Saturday. We had a grand total of six people show up, and while we got a lot of extra work done on Saturday, we really want to share our activities with members of the Hampden community. Anyway, we're really glad to have had our several guests last Saturday Here they are:

Our other Big Problem this week is that the Pacific St. Construction crew has been using an overhead crane to assemble the new addition there. Understandably, they didn't want a band of archaeologists and archaeologists-in-training hanging around while they swung a really heavy framing members in the air, so we had to move on to our second site on Falls Rd. While this isn't necessarity a bad thing, it is somewhat inconvenient, since we have several units in progress still at the site. So far we are finding good stuff in the new spot, and we have a lot more visitors than we did in Stone Hill, so the move seems to be a net good.

The new site consists of three lots between Falls Road and Crowther Street. One of the lots has an extant building, while the remnant of nineteenth-century foundation/retaining wall is present on the other. We are testing the site for buried deposits that may relate to the late 19th and early twentieth century occupations at the site, and have so far located several interesting areas, including a large sheet midden that may be related to one or both of the houses.

No photos from the new site yet, but her are some others from Pacific St. Most of these were taken by Robyn Lyles, one of the homeowners at the Pacific St. site. Enjoy!

Here, construction workers are fitting together and levelling the foundation for a new timber-frame addition to the house.

Here's me actually doing some work for a change.

Here, Bob and three of our Youthworks interns screen soils for evidence of the early 19th-century occupation of the site.

And here's the archaeology shot, showing a stratified 1-meter square unit above what may prove to be one of the site's privies.

Public Dig Day Coming Up!

2006-07-05T14:43:00.000-07:00

This Saturday, July 8th, the Hampden Community Archaeology Project will hold its first Public Dig Day of 2006. Residents of Hampden-Woodberry and the general public are invited to come out to 732 Pacific St. in Stone Hill from 10 am to 2 pm to learn all about the process of archaeology and the history of Hampden-Woodberry. (We also encourage you to share your own knowledge of local history with us.) Our Public Dig Days were a huge success last summer, and we hope to replicate that experience this year. As a visitor you will get to see active archaeological excavations, and will even have the opportunity to help us screen dirt looking for artifacts! If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us at hampdenarchy@yahoo.com.

Further update from Pacific St.

2006-07-05T14:26:00.000-07:00

First, allow me to apologize for letting almost a week go by without an update. We did, though, have the weekend and the Fourth off, so our progress has been relatively slow. Last Friday Diamond and I continued working in the unit at the back of the yard. As of the last post, we had just come down on Stratigraphic Layer 4, a level full of decaying mica. We began shoveling into it and discovered that it also contained several very large chunks of granite, of the kind that line the yards in Stone Hill. It was hard going, but fortunately the layer wasn't too thick, and beneath it was a layer of darker, moister soil. In addition, we finally began finding some artifacts in Strat 4--some older ceramics, some new-looking glass, some badly corroded nails, and what appears to be a water pipe connector. After recording Strat 4, Diamond and I began troweling through Stratigraphic Layer 5. The layer is full of coal, but has quite a few artifacts as well, including some transfer-printed ceramics, glass, nails, and brick and bone fragments. We had taken the layer down about 8 centimeters by the end of the day, and it appears to keep going down further.

Down in the outbuilding area, Dave, Thomas and Jacinda opened up a second unit diagonally to the southeast of their first one in an attempt to find a second edge to their feature. Unfortunately, they only ended up with a unit that was all feature! Thus, they had to open up yet another unit diagonally to the southeast, but they haven't gotten far enough down yet to know if they've finally found the edge.

Which reminds me of a bit of sad news--we've lost one of our workers. Thomas was transferred to another job, so he left after lunch on Friday. Our loss was compensated. however, by the addition to our crew of one Tyrae Cokley of Park Heights. Tyrae began with us on Monday, and after two days on the job has proven himself to be a quick learner and a fast digger.

On Monday Tyrae, Jacinda, Diamond and I laid out a grid for some shovel test pits (STPs)in the area of the yard immediately above the new addition to the house that is currently being built. (Dave was absent both Monday and today due to teaching duties in College Park.) This part of the yard will most likely not exist beyond next week, so we wanted to get a quick idea whether there is anything there worth digging into before it gets taken out by a backhoe. In all, over two days we completed 12 STPs spanning an area approximately 11x4 meters. The stratigraphy in the STPs was fairly straightforward, consisting mostly of a top layer and a bottom layer, with some area of mixture between the two due to faunal disturbance. Some of the STPs yielded few artifacts of any interest, but several of them contained some pretty interesting stuff--transfer-printed ceramics that probably date to the first half of the 19th century, some old bottle glass (including one small medicine bottle base and a glass stopper that probably went with it), etc. Despite the simple stratigraphy, which suggests that this area may be the product of backdirt dumping when the original addition to the house was put up, there were enough cool artifacts concentrated among three adjacent STPs to convince us to put in a unit here tomorrow to see what shows up.

Coming soon--pictures from our first two weeks!

Days 2 and 3--Progress!

2006-06-29T13:23:00.000-07:00

At the end of third day, we are finally making progress and beginning to find some interesting stuff. In the unit where we are hoping to find the privy, we discovered yesterday that the first layer comes down onto two different layers--stratigraphic level 2, which consists of three mounds (one large, two small) of hard-packed sandy loam, surrounded by stratigraphic level three, a mixture of orangish clay and the the same kind of soil that is usually the top layer in a yard. This morning Diamond and I (Bob) excavated strat 2, and as we suspected, it comes down right to strat 3 and has very few artifacts (a few pieces of brick and charcoal and one glass shard). We then began shoveling out strat 3, but discovered that it quickly comes down on the next layer, stratigraphic level 4. Diamond spent most of the day valiantly screening the dirt from strat 3 while I tried to clean up the unit and get it down to strat 4 all across. Unfortunately for Diamond, there were again very few artifacts in strat 3--mostly coal and charcoal, with a few pieces of glass, rubber, and a nail. We didn't quite finish the paperwork for strat 3 before the end of the day, but tomorrow we will begin taking out strat 4. It appears that this new layer has a heavy concentration of mica; we are currently surmising that strat 3 was put down over this layer as a way to cap it, so as to prevent accidental injury on a pile of mica dumped there from elsewhere on the site.

Over in the other unit, where we are hoping to find the remains of an outbuilding, Dave, Thomas and Jacinda worked all day to get down to the layer below the cement block they discovered on the first day. They were rewarded by finding a feature below the second stratigraphic layer in that unit. It appears to be big enough that it might, indeed, be the footprint of a former outbuilding.

Stay tuned for further updates, and pictures from our first week! And remember, we welcome visitors at any time that we are in the field, and if you are interested in volunteering to help us dig or wash and catalog artifacts, contact us at hampdenarchy@yahoo.com.

First Day a Success

2006-06-27T16:58:00.000-07:00

The 2006 season of public archaeology in Hampden is officially underway as Dave and I, along with three of our intrepid Baltimore Youthworks assistants (Thomas, Jacinda and Diamond), returned to the Pacific St. site to continue excavations there. We actually began the morning at the Hampden Family Center, washing artifacts from last year while we waited to see if the rain would stop. It did, so we headed out to Stone Hill around 11:30. The first order of business was to lay out a new unit at the back of the yard, where we hope to find the privy.

After lunch, Jacinda and Diamond began stripping the sod off of the unit, while Dave took Thomas over to another unit (laid out a few weeks ago) where we think a small building or shed once stood. Diamond and Jacinda are finding coal, oyster shell, brick, plaster, and some 20th-century coins in their unit--nothing spectacular, but then again, they haven't even gotten past the grass roots yet. Dave and Thomas have discovered a cinder block in their unit; so far, we can't tell if there are others around it, which would suggest the previous existence of a structure, or if it's just a single block. They are also finding glass and ceramic artifacts in the top layer, which doesn't appear to be too deep.

Weather permitting, we'll be back out at Pacific St. tomorrow from about 8:30 to 2. More updates to come!

Annual Field Session to Kick Off Next Week

2006-06-22T08:54:00.000-07:00

We are gearing up once again for six weeks of dirt-moving, sweat-from-the-brow-wiping, soil-sifting, artifact-discovering fun! Yes indeed, the time has finally arrived for the beginning of the second annual Field Session in Community Archaeology here in Hampden. The project is great fun because it gives us an opportunity to conduct research in public, with the public, and with local youth who learn about archaeology and heritage while getting paid by Baltimore City's Youthworks program. This summer we are receiving additional support from the Hampden Community Council, the Hampden Family Center, and the Baltimore Community Foundation, so thanks to them!

In addition to excavating at two Hampden sites this summer, we will also be holding a couple of public "dig days" at the sites on Saturdays. One will be on 8 July, and the other on 29 July. These have been a lot of fun in the past, and we encourage anyone interested to watch this spot for further updates.

So, as always, interested parties are welcome any time, but should contact us first by clicking here to send an email. Also, if you'd like some more information, you can check out our web page at the Center for Heritage Resource Studies.

Who Was John Knight? (The Long-Awaited Conclusion . . . Sort Of)

2006-06-20T14:10:00.000-07:00

The answers to the questions I posed at the end of my last blog post are a bit surprising. In the 1980s a descendant of John Knight contacted the Lovely Lane Museum to find some genealogical information, and at least part of this correspondence has been saved in the vertical file for Hampden United Methodist Church. According to research already done by his descendant (and which I was able to confirm during a trip to the Baltimore County Historical Society Library just this morning), John Knight was the son of one Horace Knight, millwright, and his wife Catherine—née Gambrill. Catherine Gambrill was the first daughter of John Gambrill, one of the founders of the textile industry in Hampden-Woodberry.

What is the significance of John Knight’s family connections? For one thing, the fact that his father was a millwright means that Horace Knight was a skilled artisan, likely a partner of John Gambrill’s at some point. At the very least he was no mere operative. Thus, it would seem unlikely that the grandson of a capitalist and the son of an artisan would himself be a mere unskilled (or little-skilled) mill worker. Indeed, while the photograph of John Knight’s Clipper Road home reproduced in Rev. Stone’s history seems modest enough, the portrait of John Knight himself is striking: he is wearing a full suit and holding a top hat—hardly the attire of a wage worker. So what exactly was John Knight’s position in the mills? Was he, in fact, a manager? And if he was, then why would Rev. Stone, writing in 1917, have suggested (without explicitly saying so) that Knight was an average operative? Was this merely a misinterpretation of source material on Rev. Stone’s part, or did he have some political reason for wanting to represent Knight as a working-class man? What might such a reason have been? Was the MP Church largely a working-class church at this time? Or can it just be chalked up to Christian humility?

My second question was, why did John Knight, whose portrait is reproduced in much of the historical literature produced by Hampden United Methodist Church over the course of the 20th century, disappear from Rev. Stone’s history of the church as soon as worship services left his home and moved to Cox’s Chapel in 1868? According to the letter written in response to his descendant, John Knight was admitted on trial to the Baltimore Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in 1873. (Recall from my last post that the ME Church, South split from the ME Church over the issue of slavery, with the latter church supporting its continuation.) Knight continued on trial until he withdrew from the church in 1876. During that time, however, he had appointments as a circuit rider (a preacher who traveled to a number of churches over a large area that were too small to have their own full-time ministers) in Howard and Harford counties.

Why (and when) did John Knight leave the MP congregation that he founded? Was it because he felt more in tune with the ME Church, South’s pro-slavery stance? (But keep in mind, the Eastern Conference of the MP Church, headquartered in Baltimore, was also largely pro-slavery—and slavery had been legally ended by this time, anyway.) Why did he subsequently leave the ME Church, South? Did he leave his position at the mills (whatever it was) when he became a circuit rider? Did he go back to the mills after he left the ME Church, South? John Knight died in 1888 in Remington, and the location of his grave is unknown, although his wife, who died in 1919, is buried in the churchyard of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Hampden—perhaps he joined her in the Episcopal faith. Unfortunately, important parts of John Knight’s life still remain a mystery.

Who was John Knight?

2006-06-14T15:24:00.000-07:00

A question I’ve been puzzling over since I first read the history of Hampden Methodist Protestant Church (now Hampden United Methodist Church, on Falls Rd. south of 36th St.) is the make-up of the original members of the congregation, who bolted from the existing Methodist Episcopal Church in Hampden. Were they workers, managers, owners, or middle-class business people? Or were they a motley assortment from all of these groups? I can’t yet say that I’ve found the answer, but after a trip to the Lovely Lane Methodist Museum and Archives (www.lovelylanemuseum.com) right here in Baltimore, I’ve found some intriguing clues.

First, some background on Methodism. Founded in Britain during the 18th century by John Wesley, Methodism quickly spread to the colonies and became particularly popular in the mid-Atlantic states. The Methodist Episcopal (ME) Church was officially organized in 1784. By the 1820s a number of lay Methodists had grown discouraged with the refusal of the church hierarchy to allow lay participation in matters of church governance, and in 1830 they split off to form the Methodist Protestant (MP) Church. Both the ME and MP churches later split again over the issue of slavery; the MP church reunited in 1877, while the ME Church and the ME Church, South remained apart until the reunification of the ME and MP churches in 1939. Shortly thereafter, this new group joined with several other Methodist denominations to form today’s United Methodist Church.

Hampden MP Church was founded in 1867, reportedly because the “Establishment” of the ME Church in Hampden did not approve of the emotional, expressive form of worship preferred by some of its members. The leader of the rebel faction was one John Knight, a resident of “The Clipper” section of Hampden, and he and 34 others decided to form their own congregation and join the Baltimore Circuit of the MP Church. Knight at first held services in his own home on Clipper Road, before Cox’s Chapel (named for Knight’s co-rebel) was built in 1868.

In Edward Stone’s 1917 history of the church, the following description of John Knight appears:

In the main, “The Clipper” is made of small houses built of Falls road stone. These houses are owned by the mill company and rented for a small sum to those who work in the mills. In one of these little stone houses lived John Knight, in whose heart burned a love for Jesus Christ and a yearning to see men saved. How strange to some of us, when God wishes to do a great work, He goes so often among the poor and obscure to find His man. . . . From the cotton duck mills of Hampden village God raised up John Knight and those who labored with him to enter into a great work. (Stone, The History of Hampden Methodist Protestant Church 1867-1917, pg. 10)

Stone clearly implies that John Knight was a humble mill operative, renting his abode from his employers and living a life generally free from luxury. (Stone’s rather uncritical depiction of work in the mills is another story.) Certainly this is the interpretation given in a later document, “A Century of Service, 1867-1967,” published by Hampden Methodist Church (previously Hampden MP Church) on the occasion of its 100th anniversary. But is this correct? Was John Knight really a lowly mill operative? Furthermore, why does he drop out of the story of Hampden MP Church after the construction of Cox’s Chapel?

As is my habit, I will cut off this already overly long post and leave the answers to these questions until a later date.

Does this look like your idea of a good time?

2006-06-12T13:05:00.000-07:00

We will be kicking off the summer field season this Thursday down at the Pacific Street site. There is a test unit (pictured above) to be completed, some mapping to do, and most exciting of all, a privy to be located. Bob and I will be there starting at approximately 9:00 AM, and would love to have some company for digging, sifting and general companionship. You don't need to know anything - we'll teach you as you go.

Contact us at hampdenarchy@yahoo.com ahead of time to let us know if you'd like to come out.

Presentation at Roland Park Place/Call for Volunteers

2006-06-09T15:29:00.000-07:00

Earlier today Dave and I gave a presentation for the Lunch & Learn speakers’ series at Roland Park Place. We had a large crowd, and they seemed to enjoy our presentation quite a bit. Dave began by giving a Powerpoint presentation recapping the history of Hampden and discussing the results of our excavations last summer. He then passed the baton on to me, and I discussed at length the research I did last fall into representations of Hampden’s heritage, and specifically what those representations can tell us about class consciousness in Hampden during the 20th century (the specifics of which are detailed in my blog posts from last October through early this year).

We then fielded questions for about 20 minutes. We had a number of really interesting questions and comments on various topics, including class consciousness, the history of the mills, social institutions in Hampden, and Hampden’s reputation as a racist enclave. After the presentation was over, we continued to discuss our project with a number of people informally. We had a great time, and found our conversations with people to be most enlightening.

We were pleasantly surprised to have several attendees volunteer their services to help us clean artifacts and perform other lab activities this summer. I would therefore like to take this opportunity to put out a general call for volunteers, both in the field and in the lab. Come one, come all! Archaeologists are not usually known for turning down free labor, and we would really appreciate any help you can give. If you would like more details on how to volunteer (and what you can do to help), contact us at hampdenarchy@yahoo.com or rchidest@umich.edu.

Sovereigns of Industry, Part II

2006-05-25T09:19:00.000-07:00

Alrighty, so here's the second part of my report on the Sovereigns of Industry (SoI). I wrote last week that the SoI seems to have vacillated between (relatively) conservative and radical social positions. I will expand on this theme here by noting both the use of religious rhetoric by the SoI as well as its racial and gender politics.

One of the very first things I noticed when reading the pamphlet I mentioned last week was the use of Biblical allusion to support a seemingly radical socialist economic position. Indeed, on the very first page of the pamphlet William Alger wrote that the capitalist system of economics was in direct contradiction with the teachings of the Bible, and asserted that economic cooperation among the producing and working classes, along with the elimination of the merchant class, would help to bring about the Millennium (the return of Christ to Earth and the end of history as we know it). Later, in the section penned by C. Edwards Lester, I came across this poetic prophecy: "And the heavenly dove of wisdom shall descend upon mankind and the holy ghost—the wind of God—blow through the souls of men until forgetfulness of self shall overtake them all" (pg. 11). Similar religious language was also used in the second document I was able to take a look at last week, the Sovereigns of Industry Bulletin! I reviewed two issues of this newsletter, Vol. 1, #8 (July 1875) and Vol. 1, #12 (November 1875). An item in the second issue explaining the purpose of the bulletin again made an explicit allusion to the Millennium, arguing that a cooperative economic system like the one promoted by SoI would help to bring about the end times: "The gates of history will be lifted up, the doors of prophecy will be flung open, and the King of Glory will come. Humanity will be throned in its world-estate in harmony and happiness."

In a posting from last November I discussed how important religion has been in the social life of Hampden, and particularly its place within collective imaginings of Hampden's past. It seems likely that the kind of religious justification for a group like SoI would have worked very well in a place like Hampden, and indeed, famous labor historian Herbert Gutman once surveyed the many ways in which the organized labor movement of the late 19th century used religious arguments to bash capitalism and promote socialist alternatives (Gutman, 1966, "Protestantism and the American Labor Movement: The Christian Spirit in the Gilded Age." The American Historical Review 72(1):74-101).

Finally, I was struck by the race and gender politics of the SoI. While certainly not radical for the 21st century, SoI did hold what would at the time have been very progressive positions. In the pamphlet by Alger and company, they note that one of the reasons for the need for an organization such as SoI is that women were "divorced from equal participation" in the economic and political system by men, when in fact they had every right to be just as involved (pg. 6-7). Vol. 1 #12 of the Bulletin! included a front-page article stating the "Declaration of Purposes" recently adopted by the national SoI. The declaration read, in part, that SoI was to be "an association of the industrial or laboring classes, without regard to race, sex, color, nationality or occupation; not formed for the purpose of waging any war of aggression upon any other class, or for fostering any antagonism of labor against capital. . . ." SoI's socially inclusive policy was directly counter to that held by the new American Federation of Labor, the leader of which, Samuel Gompers, was determined that the AFL should be principally an organization for skilled, white, male workers. On the other hand, SoI's insistence that it was not in the business of fomenting class war made it seem somewhat less radical than other contemporary groups, such as the Knights of Labor, that were all about upending the capitalist economic and social order. Certainly, the SoI did not treat women and people of color equally to white men. On page 3 of the November 1875 issue of the newsletter, one author urged men to make their wives members of SoI (rather than urging women to join of their own accord). Nevertheless, the same author did argue that "the Order will never accomplish its work . . . until the cheering and elevating influence of women is made manifest by her presence in the council room." Again, this kind of philosophy would likely have been appealing in a place like Hampden, where at least half of the industrial workforce consisted of women.

Apart from the "Declaration of Purposes" published in the November 1875 Bulletin!, I only noticed one other piece of evidence concerning the racial policies of SoI. It appears that the order subscribed to a "separate but equal" philosophy when it came to African Americans. In a section titled "Notes and Clippings," in the same issue of the paper, it was reported that a newly formed "colored" council was operating in Ohio. Why African Americans should have to form separate councils is, of course, not stated, but was probably taken for granted by most (if not all) white members of SoI.

Sovereigns of Industry

2006-05-19T10:48:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to do a little digging into the archives here at the University of Michigan, on the topic of the Sovereigns of Industry. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned them before, but it's been awhile, so I'll provide a new introduction: The Order of the Sovereigns of Industry (hereafter referred to as SoI) was a cooperative workers' organization founded in Massachusetts in 1874 and patterned after both the Grange (here in the U.S.) and similar organizations in England. Not much is known about SoI—in fact, I have so far only been able to track down two scholarly works on the organization, both of which are Master's theses and thus unpublished (and one of them is not even solely about SoI, but is a comparison of several such cooperative groups in the 19th century). While SoI was organized at the national level, most of the activity took place in local "councils," more or less like union locals. The primary activity of these locals was the organization of cooperative stores in an effort to connect producers directly with consumers, thus eliminating the "idle" and parasitic merchant capitalist. SoI apparently did not last for more than a few years in the mid-1870s. According to the researchers who compiled a National Register of Historic Places nomination for Hampden a couple of years ago, they found evidence that a local council of SoI was active in Hampden (although they unfortunately do not mention it in the nomination that was submitted to the National Register, and I have not yet been able to discover any confirmation).

In looking for information on SoI, I discovered that the University of Michigan Graduate Library's Labadie Collection (an amazing archive of materials related to anarchist and radical organizations in the U.S. over the past 150 years or so) actually contains several documents published by SoI, and I was able to see two of them earlier this week. As is my habit, I'll write a little this week but save some juicy tidbits for a posting next week, as well.

The first piece of SoI literature that I looked at was a pamphlet titled, "Sovereigns of Industry. Report of the Committee on Declaration of Principles and Purposes," written by three men named William R. Alger, C. Edwards Lester, and Henry B. Allen and published in January, 1875. This was a most enlightening document for several reasons. First, it lays out both the reasons for the organization of SoI and its goals. In 1873 a depression hit the United States, partly as a result of the ongoing financial burden of Reconstruction in the South. In response to this economic panic, which disproportionately affected working-class people, SoI was organized to help workers deal with an unjust economic system. Apparently, SoI was one of a number of groups at the time calling for the adoption of paper currency (at the time, only "hard" currency was held to be valid by the U.S. government). The pamphlet is quite critical of capitalists, which it calls "the curse of American society; barnacles on the ship, only to retard her progress" (pg. 8). Capitalism is described as a "false social system," and workers, called "mechanics and artizans (sic)," are compared to slaves (pg. 14; a common analogy during the mid-to-late nineteenth century).

Unlike the then-fledgling American Federation of Labor (AFL), whose main goals were better working conditions and better pay (only for skilled workers, however), SoI emphasized education over the accumulation of "wealth." According to the pamphlet, the various activities of the SoI were aimed at the mental, social and material elevation of the working class. Advocating a system of economic cooperation among producers and consumers, the SoI seems to have vacillated between a stridently socialist project (wherein the social and economic differences between producers, workers, and consumers would be completely eliminated) and a more conservative approach that would simply do away with "middlemen"—the merchant class (as evidenced in the pamphlet's disparagement of strikes as a method of improving the working person's lot).

Religion in Hampden

2006-05-01T08:21:00.000-07:00

Well, now that the semester is over I'll be going on my honeymoon for a couple of weeks, and then preparing to come out to Hampden, so this is likely my last post before I get there. I figured I'd talk a little about some of the archival research I want to try to do this summer when Dave and I aren't getting very dirty in other people's yards.

This past semester I was an instructor for the course "Religion in America" here at the University of Michigan. I learned a lot myself (I must admit that previously I had little knowledge of the topic), and now I'm interested in looking into the topic in Hampden. We already know that a large number of Hampden workers were Methodists, but there were also Presbyterians, Baptists, Catholics, and probably others. Camp revival meetings, when preachers from all over would converge in a field near Hampden and exhort the message of the Gospels to the masses, were a very important and popular part of social life in Hampden from the 1860s through the early 20th century. Interestingly, this time period in general was not particularly known for such public displays of religiosity. (The Second Great Awakening lasted roughly from 1800 to 1835, and the next outpouring of religious fervor began in the 1910s.)

E.P. Thompson established the connection between Methodism and the labor movement in England in his classic book "The Making of the English Working Class," and labor historian Herbert Gutman wrote an article titled "Protestantism and the American Labor Movement: The Christian Spirit in the Gilded Age," published in 1966. In this article, Gutman argues that labor activists during the late 19th century actively used the Christian scriptures to argue for the rights of working people (even as capitalists and their allies used the Bible to defend laissez-faire capitalism). But, as I've written on this blog before, the 1917 "History of Hampden Methodist Protestant Church" makes barely any mention of Hampden's industries, much less the fact that a large part (if not all) of the congregation would have worked for the mills. So my question is, did religion act as a deterrent to militant labor activity in Hampden (as Karl Marx might suggest), or did it actually provide workers with some support for their various attempts to gain better wages, working conditions and standards of living over the years?

Thus, one of my goals this summer is to try to get into some church archives in Hampden this summer to see if I can unearth some information about the role of religion in Hampden. Some of the things I will be looking for include social activities and public events organized by churches for workers or in support of workers in times of labor unrest; the position of the churches and their members on the camp meeting revivals that were so popular; public statements by local ministers concerning strikes, such as the 1923 strike at Mt. Vernon Mills, in which local clergy played an important role in getting the mayor of Baltimore to intervene; and even any evidence from sermons to suggest the general stance of ministers on the labor-capital relationship over the decades.

If you have any documents, personal memories or family stories about church activities in Hampden, from any time period, I'd love to hear from you and to incorporate this information into our research.

SAA meetings

2006-04-25T09:11:00.000-07:00

I am headed off tomorrow to the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in San Juan, PR. I have never been to one of these before, and have never been to San Juan, but it should be fun anyway. I am chairing a session on community archaeology and delivering a paper on praxis in community archaeology. Here is the abstract:

Writing in 1970, Paolo Freire (2005:51) defined praxis as "reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it". In recent years, some archaeologists have begun to include the notion of political action into their work. But how can archaeologists’ reflection and action be transformative? An ongoing archaeological project in the Hampden neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland attempts to employ this notion of praxis by acting, through education, on public heritage discourse. By promoting a democratic discourse centering on heritage, the project seeks to increase the power of local community members to affect the course of gentrification in their locality.

I will try to post once or twice about the meetings while I'm there, but they are always busy, so I'm not promising anything.

housing for the summer (again)

2006-04-13T14:19:00.000-07:00

Well, when I posted this a little over a month ago, I didn't get any responses, but I hope its because at that point people really weren't sure about the summer yet. The situation is this: I really want to come to Hampden to work this summer. In order to do that, I need a place to stay--really just a room with kitchen access will do. I would prefer a place in Hampden proper, since it's nice to actually be in the community (I have a possible place in Medfield, but I'd like to be closer to the digging). So, if anyone really wants to help out Hampden Archaeology and happens to have a room to spare for the summer (roughly from the beginning of June to mid-August), I'd love to hear from you. I am, of course, willing to pay rent and utilities. Thanks a bunch.

Responses to Bryn Mawr Questions

2006-04-06T05:41:00.000-07:00

Thanks everyone for all of your comments. I enjoyed the tour. There are a lot of questions here, so I will try to take them one at a time.

The most common thing that folks commented about was the idea of a microcosm. In some ways I think that this is a useful way to think about the neighborhood, but in others I think that it is not. Here is why:

Hampden, like many other industrial towns was, as we discussed, closely tied to the Atlantic economy through the shipping industry. Because of this, it was subject to the same ideological and economic forces - including market pressures, organized labor activities, paternalism, and so forth – that it followed the same general historical/economic trajectory as many other places in America.

With that said, its important to bring up something we didn’t get a chance to talk about on the tour, which is Hampden’s history of racial exclusion and outright racism. Cady is correct when she points out that:

There are parts of America that weren't represented in Hampden during that time that were keys parts of the country.

In fact, there were large parts of American that aren’t represented in Hampden’s history. In particular, one reason that the paternalist system worked is that the mill workers, who were almost exclusively people of English descent that migrated from the Appalacians to the town in search of steady work, exchanged their good behavior for favorable hiring practices. Those practices excluded anyone of African or Eastern European descent from working in the mills. This legacy of exclusion has had lasting consequences, and even today the neighborhood of Hampden is 92% “white” (according to the 2000 U.S. census) in a city that is at least 70% African-American.

Another common question concerned Hampden’s future. People wanted to know if I thought Hampden would continue to gentrify, and what I though the next ten to twenty years would be like. I have to say that I don’t know. There is a lot of struggle along class lines in Hampden right now, and the direction of Hampden’s future depends in large part on the outcomes of those struggles. I think that development in Hampden will probably continue until houses get too expensive for people to buy, and then it will slow down or stop.

Some of you wondered about the effect this would have on working-class families in Hampden. The goal of my project is to give working-class families in Hampden a voice in how development occurs in their neighborhood by giving them a concrete and powerful way to talk about their heritage. If all goes well for working families in Hampden, they will continue to wield some control over the processes of development and gentrification in

Some others:

Since the mills have been shut down and the silver company is no longer, what other businesses provide an income to this town? Also, what is your favorite part of Hampden?

Hampden has gone through a number of economic changes in the last century. The mills, along with other manufacturing operations, left slowly, beginning in the 1920’s. By the late 1960’s the major textile mills had moved south in search of cheaper labor. As all of this occurred, the people who worked in manufacturing were forced to look outside of the neighborhood for jobs, sometimes with limited success. By the 1970’s, Hampden was a fairly impoverished, fairly unsafe neighborhood. Even the commercial sector – the small business owners- began to suffer, and many shops in the neighborhood closed. When a resurgence began in the late 1980’s, it was not Hampdenites that started it, but middle-class entrepreneurs from outside of the neighborhood who sought to capitalize on cheap rents and working-class culture

When did the sort of "demise" of Hampden really start to occur? You mentioned how the police station left and crime went up, but i'm wondering if there were any other things that lead to this?

I think its premature to announce the death of Hampden, but see my comments above. The social situation in any neighborhood is closely related to its economic structure, so that the rise in crime and poverty coincides with the economic changes that the neighborhood has undergone.

I'd like to learn more about life in the mill, where can I find more information?

There aren’t a whole lot of sources, but check out these:

Hare, Jean.
1976 Hampden Woodberry. Hampden-Woodberry Community Council, Baltimore.

Harvey, William
1988 “The People is Grass”: a History of Hampden Woodberry 1802-1945. Della Press, Baltimore.

Hollyday, Guy
1994 Stone Hill: The People and Their Stories. Privately published, Baltimore.

All of these are available at the Hampden branch of the Pratt on Falls Road

I realize the mills and the silverware company and the old police station are landmarks in the area, but what makes this area more famous and historic than any other?

I don’t think about Hampden as being particularly famous. It is however quite historic, but I don’t think that it is more so than lots of other areas of Baltimore. It sounds like your asking why I should bother working here, and why you should bother learning about it. The answer there is that Hampden is a place that presents a wonderful combination of and contemporary historical problems, that I have the opportunity to study in detail. What I like about Hampden is not that its famous, but that there is a great deal of evidence – archaeological and historical – that tells us about people who couldn’t or didn’t write their own history. We know that most often, histories are written by the wealthy and powerful, who are never in the majority, and that those histories tend to reflect the interests of their authors. In contrast, I think its worthwhile to examine the pasts of people whose voices has been left out of those privileged histories.

Pacific St. (again)

2006-04-04T11:58:00.000-07:00

Even though I'm working my way through a fairly daunting pile of books and articles for my upcoming comprehensive exam, I manage to get out in the field every so often. A couple of Fridays ago was such a beautiful day that i couldn't stand to just sit around in the house, so I went out in the field and excavated a level in the trench on Pacific Street. Its fairly interesting stuff. I dug through a layer of coal-ash that also contained a lot of destruction debris presumably from an early addition to the house. The destruction must have occurred sometime after 1920, based on a dated coin within the fill, but the addition is clearly quite a bit older, as evidenced by some hand-wrought nails, which tend to indicate a date in the first part of the 19th century.

School Tour on a Spring Day

2006-04-04T10:33:00.000-07:00

Today, a group of high school students from Bryn Mawr School joined me for a tour around Hampden. As many of the kids remarked, it would've been a beautiful day for a walk if it hadn't been so windy. We started at the Hampden Elementary school, looking at the frieze of which I'm so fond. We then walked down Keswick Avenue, stopping to take a look at some of rowhouse architecture as well as the old Northern District police station (shown right - before the recent renovation began).

We then headed down to the Stone Hill, where we discussed paternalism and textile manufacture before going on to check out some of the worker housing. Stopping briefly at the Mount Vernon No. 3 Mill, we talked a little bit about how mill the buildings function as control mechanisms, as well as how cotton duck was produced. We then headed up the hill along Chestnut Avenue, pointing out changes in the commercial character of the neighborhood, and noticing some of the creative uses of lawn ornamentation along the way. The tour ended at the Bank of America Mural on Elm Ave, which serves as a pretty good bookend for a tour that focuses on history and gentrification.

I really enjoy doing these tours because they give me a chance to talk about all of my thoughts about Hampden in a fairly condensed way. There's no time for political or archaeological theory, you pretty much just have to say what you think. In many ways this is very good, but it also means that I leave a lot out because the neighborhood is so dynamic and complex.

Anyway, I understand that my tour group is going to be checking out the blog in the next few days, so I hope that you guys enjoyed yourselves. I invite you to leave a comment here, or on any of the posts below. Also, please check out the project's web page, which contains, the project research design, some transcriptions of oral histories from the Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage Project, and more.

Class Consciousness is Everywhere!

2006-04-04T10:19:00.000-07:00

Last summer I did some research in the Maryland Room of Hornbake Library on the campus of the University of Maryland-College Park. I discovered a treasure trove of photocopies of newspaper articles, all pertaining to organized labor activity in Baltimore, collected by a former graduate student in History at UM who had donated all of his photocopies to the library. I didn't get to spend nearly enough time there to go through all of the collection, but what I found in the clippings from the 1870s was very interesting indeed. But first, a preface:

In the mid-1870s, the nation was reeling from a deep economic depression that had struck in 1873. As usual, wage workers took the brunt of the impact, which didn't exactly make them feel to be on particularly stable ground when it came to providing for their families. Increasing tension between workers and corporations came to a head in the summer of 1877, and it all began in Baltimore. When the B&O RR cut wages yet again in mid-July, workers in Baltimore and Martinsburg, WV walked off the job. A riot at Camden Station on July 20 resulted in the deaths of several protesters when National Guard troops fired into the crowd. Martial law was established in Maryland the next day, but the fire of rebellion had already begun spreading to other industrial cities and small towns, primarily through the middle of the country. Cities that witnessed particularly violent confrontations included Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis (where a workers' committee actually established de facto control of the city for a whole week), and San Francisco (where the railroad riots were used as a pretext for anti-Chinese violence). By August 1, military and government forces had re-established control in most places, and the Great Strike of 1877, widely considered to be the first national uprising of workers against an unjust capitalist system, was over.

So what, you ask, does this have to do with Hampden? Two things, I say. First, as Bill Harvey has already told us in his book "The People Is Grass," employees of the Ma and Pa RR stationed in Hampden-Woodberry participated in the general strike. Perhaps more importantly, however, is what I found in the newspaper clippings in College Park: After the strike had ended, workers turned their efforts to a more socially acceptable form of political action--across the country, local "Workingmen's Parties" were established in an effort to give laborers a political voice in state and local government. As it turns out, Hampden was the epicenter of such activity in Baltimore County (it had not yet been incorprated into the city). Throughout the fall of 1877, Baltimore newspapers regularly reported on the organizational meetings of the Baltimore County Workingmen's Party that were held (most often) in Hare's Hall in Hampden. From what I understand, eventually control of the party moved to locales in the western part of the county. Unfortunately, most Workingmen's parties across the nation did not last very long, and I believe that Baltimore County's was no exception.

Clearly, however, these brief newspaper accounts provide a glimpse into a very interesting and largely hidden history of working-class activism in 1870s Hampden that deserves a much closer inspection. Thus, I will again end a post by calling for help: If you have any information about Hampden-Woodberry workers' participation in either the Great Strike or the formation of the Baltimore County Workingmen's Party, we'd love to hear from you. I can be reached by email at rchidest@umich.edu, or you can respond to this post.

A link and a book recommendation

2006-03-23T12:37:00.000-08:00

Well, now that all that crazy wedding stuff is over, hopefully I'll be able to begin posting on a regular basis again. I'll begin by making two recommendations, one for a website and the other for a book. The website is the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (better known as AFSCME) Laborlinks page (available at http://afscme.org/otherlnk/whlinks.htm#other) devoted to women's labor history. Not only is there an incredibly long list of links to various websites about women's labor history, but there's even a whole section just for "Women and Labor in the Textile and Garment Industries."

My second recommendation is for a book that I just recently read in one of my classes--Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure by Nan Enstad (published by Columbia University Press). This book recounts and provides a new interpretation of the famous shirtwaist workers' strike in New York in 1909 (in which some 15-20,000 female workers participated). I think this book is really important for the way in which Enstad critiques previous histories of this strike (which have largely been written from a middle-class, male perspective), and for the alternative reading of this event that Enstad gives. In the process, she also provides a great way of thinking about the female working class and particularly their leisure activities in new ways that don't force us to choose between viewing women workers as airheaded and prone to flights of irrational fancy and viewing women workers as rational, serious social actors. Rather, Enstad demonstrates that this is a false dichotomy. So, given that we know little about Hampden workers' lives in general, and even less about Hampden's women workers, I think that this book provides us with one way of reading the evidence we do have against the grain, giving us the ability to come up with better interpretations of the past.

Further Pacific Avenue excavations

2006-03-21T04:50:00.000-08:00

Thursday afternoon, some friends from the Archaeology in Annapolis project - Jenn, Amelia and Matt - joined me at the Pacific Avenue Site for excavations in a trench between the main house and an old foundation wall, which we are now calling Feature 1. For those unfamiliar with the term, a feature is anything made or modified by humans (an artifact) that is too large or complex to remove in one piece. So while a brick is an artifact, a brick wall is a feature, because you could never take it to the lab and analyze it as a whole. Other examples of features might include privy pits that have been filled with artifacts and soil or stains left in the dirt from old plantings or postholes.

Anyway, Feature 1, a dry-stacked stone wall lies parallel to a several-foot deep, 1.5-foot wide trench that has been filled with soil. Because new house construction will cover up that trench, we decided to dig an excavation unit within it in order to try to discover the function of the trench and to date the soils that lay within it. The hope was that we might find a builder's trench - another kind of feature - which might help us to date Feature 1 or the house.

Jenn began excavating through a thick,compact layer of clay and silty-clay fill that was roughly 9-inches deep. Within this layer, and especially at its base, we found a variety of artifacts dating from the early 1800's through the 1930's. This included ceramics, machine-cut and hand-wrought nails, along with window and bottle glass like this Old Grandad Bottle recovered from the base of the layer. Text on the bottle dates it between the 1930's and the 1960's. The upper layer of the trench was filled in sometime after 1930, likely all at once with soils from nearby. Beneath the clay fill lay a stratum of coal ash probably tossed into the trench from the nearby basement.

While Amelia and I screened soils and kept careful records of what we were doing and finding, Matt, a skilled artist, began a measured drawing of Feature 1. He carefully sketched each stone in place, fixing the feature in relationship to other parts of the site, including our excavation unit.

So far, we haven’t been able to determine the age or function of the trench. However, this information will likely become clear as we continue to excavate. I plan to be out in the field next for a half-day on Friday, and anyone who wishes is welcome to join me. Email me for more information.

"Excellent!"

2006-03-19T04:59:00.000-08:00

My wife and I had the great pleasure this weekend of attending the wedding of our very own Bob Chidester to his long-time paramour, Angela Hull. The two of them tied the knot at Trinity Church of Christ in Tiffin, Ohio around 2:30 in the afternoon. Loads of friends and family attended, and were invited to a reception at the Seneca Hills Banquet Hall.
Bob wants us all to know that this is the most formally we will ever see him attired, and that the shoes pictured below are certainly the fanciest shoes that have ever or will ever to adorn his feet.

Best Wishes to Bob and Ange from Hampden Heritage!

Pacific Ave. Update

2006-03-14T14:41:00.000-08:00

I spent some time this week - along with volunteer, fellow grad student and Medfield resident Jenn Babiarz - excavating shovel test pits (stp's) at the house on Pacific Avenue. "What," you may ask, "are shovel test pits?" They are 18" round excavations, dug on a grid, that are designed to detect the presence or absence of archaeological sites and deposits of artifacts (archaeologists call these deposits "features") in a given area. In this case, we wanted to find out if an area that will be covered by new construction contained any features, such as a filled root cellar, well, or cistern. Features such as these tend to catch lots of artifacts that can provide insight into how people lived in the past.

We knew going in that our chances were fairly slim. The area had already had some earth-moving occur, and asbestos clean-up removed a lot of soil. Nonetheless, I wanted to be reasonably sure that we didn't miss anything. We began by picking a datum point - a reference point on the landscape that isn't likely to move - and measuring a grid from there with long tapes. We then laid in ten excavation areas, each six meters apart in two rows within the impact zone of the new construction. Over the course of several hours, we excavated each of these down into the undisturbed subsoil. We located a number of artifacts, including some marbles, pieces of nineteenth century ceramic, and machine cut nails, but did not find evidence of buried features. We did however, take notice of a large foundation wall in the area that had sustained some damage from construction equipment.

We were glad to learn that the new construction would not hurt any important archaeological resources. Trenching activity in the previous week appears to have cut through an intact feature at the back of the lot, turning up a number of artifacts. We were also intrigued by this large foundation wall and plan to go back on Thursday to excavate within that trench. Hopefully, deposits we find there will give us some insight into the dating and purpose of that wall. Eventually, we hope to do more extensive excavations throughout the yard of this house, that will help us determine the construction date of the building, and more importantly tell us something we don't know about the lives of people who lived in nineteenth-century Hampden.

Update: I've invited Jenn to contribute to this blog. Anybody that comes out to volunteer can have a chance to post as well. Very exciting. Be sure and email if you are interested in joining us for some excavations.

Women's Labor History at CCBC

2006-03-13T04:31:00.000-08:00

Rosie the Riveter

The CCBC Labor Studies program will celebrate Women’s History Month with a special class on women in the workforce during World War II.

Thursday, March 16, 2006
5:45—8:30 p.m.
Room H-205 (the gym building on the Dundalk campus)

There will be a showing of the video The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, with a discussion by Veronica Clark, the chairperson of the local “Rosies.” This discussion is part of the Labor History II course at the college.

The public is invited and it’s free.

Call Bill Barry for more information (410) 285-9563

Emergency Archaeology in Stone Hill

2006-03-03T16:29:00.000-08:00

About a week and a half ago, community leader and activist Guy Hollyday called to let me know that a house on Pacific Street in Stone Hill was under rennovation, and that the owners were interested in including archaeology in the process. It turns out that the house was a large old stone farm house, which I've always thought would be an important place to dig because it seems so different from the other houses in the area.

While most houses in the neighborhood are duplexes, this one is a stand-alone two and a half story with two telescope additions, which are now separate properties. The new owners, Mark Thistle and his wife Robyne Lyles, are undertaking a massive project to rennovate the property. They've begun by stripping old paint and paper, and removing a later rear kitchen addition (pictured above). They plan to replace that addition with an updated kitchen, but before they do so, are willing to let some archaeology happen. Replacement of the metal roof is another major project.

Construction workers have already recovered a number of artifactsfrom the area, such as those pictured at right, which range in date from the early nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. Included in this small assemblage are a number of bottle fragments, the rim of a whiteware chamber pot, a sherd of a beautiful annular-ware teapot, as well as tobacco pipes, machine cut and hand-wrought nails and so forth.

I plan to do some limited excavations during the week of March 12. Likely I will dig a few shovel test pits in the area where the new addition will be constructed to see if significant subsurface deposits or features are present, but I also have a number of other research goals in mind. Included in these are the location of the building's privy or privies, location of a possible builder's trench to help date house construction (Architecural historians suspect that the house was built much earlier than the rest of the neighborhood, and artifacts from a builder's trench could help confirm this). Additionally, we'd like to learn more about a strange wall and trench (pictured below) of unknown function.

I've spent the last week or so trying to drum up a little grant support for this project, but to no avail. So I will be out there doing a little work over my spring break, pro bono. I would certainly welcome company from anybody interested in a little impromptu archaeology. I will likely get a few volunteers from groups around the area, but the more the merrier. If you're interested in helping out, please send me an email for further details. I will likely do the work early in the week, since I have to be out of town later in the week. If you'd like to see a few more images of the house, including some off Mark's fairly amazing handiwork check out my flickr photo set from my visit to the site last Friday.

Class on Workplace Discrimination

2006-03-02T05:57:00.000-08:00

The Announcement below comes from CCBC Labor Studies Program Director (and Hampden Community History Workshop Participant) Bill Barry Be sure to check out his great online project on Sparrows Point labor heritage.

With claims of workplace discrimination rising, it is essential that everyone understand the laws and enforcement procedures, as well as the impact of the law on non-discrimination clauses in your union contract.
The Labor Studies Program is presenting
a special class on workplace discrimination, with featured speakers:
M. Patricia Tanner, Enforcement Supervisor
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)
And
Lee Hoshall, Assistant General Counsel
Maryland Commission on Human Relations (and Lauraville resident)

TUESDAY, MARCH 7, 2006 6:00-8:45 p.m.
CWA Local 2101
8035 Harford Road (Parkville—near Exit 31-A of the Beltway)

These speakers are part of the Labor Law II class and are experts in their field. They will discuss elements of the law, latest developments, and the enforcement procedures for each agency.
This class will be free and open to all of you, with plenty of time for Q and A.

Labor and anthropology

2006-02-28T05:53:00.000-08:00

Check out Savage Minds for an example of anthropologists engaged in labor advocacy.

Class Consciousness part II

2006-02-19T11:36:00.000-08:00

Finally, the second part of my piece on class consciousness:

The “suburban factory village” so idealized by the Sun (See Part I) began in the 1820’s as a series of water-driven grist mills in the valley of the Jones Falls about three miles upstream of the booming shipping town of Baltimore. In 1833, Lloyd Norriss and William Tyson advertised the sale of a 238 acre parcel on the Jones Falls. The parcel contained mansion house, a farmhouse, a tavern, and a brick and stone grist mill capable of producing 120 barrells of wheat per day (American 28 May 1833. Ten years later that Woodberry Mill was one of eighteen in the Baltimore area and at least three in the immediate locality. Another, White Hall Cotton Factory, was still water-driven (American 25 Sept 1843). However, by 1850, Gambrill Carroll and Co. - White Hall’s owners - had begun the conversion to steam drive. By this time, there were also 27 dwelling houses for mill workers erected on mill property (American 2 March 1850). While paternalism certainly already had a past in Hampden, here is its appearance in the historical record.

By 1860, Hampden-Woodberry hosted a large foundry and the area was sufficiently populated to warrant the construction, by mill workers, of a library (Sun 3 Oct 1860). In the early 1870’s the village had blossomed into a full-fledged mill town, albeit a rustic one. Simultaneously an apex of industrial development and a backward suburb lacking even paved streets, Hampden played host to no less than five steam-powered cotton duck, or canvas mills, and supported as many as 8,000 inhabitants (Sun 8 August 1872; 6 April 1874). It was in this condition that the Maryland’s cotton mill labor delegates found the town on the night of their meeting:

Saturday night, while everything was activity in Woodberry, the people on their several errands were walking up steep and unpaved streets and groping in the dark, the only light in the place being that coming down from the windows of the cottages. With 8.000 inhabitants, large churches of various denominations, a daily newspaper, public halls, numerous large cotton factories and engine works and stores of all descriptions, Woodberry, situated three miles from the heart of Baltimore City has no gas, little or not supply of water, and the most meager kind of communication with the city, to which of necessity one half of the population have business every day (Sun 6 Apr 1874).

At the meeting, laborers from textile mills throughout central Maryland began discussed the possibility of organizing in order to reduce working hours and increase wages. The gathering signals the beginning of real labor consciousness in Hampden-Woodberry. Throughout the 1880’s and 1890’s, organized labor gained strength, particularly under the auspices of the Knights of Labor, and won a series of strikes, culminating in a successful strike of 1918. However, by 1923, labor seems to have lost some of its strength. After a winning a lengthy strike in that year, mill corporations began the slow process of closing their operations and moving them south, drastically changing the character and economy of the neighborhood.

Paternalism and Class Consciousness in Hampden: A two parter!

2006-02-09T05:21:00.000-08:00

Mill Housing 1920's
Originally uploaded by hamdpenarchy.

Even in its heyday in the 1870’s, Hampden’s system of paternalism was much romanticized. An August 1877 editorial, noting recent labor troubles in Baltimore -the Workingman’s Party had just held a platform meeting the previous day- advocated for the implementation of “something more than a money consideration” in the worker-capitalist relationship. “When you give men a root hold on the soil you make them conservative. They will be slow to strike, even when wages are reduced, if they have the consciousness of having been well-treated…a little suburban homestead of one’s own fosters the sentiment of local attachment…”(Sun 24 Aug 1877a).

In the same issue, the Sun’s publishers cited a local example – that of the Woodberry mills near Hampden. "…Controversies which exist between the employers and the employees in our midst make interesting a brief description of the system pursued in some of our suburban factory villages whereby such disagreement has been obviated. The system of all the cotton factories [in Woodberry] is similar in so far that the hands are colonized together in the vicinity of the works and that the more or less facilities for comfort are afforded by employers at as small an expense to the operatives as possible. All of the factories have erected cottages, which are rented to the operatives” (Sun 24 Aug 1877b).

The article makes particular note of the new “hotel,” complete with an organ and billiard table, that the James E. Hooper Co. to house unmarried women working in the mill. This image recalled the famous Lowell Mill Girls, supposed by many middle class Americans to be a model for a utopian paternalist industrial system.

In romanticizing the mill system in Hampden-Woodberry, the Sun author forgot that a mere three years since, Druid Mill workers had struck over mill owners’ failure to comply with a newly legislated ten hour workday for child laborers. Since child laborers represented the vast majority of the mill workers (the workforce of one mill is reported as consisting of 95% children), the new law meant that mills had to be shut down before the beginning of the eleventh hour, and despite the de facto end of the work day for adult laborers, mill owners persisted in running the mill overtime. The work stoppage, which generated “some little excitement” in the surrounding community, was cause for a meeting of 200 workers, who attempted to establish a strike fund (Sun 2 April 1874). While the mills restarted in less then a week, with mill owners acceding to worker demands, the incident was sufficient to spur labor leaders (not yet organized) from mills throughout central Maryland to meet in Hampden to discuss the new law and to consider forming a union (Sun 3 April 1874; 6 April 1874).

End of Part 1

A Plea for Help

2006-02-02T17:19:00.000-08:00

In doing historical research on Hampden, Dave and I have been plagued by a persistent problem: There are very few, if any, primary historical sources pertaining to Hampden workers' experiences from their own perspective. We have newspaper descriptions of strikes and labor organizing meetings, the company newsletter from the early 1920s to illustrate life in the mills, and historical booklets from jubilee celebrations that were written (usually) by middle-class Hampden residents. But thus far, the only primary sources directly representing workers' experiences are the oral histories performed by the Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage Project, Guy Holliday, and Dave. While these are excellent resources to have, there are other kinds of primary sources that would just as helpful, especially the further back in time they go (the oral histories mainly cover life in Hampden from about 1910 forward).

So, I am taking this opportunity to ask our loyal readers to share any primary sources they may have about life in Hampden during earlier times. Such sources could include diaries, letters, family bibles and geneaologies, union meeting minutes, etc. If you have anything like this, and are willing to share them with us, you will have our undying gratitude, and will also have made a very important contribution to the history of workers in Hampden.

"About Hampden"

2006-01-27T05:44:00.000-08:00

One of the most interesting things included in Notes On History (in the second issue, 1938) is a poem apparently written for the Hampden Golden Jubilee Celebration by Rosa Lohr titled "About Hampden." This verse reveals several things at once about the way in which Hampden was conceived by its leading citizens in the late 1930s (or at least, the way in which they wished to conceive it). First, personal relationships were very important, as revealed by the use of personal names. Mr. Heil, a grocer, and Mr. Grim, owner of a lunch room, were singled out for mention. Second, consumption was an important social activity: six of the poem's nine stanzas are about local businesses such as grocery stores, bakeries, candy shops, furniture places, hat cleaners, taylors, and so on. Third, industry played only a minor role in Hampden; the textile mills merited only a single mention, buried in a list of other businesses in Hampden in the penultimate stanza. Finally (and perhaps a bit paradoxically for a community that was spending so much energy remembering and memorializing the past), Hampden was conceptualized as a thoroughly modern and even progressive community, as evidenced by the last stanza.

Here's the text of the poem:

As we go around thru these busy streets
Many familiar faces and acquaintances we meet.
Saturday evenings the folks go shopping
Crossing streets the autoes keep them stepping.

Hampden has many stores from which you can buy
On the price and purse you must keep your eye.
Mr. Heil has a big grocery store on Falls Road
He's a butcher and dealer, has meat by the load.

Mr. Grim has a nice large lunch room
For home cooking 'tis the place to come
They serve meals, done in the best of style;
They'r congenial, and greet you with a smile.

New System and Rice Bakery on our main street
There you'll find good things that's very sweet
Candy kitchens, another name for candy store,
Where many folks go once a week and more.

Here friends and acquaintances so often meet
Have a friendly chat and an ice cream treat.
At Freelands' corner, there's been an alteration
There they have built a Sinclair filling station.

Ten Cent stores, only two are in the town
And furniture places, a number are around.
Barber shops galore to shave and to shorn,
And beauty shops since bobbed hair is worn.

Many of our people have a moving van
With all the facilities, they can
Move any cargo to far cities in the land.
Parrish's specialty is rug cleaning grand.

Most every business in this town you'll find
Hat cleaners, taylors, and the shoe shine.
Textile Industries, sewing and laundry work
Churches, Ministers, Doctors, Lawyers, Clerks.

Here's to Hampden, a town in Baltimore
With its achievements, and improvements in store
Greetings we offer on this day you celebrate;
The past is gone, and you are more up to date.

Metapost: Comments Wanted

2006-01-25T08:31:00.000-08:00

I used to chalk the fact that we never got any comments on the blog up to our lack of readership. However, now - mostly thanks to Bob's recent posts - that we've reached over 1200 hits, and folks are watching the blog with some regularity, I have decided to publish an appeal for additional comments. If you watch this space, and especially if you live in or near Hampden, or are from Hampden, or if issues around heritage, history or gentrification effect you in some way, please let us know about it. We really want this blog to be a forum for public discussion. Anyone can post comments - you don't have to be a Blogger member, and you don't have to leave your name.

In the spirit of this, I think I'm going to start publishing small posts from time to time asking folks what they think about pressing issues surrounding Hamdpen's past and present. But you don't have to wait for these things. Leave us a comment. If you're a regular lurker, let us know who you are, and tell us what keeps you coming back.

Stone Hill Sanborne Map

2006-01-24T09:05:00.000-08:00

721_FIELD_1915
Originally uploaded by hamdpenarchy.

I'v recently stumbled across a fantastic digital archive of Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. Pictured here is a section of a 1915 map that pictures the historic Stone Hill section of Hampden as well as a part of Chestnut Avenue and Mount Vernon Mill No. 3, now the Mill Center.

These maps are really useful for archaeologists of recent history and for anybody interested in historic landscapes because of the detailed information that they provide about buildings (often including what kind of building materials a structure is composed of).

At the same time, however they present some mysteries, because they don't tell us much about the people who lived at a site - who lived there, how they made ends meet, their patterns of consumption, and numerous other details. Such mysteries are in themselves a good reason to do archaeology and community history in places like Hampden.

Belated summary on "Notes on History"

2006-01-20T09:09:00.000-08:00

I just realized that right before Christmas I promised to post something on the 1938 periodical publication Notes on History during the first week of January. Well, school has been hectic, so I forgot, but better late than never:

The fiftieth anniversary of Hampden's incorporation into the city (1938) also happened to be the year in which Hampden resident Robert Hayes began publishing the periodical Notes on History: Hampden-Woodberry and other parts of Baltimore. Hayes apparently published this periodical from his home four times a year. The first issue was most likely published during the summer of 1938; at least four issues were published through May, 1939. After this date, the fate of the periodical is unknown. (If anyone out there has any more information about this, I'd love to hear from you.)

This publication consisted of various reminiscences of Hampden "old-timers," brief histories of local churches, old newspaper items about businesses and people in Hampden, and portions of the membership roll of Dennison Post No. 8 of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR—an organization in which many Hampdenites took great pride during the late 19th century), among other assorted items. Hampden's industries were rarely mentioned; two exceptions were the reprinting of obituaries for Robert Poole (owner of the Poole and Hunt Foundry, in issue number two) and James E. Hooper (owner of the Hooper mills in Hampden, in issue number 3). As in the jubilee souvenir book, names are prominent throughout Notes on History—the membership roll of the GAR is only one example. Others include lists of pastors and lay officials at various churches; members of social and religious organizations active in Hampden; the muster roll of the First Mechanical Volunteer Company from Baltimore (during the Civil War); business owners listed in an 1878 business directory of Hampden-Woodberry; a selection of names and epigrams from the autograph book of one Mollie DePasquale; and a list of the "Nativity of Some Hampden-Woodberry Families."

Ok, enough for now--I have to save something for next week.

place to stay for the summer

2006-01-11T08:29:00.000-08:00

Here's a non-historical post for the week. As a resident of Michigan during the school year, I will be looking for a place to stay in Hampden this coming summer while Dave and I are running our second archaeological field season. I really just need a room with kitchen access (internet access is desireable but not absolutely necessary), preferably in the price range of $300-$500 a month (or less, of course). So, if anyone has a room that they would be willing to rent out for part of the summer, please let me know. My email is rchidest@umich.edu. You'll have my undying gratitude.

Rewind 50 years . . .

2005-12-23T05:44:00.000-08:00

1938 was an important year in Hampden: it was the 50th anniversary of the neighborhood's incorporation into Baltimore City. Accordingly, a great "jubilee celebration" was held from June 11 to June 14 of that year, and a souvenir book containing "historical data" and a program of events, very similar to the one put together for the 1988 celebration, was published. According to the compilers of the historical data (Andrew Cavacos and Robert Hayes), it was collected hurriedly over four weeks, "obtained by interviews with old citizens, and from books and newspapers." "A Brief History of Hampden-Woodberry" then begins with a recounting of how Hampden got its name (from the Englishman John Hampden, who opposed the levying of taxes by Charles I; this name was bestowed upon the community by Henry Mankin, who during the mid-nineteenth century owned much of the land that eventually became Hampden), followed by a description of the Hampden Association (which was responsible for purchasing the land for Hampden and subdividing it into individual lots), leisure activities (including movies and baseball), the story of Hampden's annexation to the city and the civic involvement of its citizens, banks, the Boy Scouts, a second early building association, camp meetings, and churches. The mills and the Poole and Hunt Foundry are nowhere to be found. Names of people, however, abound: partial rosters of four baseball teams, members of the newly organized North Baltimore Hunting and Fishing Association, councilmen, mayors, legislators, magistrates and other public servants, bank directors and business owners, and Boy Scout troop masters were all listed by name.

In the paper that Dave presented at the AAA meetings recently, he mentioned that anthropologist John Hartigan has noted the tendency for working-class people to think of history in terms of people and events, whereas middle-class people tend to think of history in terms of places and objects. Thus, I find it interesting that in the case of the 1938 souvenir book, naming individuals seems to be so important. This is interesting because the compilers were not workers, but rather middle-class residents of Hampden. Cavacos was a pharmacist, and while I don't know Hayes's occupation yet, he later published the periodical Notes On History: Hampden-Woodberry and Other Parts of Baltimore out of his home, so I doubt he was working-class. This seeming contradiction may put into question Hartigan's contention, or it may lead to interesting insights about class and class relationships in Hampden.

I'll take a break from posting next week, seeing as how it'll be Christmas week, but the first week in January I'll post a description of, and my thoughts about, Notes on History.

More on the 1988 Centennial booklet

2005-12-16T08:12:00.000-08:00

Some more reflections on the 1988 centennial booklet, as promised . . .

Rather than focusing on those aspects of the community related to the cotton mills, the centennial booklet emphasizes other aspects of Hampden, specifically institutions, a general nostalgia for "the good old days," the importance of family, and consumption. Brief articles printed under the heading “Our History . . .” are on the topics of the Roosevelt Park Recreation Center (pg. 9), Hampden Elementary School #55 (pg. 10-11), Robert Poole Middle School and St. Thomas Aquinas School (both pg. 12), “The Avenue” and the Hampden branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library (both pg. 13), the Hampden Fire House (pg. 14), the Northern District Police Station (pg. 15), and the various churches of Hampden, Woodberry, and neighboring Remington (pg. 16-17). While each of these pieces outline their subjects’ histories, there is often no mention of how they fit into a larger historical narrative about Hampden. The description of Robert Poole Middle School comes the closest, expounding on the Irish immigrant for whom the school was named and his mechanical ability, which allowed him to found the Poole & Hunt Foundry in the mid-19th century and eventually become one of Hampden’s most successful businessmen. One striking characteristic of these short pieces, however, is their emphasis on Hampden’s place within greater Baltimore: The Roosevelt Rec Center was “the first such facility in Baltimore and the forerunner to all subsequent community-recreation facilities;” Hampden was the first area in Baltimore “to receive commercial redevelopment funds” from the city government, for the revitalization of “The Avenue;” the police station is “the oldest of the city’s nine stationhouses still in use.”

While the list of “One Hundred Nice Things about Hampden” contains a notable lack of items related to the area’s industrial past, nostalgia is laced throughout, in such items as “roots,” “old-fashion” barbers and doctors, “corner grocery stores that deliver to your door,” “tree-lined streets,” “war monuments” and “murals dedicated to heroes,” “memories of the dairy,” and “streetcars and trolleys.” Important aspects of a sense of community, including family, religion, and security, are also prominent on the list: “feeling safe,” “caring people,” “churches for everyone,” schools “where teachers are nice and helpful,” patriotism, “good foot-patrol policeman,” “a friendly firehouse,” “an Anti-Drug Program,” “church suppers,” and “American flags,” among other items.

The smorgasboard of advertisements and congratulations also displays a definite concern with issues of stability and family. Many items mention how long a business or organization has been located in Hampden, including Howard C. Heiss, Jeweler (52 years); C.D. Denison Orthopaedic Appliance Corporation (43 years); the Burgee-Henss Funeral Home (five generations); Gilden’s Food market (58 years); the Sheridan-Hood VFW Post 365 (43 years); Machinery & Equipment Sales, Inc. (“A Hampden Firm Since 1962”); and the New System Bakery (“Hampden’s Bakery for 65 Years”). (Despite the emphasis on heritage, very few of these businesses and organizations date from before the 1920s, and indeed most of them were little older than 40 or 50 years in 1988. Notable exceptions include the Burgee-Henss Funeral Home and the Tecumseh Tribe, No. 108 of the Improved Order of the Red Men, active in Hampden since the early 1890s.)

Furthermore, the non-business congratulatory ads also emphasized family and longevity. One full-page ad proclaims “Good Luck and Best Wishes from Six Generations of Hampdenites” (with pictures of one person for each generation) (pg. 23), while another sixth-generation Hampden family, the Arnolds, was content just to list names (pg. 99). Genealogies running three of four generations were also printed, as for the Hankin and the Jeunette families (pg. 26-27). The Cavacos family, long prominent in Hampden, bought a full page ad (pg. 67) in which they noted the many ways in which they have served the community (“Confectioners, Pharmacists, Business People, Real Estate Developers, Political Activists, Magistrate, Attorney”) and their devotion to the area (“5 Generations . . .Since the turn of the century continually committed to HAMPDEN and environs”). Senator Paul Sarbanes even included a photo of his family in his congratulatory ad (pg. 81). Even some businesses felt the need to emphasize their family orientation (or at least a willingness to participate in the rhetoric of familial relations): Top of the Tower Restaurant, owned by the Goodman family (pg. 97); Hansen’s, run by Butch, Patty, Melissa and Little Butch (pg. 85); J&B Wine and Liquor Mart, belonging to John, Brenda, Jack, Grace and Bernie (no last names needed) (pg. 64); the E-Zee Market Family (pg. 60); TV station WJZ13, which “is proud to be a part of the Hampden family” (pg. 49); the Drs. Wallenstein and the Drs. Hoffman & Associates (pg. 47); the Chestnut Pharmacy, Inc., “[n]ow in the 2nd generation of caring pharmacists . . . very proud to be the only family of Registered Pharmacists in Maryland who are all serving the same community” (pg. 43); and, again, the Burgee-Henss Funeral Home, established by Horace Burgee in 1899 and passing through the hands of his son to his grandson, joined in 1982 by the third Burgee’s daughter and son-in-law (pg. 24).

In the middle of all of the advertisements is a small section under the heading “Do You Remember . . .” The first two and the fourth pages (pg. 72-73, 75) consist of random trips down memory lane for older Hampden residents, including such things as old businesses, movie theaters, Christmas, and community activities such as the local ball club. Consumption is a big theme, represented not only by the simple enumeration of businesses, but also by the fond memories of shopping for Christmas (one woman remembered her usual Christmas list, including the stores she went to and the prices she paid); of going to the movies every week; and of shopping at the various stores along The Avenue. There are only two mentions of the mills or anything associated with them. One is the recollection by one man of “the boarding house at the corner of Ash Street and Clipper Mill Road” (pg. 72). The second is a memory of “the street car on Union Avenue that would deliver people that worked at the mills” (pg. 75). Also seemingly rather out of place in this primarily Anglo-Saxon community is the recollection of “the great smell of the Chinese Laundry on 36th Street” (pg. 75).

Heritage for Sale

2005-12-10T17:27:00.000-08:00

This post is an excerpt from a paper I presented last week at the Annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association.

Last summer, Bob Chidester and I participated in a public history event at a Baltimore retirement community. During the hour long talk, we discussed the history of Hampden, a central Baltimore neighborhood and mill village, along with our plans to conduct archaeology there. Two other speakers, one a local amateur historian, and the other –the moderator – a retired local schoolteacher participated in the talk with us. We discussed the neighborhood’s history as a mill town. We recounted how it developed from a series of mill-owned villages in the 1820’s, through its boom years in the 1870’s and into the hardscrabble era of the mid-twentieth century. Bob talked at length about the strike of 1923, an incident that is either left out of Hampden’s history or blamed for forcing mill owners to move their facilities to the South, where cheaper labor could be found.

Toward the end of the hour, we fielded questions from the crowd. The discussion turned to the topic of company-owned worker housing in the mill town, and the system of paternalism, or welfare capitalism. I made a comment that the paternalist system robbed people of freedom by linking their economic wellbeing to their good behavior in the mills, a fact that has not been lost on Hampden historians. I have presented this argument a number of times without much controversy, so I was a little surprised when the moderator came out with a rather angry attack against it. Instead of my class analysis, she asserted something to the effect of “The mill owners were kind and gentle leaders who built this town and you have no business defaming their character.” Such a statement, is not, of course merely a statement, but the instantiation of a particular, middle class discourse about Hampden history: one that says that the history of Hampden ultimately resides in its relic mills, and not its living people.

In moments such as this, narratives about the past come to bear on contemporary politics. Hampden may have roots in its working class history, but histories that stress the agency of the middle class have for some time elided those of the working class. In part, this is because the early documenters of Hampden’s history were middle class newspaper reporters or official business chroniclers. But, it is also to due to an unmistakable silence, or silencing of alternatives. More recently, developers have appropriated the notion of heritage in Hampden in order to amplify sales in a booming housing market. They have cooperated with the local merchant’s association to create a historic district centered on Hampden’s commercial Avenue, 36th street. Merchants are currently lobbying for legislation that would make chain stores illegal on the avenue, even though they are conscious that it will probably remove basic services from the area.

History and heritage, then, become no small problem for people in places like Hampden. As sociologist Sharon Zukin notes in her 1995 book The Culture of Cities, historic designations can raise the cost of living in a neighborhood dramatically. University of Texas anthropologist John Hartigan has written about the propensity of working class whites to regard history in terms of people and events in the past, while middle class whites tend to regard it as being related to material culture, particularly houses. In the second formulation, houses are of course also imbued with elevated monetary value because of their possession of a general history. Thus, what was once particular history – the history of working class struggle, or alternately of neighborhood unity– is transformed into a generic kind of history that is assumed to exist in old houses. Places become worth something not because they are associated with a particular person or event, but because they have “something about them,” “character” or “style” that speaks to the aesthetic sensibilities of middle class gentrifiers.

More importantly, history of this kind can be marketed. Archaeologists Yannis Hamilakis and Eleana Yalouri argue that archaeological remains possess symbolic capital, which can be exchanged for actual or monetary capital. Developers have certainly attempted to cash in on the symbolic values of ruins at the multi-million dollar Clipper Mill redevelopment in the nearby neighborhood of Woodberry. Here, they have explicitly used the heritage of a nineteenth century foundry –partially burned in 1996 - as a selling point for their new luxury condominiums. An advertisement for the new development reads as follows:

In 1853, a modest machine plant was born on Woodberry Road, just north of a nameless branch of the Jones Falls at the foot of Tempest Hill. The new plant, coined Union Machine Shops, housed Poole & Hunt's general offices, an iron foundry, erecting and pattern shops, a melting house and stables. Instantly it became the backbone of the Woodberry/Hamden community, employing thousands of men as it grew to become the country's largest machine manufacturing plants.

Today, Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse, Inc. is redeveloping Clipper Mill, creating a new urban corporate campus and upscale residential community.

This kind of marketing simultaneously erases the role of working people in the creation of the neighborhood and hijacks their history as a history of place over people. Notice the language that the ad uses: a machine plant, not a community or a person was "born" in 1853. People who live(ed) in surrounding neighborhoods – people with a real stake in how redevelopment goes, are dropped from the process.

Hampden Heritage

2005-12-08T15:30:00.000-08:00

I recently took a look at the souvenir booklet published for Hampden's 100th anniversary in 1988 (actually, this was the anniversary of Hampden's incorporation into Baltimore City, not of Hampden itself) and discovered some interesting stuff regarding how Hampdenites represented the community in the 1980s. What follows are my observations on the representation (or lack thereof) of Hampden's industrial heritage in this booklet; next week I'll post about some other themes in the booklet that seem to have been really important to the people who put it together.

The opening commentary states that Hampden is “a strong, working-class, residential community [in which] many of the attitudes that existed in the early mill community persist today including a strong sense of community and family” (pg. 3). Indeed, most of the rest of the booklet that is not taken up with advertisements is devoted to brief histories of community institutions such as schools, libraries, churches, the Roosevelt Recreation Center, and the fire house and police station, as well as public spaces like movie theaters and “The Avenue.” Even on a list of “One Hundred Nice Things About Hampden,” the first three items listed are friends, family and home. Not until item #75 is anything related to Hampden’s industrial past mentioned, the item being “stone houses” (in Stone Hill, the oldest part of Hampden). Craftspeople are item #86, right before “mill factory memories” at #87.

The only other acknowledgment of working-class or industrial heritage in the entire booklet is one page titled “The Craftsman” (pg. 8—in the “Our History” section) and devoted to Mill Centre, a former textile mill that has been renovated for commercial use by “artists, craftsmen and small businesses.” Interestingly, this vignette, written by historical geographer D. Randall Beirne (a professor at the University of Baltimore and author of a dissertation and several scholarly articles on Hampden), weaves back and forth between being an advertisement for the new Mill Centre and a description of Hampden’s industrial past. In addition to describing the industrial history of Hampden’s mills, this short piece emphasizes the importance of family. Beginning with a colorful description of Hampden during its early years, the author describes how the neighborhood “echoed from the sounds of clanging lunch pails and the voices of small children carrying the noon meal to their families in the mills.” Families, being preferred by the mill owners as a stable source of labor, worked together in the mills; houses and churches were built by the mill owners for families; and many people living around Mill Centre can still claim family ties to the textile industry there. Furthermore, the difference between skilled and unskilled labor is again minimized. While the author mentions that machines once did the work of weaving and spinning in the mills, while today the work in Mill Centre is performed by “skilled artisans,” he nevertheless draws a parallel between work then and work now: “Today the sounds of cheerful voices and humming machines in the new Mill Centre are reminiscent of the Hampden of a hundred years ago that claimed to be the fastest growing community in Maryland.”

Urbanite story on the web!

2005-12-07T05:26:00.000-08:00

The Urbanite story has made it onto the web. Unfortunately you can't see the pictures in the HTML version, although they are very nice. You can, however, read the text, written by Baltimore freelancer Alice Ockleshaw. In order to see the photos, download the pdf document from Urbanite's home page, or pick up a copy around Baltimore.

Religion in Hampden

2005-11-28T12:21:00.000-08:00

Just today I've written a little bit about religion in Hampden, using as my source a book entitled The History of Hampden Methodist Protestant Church, published in 1917 (the 50th anniversary of the founding of that church) and written by then-pastor Edward D. Stone. Not unsurprisingly, this church history is devoid of any mention of class struggle or the hardships of life in an industrial community. Perhaps more surprisingly, there is practically no mention of Hampden's industries. This book begins, naturally enough, with the story of the founding of the church, and it is in this section that the cotton mills and the foundry are mentioned for the first, and only, time. According to the author, the Hampden of the mid-19th century "was just a plain old-fashioned country village going along in its easy way," one in which there just happened to be cotton mills and a foundry. Despite the monotony of long hours in the mills, "The people in the village were . . . just country folks moved to town. . . . the hard evil things of the great city had not yet found root in the village" (pg. 8-9). Indeed, due to the "good business sense of the leading men of affairs" of the time, even in 1917 the sale of intoxicating beverages within a mile of the mills was prohibited.
Built in 1868, the history of the church is told as a triumphal history, one in which the good citizens of Hampden faced many serious challenges and overcame them all. Originating from a schism within the Methodist Episcopal church, the Hampden Methodist Protestant Church allied itself with the Baltimore circuit of the Methodist Protestant Church and began holding meetings in the home of one of its members. Soon the home was not big enough, and a small building was erected; again, the church quickly attracted so many members that it needed an even larger building. And of course, in later years renovations were needed and parsonages were constructed. Each time, the church nearly ran out of money to complete the task, miraculously finding it only at the last minute and through the devotion of its members (chapters 1-4).
Great emphasis is placed on the evangelism of the church. Hampden was a community that loved camp meetings, and its churches did not hesitate to supply this service. According to Rev. Stone, Hampden M.P. church became famous throughout its circuit for its revivals. Indeed, declared Stone, "Soul-saving can never be a side issue with the church that follows Jesus. It can never be an appendix, it must be the supreme business always" (pg. 22; emphasis in original). Descriptions of these revivals printed in the Methodist Protestant Church newspaper proclaimed the conversions of hundreds of souls in Hampden on a regular basis from 1867 to 1882, and Stone himself took responsibility for over one thousand conversions between 1913 and 1917 (pg. 22-25).
The middle part of the book is concerned with great individuals in the church's history, and especially its various pastors. This section is succeeded by chapters on the Emmanuel and Queen Esther Bible classes, for adult men and women respectively, as well as other church organizations. The description of the phenomenal growth of the Bible classes during the 1910s, and the zeal of their members for converting others, is enough to make one wonder how many of Hampden's residents weren't members of this church. Indeed, Stone claimed that his church had gained international notoriety, and a picture of the congregation's "native pastor," Rev. Yotaro Koizumi (who was spreading the message in Nagoya, Japan), is even included. The penultimate chapter of the book (chapter 15) consists of a number of songs and verses that were written by various members of the church, and the last chapter ends with the following verse (pg. 104):

One more day's work for Jesus,--
How sweet the work has been,
To tell the story,
To show the glory,
Where Christ's flock enter in!
How it did shine
In this poor heart of mine!

One more day's work for Jesus!
Oh, yes, a weary day;
But Heaven shines clearer,
And rest comes nearer,
At each step of the way;
And Christ in all
Before His face I fall.

Oh blessed work for Jesus!
Oh rest at Jesus' feet!
There toil seems pleasure,
My wants are treasure,
And pain for Him is sweet.
LORD, IF I MAY,
I'LL SERVE ANOTHER DAY!

Indeed, the theme of this verse runs throughout the book: the salvation of souls as a kind of work that makes one weary while also providing the deepest sense of satisfaction. However, I don't feel that all of this can be taken as evidence that religion in Hampden served to distract people from their position as exploited workers in the mills, as some scholars have done in other contexts. In fact, in many cases labor activists of the late 19th century used Biblical rhetoric to support their cause, as prominent labor historian Herbert Gutman has argued, and Methodism in particular was crucial to the formation of class-consciousness in England earlier in that century, according to even more prominent labor historian E.P. Thompson. So, the role of religion in Hampden during the late 19th and early 20th centuries is still a little bit fuzzy.

I haven't had a chance to look at other church histories from Hampden, but I do know that several exist, including histories of the Presbyterian and Baptist churches. (I am still trying to obtain a copy of the Presbyterian church history, and the Baptist church history is available through interlibrary loan.) If anyone knows of any other Hampden church histories, I'd love to know about them. There is also a recent doctoral dissertation about cross-racial appointments in the Methodist church using Hampden as an example, written by Paul Choonam Kim, then a pastor at the Hampden and Mt. Vernon United Methodist Churches. Unfortunately, the dissertation is written in Korean, a language which I cannot read. So, if anyone out there can translate Korean, or knows how to contact Rev. Kim, I'd much appreciate it.

AAA meetings this week

2005-11-28T10:42:00.000-08:00

Both Bob and Dave G. will be presenting our research at the American Anthropological Association meetings in Washington, DC this week. The meetings start Wednesday, and our session, chaired byDave G. and fellow community archaeologist Jodi Barnes, will focus on archaeology as a tool for activist research. Our session is Friday from 1:45 to 5:30 p.m. in the Mariott Wardman Park Hotel, easily accessible by the Red Line Metro.

Urbanite

2005-11-27T12:17:00.000-08:00

Check out the new piece about Hampden archaeology in December's Urbanite, available all over Baltimore, FOR FREE. Some nice photos and a nice piece in general. My only regret is that they do not, anywhere, mention the fantastic support that we received from Hampden Community Council this summer. As soon as they post the article on the Urbanite website, I'll post a link.

Hampden Reservoir

2005-11-19T14:37:00.000-08:00

25690078
Originally uploaded by Megananopod.

This afternoon, I've been editing transcriptions of oral histories recorded by the 1979 Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage Project. The project recorded oral histories all over Baltimore in 1979. A number of them remain untranscribed, and the tapes are stored in the special collections department at the University of Baltimore. Recently students from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Maryland have begun to work on the transcriptions as part of the Hampden Heritage project. Those texts are then posted on the project website. They are really good sources of information about Hampden's past and make for good reading.

Two of the ones I edited today mentioned the Hampden Reservoir. Engineer James Slade designed the reservoir in 1861, and it remained in Roosevelt Park for nearly 100 years.

During its time, the reservoir provided first drinking water, and later fed the city's fire hydrants. Shortly before 1960, crews building the Jones Falls Expressway began to fill in the reservoir with their excavation spoils, to the consternation of many community members. The site of the reservoir is now a series of open athletic fields.

One Hampden community member, interviewed in 1971, remembered that the city just began to fill in the lake one day, without community consultation:

I guess that was the beginning. I became concerned, because I learned at that time that the residents and the property owners in Hamden had no say, whatsoever, when Baltimore City officials made up their mind to do something. It made no difference whether they were going to tear a street up, whether the residents wanted it or didn’t want it, the street was going to go. Even with considerable opposition, with legal help…with paid legal help, Baltimore City did what they wanted to do. The beginning was the Hamden reservoir, which had been there for many, many, many, many years-- way before the 1900s...The first time that anyone from Hamden, the residents, knew that the lake was being disposed of was when the fence was torn down and there were dump trucks and dirt being dumped in along the edge by Potts and
Callahan, who were under contract by the city to build the Jones-Falls
Expressway. See, dirt had to be disposed of, obviously, but the residents
did not know of the plans for the disposition of the dirt from the causeway,
when they level it off and fill it out. So the contract was left with Potts
and Callahan with the understanding to fill in the Roosevelt park lake, because
it was closer to the excavation of Jones-Falls expressway. In that sense they wouldn’t have to haul the dirt as far so the city agreed to let them fill in the lake, and that’s exactly what they did. From that time on I swore to stay as knowledgeable as I could with what was going on around Hamden. Later on, I started to attend the Baltimore City council meetings every Monday night, the Zoning Commission on Tuesday, and the Liquor Board hearings.

Another Hampdenite, active for many years in the machine politics of the Trenton Democratic Club, tells a very different story:

Interviewer: In the 60’s and then the Trenton Democratic club and the Trenton Democratic Club was still strong in the 50’s. Is that right? Okay, in the 50’s there was talk about filling in the reservoir a couple of times, one or twice, and people got upset. And that what I know about people can call on the community issue, what is there any way you would act or did act?

Response: Yes. I was called by several people they said that they was having a meeting in the Hampden Methodist Church and that I won’t mention the man’s name, the man in charge of the Department of Woodbridge of (?) circle said that we was going to be there and… So, I called Jack Pollack and told him about the meeting and I said I was going to be there and wanted to get all the facts and everything and I wanted to get with you. Pollack said, “Maybe tomorrow and come over to my office and tell Ms. Herbert what you think.

Anyway, he had all the plans there and everything, there having been a kid and swam there a couple times, I have hurt myself . I know of others that got hurt because of the way the lake was slanted and all. It was not being used at that time and after I got all the facts together. And then I all considered, what’s involved, who is involved and why? We as human beings, we have our doubts about any kind of change. Any change we like is getting a new car. We have a dislike of , why you gonna put that light over there why you put it there; it got to be a reason for that.

Anyway, I went down and attended the meeting. They had the plans and everything down there and they had the architect and grant and all the blueprints and I look things over and then I tried to close my eyes and tried to make a mental picture of what it would be, what it was now and what is now, what it’s gonna be.

Actually , sure I could show you a picture of it. I got picture of it downstairs; you want to see it? Did you want to see it? I went to Jack the next day and I said Jack, “I said I have been personally involved because we were kids we dove off the granite building”. Down at the end and it is about as big as the room here and kids used to climb up and the stone stuck out about that far from the climb up on that and you could see the cobblestones, the cobblestone bottom there, if you don’t cut real quick you and see. But as kids this isn’t a challenge here and I know several that got hurt . I was convinced that was a better thing.

I think the two accounts are a really interesting illustration of different approaches to civic engagement in Hampden, and particularly into the power of Democratic machines in running this town until very recently.

Historical research on Hampden

2005-11-18T09:06:00.000-08:00

Hello again. Like Dave, I have shamefully allowed my contribution to this blog to lapse. However, I plan to begin a regular series of postings updating you on the historical research I'm doing while we are not in the field. I'm currently working on a paper that will be an analysis of the different ways in which Hampdenites and others have represented Hampden, and specifically its heritage, throughout the 20th century. In addition to the ethnographic observation of HonFest which I undertook this past summer, I have been collecting as much written material as I can find on the history of Hampden. While we usually think of historical documents as being things such census reports, newspaper articles, personal letters, diaries, etc., for the most part I am not looking at these kinds of things (newspapers being the exception). Rather, I am using what would normally be considered to be secondary sources--histories of Hampden and individual institutions within the community (such as churches), the programs for the 50th and 100th anniversary celebrations of Hampden's annexation to Baltimore, and other such things. Essentially, the paper that I am writing will consist of an ethnographic interpretation of these documents, with the goal of tracing the ideas and themes that have characterized the way that people think about Hampden, and especially how these ideas have changed over time.

In addition, I am trying to locate information that will help me to contextualize some of the community institutions that have been important in Hampden at various points, including the Sovereigns of Industry in the 1870s, the Junior Order of the United American Mechanics in the late 19th century, and the Improved Order of Red Men from the 1890s to the present. Oddly enough, the Labadie Special Collection at the Hatcher Library of the University of Michigan, where I am currently a student, seems to be the only place in the country that has information on the Sovereigns of Industry--quite fortuitously, for me.

So, like Dave, I will try to post to this blog about once a week, updating our readers on what sources I've been able to acquire and how I am interpreting those sources. I would love to hear feedback on my interpretations, especially if you disagree, since a Hampdenite's perspective on these sources will undoubtedly be very different from my own--and also since these perspectives in themselves will help to sharpen the ethnographic understanding of Hampden that is so important to our project.

Rescussitation

2005-11-11T05:17:00.000-08:00

This so-called "blog" has suffered immensely from neglect, and I have been feeling guilty about it. SO, this is my online pledge to you, gentle reader, that I will post at least once a week. It will probably be on Fridays, but maybe also on Tuesdays.

I hope that nobody minds if provide a brief recap of what this blog is about and the project that it is linked to. We (Bob and I) are archaeologists for the Center for Heritage Resource Studies at the University of Maryland. We are not paid for this distinction, except for when we can raise money through grants that pay us. Bob is also a PhD student at University of Michigan, and I am a PhD student at American University.

We started thinking about this project in the spring of 2003, while finishing our master's degrees at the University of Maryland. Bob had a strong interest in labor archaeology and history, and was preparing a survey of labor archaeology sites in Maryland. I had a strong interest in responsible and community archaeology, as well as the archaeology of the Chesapeake. I also lived in Hampden, and had, in wandering around the neighborhood, become interested in its history. We decided to undertake a community archaeology project in Hampden together. We envisioned a project that would involve as many community members as possible in as much decision-making as possible while incorporating history, archaeology, and ethnography.

I began by researching area history and writing a small grant to fund public history workshops. The plan was to hold three of these workshops in order to try to understand how people in Hampden thought about their history and, in turn how we should proceed with our research. After getting a small grant from Maryland Humanities Council we held three such workshops in the fall of 2004. Guest speakers (Bill Harvey, Bill Barry and Bob Chidester) lead the attendees in lenghty discussions of heritage issues in Hampden.

One of the things that these discussions verified for us was that Hampdenites have a strong sense of history and heritage, and that it factors into their contemporary consciousness. Another insight was that many peoople who live here divide the neighborhood into "Old Hamdpen" and "New Hampden", and that this division has all kinds of consequences for social life in Hampden. Hampdenites also told us that they were concerned with issues of class, race, gentrification, family structure and gender, and labor.

From these workshops, we developed a loose research design to guide our future archaeological research. It is available for download at our Website, along with several newly transcribed oral histories from the Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage Project. With the generous help of three landowners, we were able to find three sites in Hampden, dating from three different eras to begin our archaeological explorations.

We began in July of 2005 with a group of kids from the Baltimore City Youthworks program and the Hampden Community Council, who provided generous funding for the project. We excavated at three sites, recovering hundreds, if not thousands of artifacts from our test units. We held two site open houses and, I think, accomplished a great deal over the course of the summer.

We are currently seeking additional funding to continue the project next summer. We are also in the process of cleaning, cataloging, and interpreting artifacts, a process that is quite painstaking. Since Bob and I are currently in school, this is proceeding more slowly than expected. We hope, however, to have a brief report on our initial excavations by the spring.

Public Anthropology Day at American University

2005-10-14T11:40:00.000-07:00

Hampden Archaeologist Dave Gadsby will present a session on Community Archaeology at American University's Anthropology Graduate Student Open House. The presentation will focus on the past summer's archaeological work in Hampden and on ongoing efforts to conduct a community based heritage project.

Public Archaeology Day #2

2005-07-27T12:53:00.000-07:00

If you missed our first Public Archaeology Day on July 16th because of the rain, don't despair--Public Archaeology Day #2 is coming up this weekend! On Saturday, July 30th from 10 am to 2 pm we will be working at 721 Field St. in Stone Hill, the oldest part of Hampden. As before, anyone interested in volunteering or just simply finding out more about what we're doing is welcome to come. In addition to getting a chance to help us in the excavation process, visitors will be able to learn about the process of archaeological research from preliminary preparations through excavation, lab work, analysis and interpretation, and dissemination of final results.

We will also be offering site tours of our two other dig sites, which we have now more or less completed, as well as brief talks on the history of Hampden.

Please note that none of the houses at our excavation sites will be open to the public, and that visitors to the sites should park only on public streets and not in alley ways.

In the event of rain, the event will be cancelled.

If you would like specific directions on how to find us on Saturday, you can contact us at dgadsby@anth.umd.edu or rchidest@umich.edu. We hope to see you there!

Young Archaeologists

2005-07-15T15:28:00.000-07:00

Youthworks Archaeologists
Originally uploaded by Megananopod.

These three young men are hard at work excavating a 1-by-1 meter unit at one of our sites in Hampden. We are really lucky to have these guys. Despite wilting heat and humidity, they remain energetic and continue to learn the techniques of archaeological excavations. They come to us from the Baltimore City Youthworks program, which is paying their salary for six weeks this summer.

Public Archaeology Day This Weekend--Addendum

2005-07-15T04:32:00.000-07:00

In our post yesterday, we forgot to mention two important things about the properties where we will be giving tours, etc. this Saturday.
1. The houses on these properties are both private residences, and as such will not be open to the public, either for tours or bathroom use. (However, both sites are about a block away from The Avenue, so public restrooms are nearby.)
2. At 3337 Falls Rd., our base of operations, we are digging in the back yard, which is bordered by an alleyway. Please do not park in this alleyway, as it will block passage for neighbors. If you are driving to the site, please try to find parking on either Falls Rd. or Hickory Ave.

Thanks for your consideration.

Public Archaeology Day This Weekend!

2005-07-14T08:19:00.000-07:00

This weekend we will be hosting our first Public Archaeology Day as a part of the Hampden Community Archaeology Project. This Saturday from 10 am to 2 pm we will be working at 3337 Falls Rd., and anyone interested in volunteering or just simply finding out more about what we're doing is welcome to come. In addition to getting a chance to help us in the excavation process, visitors will be able to learn about the process of archaeological research from preliminary preparations through excavation, lab work, analysis and interpretation, and dissemination of final results. We will also be offering site tours of both 3337 Falls Rd. and another dig site, as well as brief talks on the history of Hampden.

Please note that niether of the houses at our excavation sites will be open, and that the visitors to the sites should park only on public streets and not in alley ways.

In the event of rain, the event will be cancelled.

If you would like specific directions on how to find us on Saturday, you can contact us at dgadsby@anth.umd.edu or rchidest@umich.edu. We hope to see you there!

Hampden Archaeology in the News

2005-06-30T14:13:00.000-07:00

The first ever news item on Hampden archaeology! We are in the field and already finding some interesting things. Starting next week, we will be bringing volunteers out to the site. Please contact us if you are interested in spending a day digging in Hampden.

New research on the 1923 strike at the Mt. Vernon-Woodberry Mills

2005-06-29T06:53:00.000-07:00

This spring I had the opportunity to do some research on the 1923 strike at the Mt. Vernon-Woodberry Mills by members of the United Textile Workers union. I became interested in this strike when I read about it in Bill Harvey's book "The People is Grass." According to Harvey, when he interviewed people for the Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage Project in 1979 and 1980, virtually no one either could or would remember anything about it, despite the fact that many of the interviewees had lived in Hampden at the time. He struggled to understand what could have caused such an incident of mass forgetfulness, and concluded that it was likely due simply to the fact that the workers lost the strike, and thus it was a painful memory. Thinking that there might be more to the story, I went back to the available primary sources and have emerged with a slightly different interpretation of events than did Bill Harvey.

Before getting to my interpretation of the source documents, I'll provide a basic summary of the events associated with the 1923 strike. After World War I, a time of booming profits for many industries associated with the war effort, the U.S. economy slumped in the early 1920s. In April of 1923 the Mt. Vernon-Woodberry Mills Co. announced that it was going to make its textile operatives work for 54 hours per week, up six hours from the then-current 48-hour work week. In addition, it was only going to give workers a 7.5% increase in pay (which, given the number of extra hours they would have to work, actually amounted to a cut in "real" wages). Workers quickly banded together, garnered the support of the Baltimore Federation of Labor (hereafter referred to as the BFL; the local branch of the American Federation of Labor), formed a local of the United Textile Workers union, and voted to strike on April 19th. At first the strikers were upbeat and sure of a quick victory. It soon became clear, however, that the company had no intention of negotiating with the strikers. BFL president Henry Broening called upon newly-elected Baltimore mayor democrat Howard Jackson to mediate between the two sides, and Jackson was to be helped in this endeavor by a representative from the U.S. Department of Labor. A meeting was set for June 6th, but when that day came representatives of the company failed to show up. The strike continued for another two or three months, but soon the company began evicting strikers from their company-owned homes and the strikers began to run out of money to support their families. Some finally returned to work at the Mt. Vernon mills while others refused to humble themselves in such a way, and found jobs elsewhere in Baltimore. Thus ended what was described by the Anuual Report of the Commissioner of Labor and Statistics for Maryland as the largest strike in the state that year.

The first important thing I noticed was the problem of just how many workers went on strike (at the time, the company employed about 1,800 workers). Estimates varied from as little as one-fourth to as much as 90% of the workforce at the Mt. Vernon mills. All of the higher estimates, however, were made by the BFL or the strikers themselves, and thus it seems likely that they may have been exaggerating the number of strikers in order to win support. A more likely estimate seems to be that about one-third of the workers eventually joined the strike. Why would so few have gotten involved? Again, a little-known feature of company town life may provide the answer: around the end of World War I the Mt. Vernon-Woodberry Mills Co. instituted an employee representation plan, what labor historians refer to as a "company union." Publicly, industrialists claimed that "company unions" were created for the benefit of the workers and provided a more congenial atmosphere for settling labor-management disputes. In reality, however, "company unions" were just an attempt by management to control collective worker action in the same way that it already controlled other aspects of workers' lives, such as their housing, consumer activities and places of worship. "Company unions" rarely brought important worker concerns about issues such as wages, hours and workplace safety before management. Apparently, the employee representation committee at the Mt. Vernon mills was good enough for many of the workers in 1923, despite the fact that it did not try to protect workers' interests by protesting the increase in work hours and drop in real wages.

The second interesting feature of the primary documents relating to the strike is the manner in which coverage of it ends. While the Baltimore Sun printed weekly updates from late April through early June, after the failed mediation meeting with Mayor Jackson the Sun carried not even a single article about the strike for the rest of its duration. Similarly, the BFL weekly meeting minutes (archived in the Maryland Room of Hornbake Library at the University of Maryland-College Park) do not make even a single mention of the strike after early June, failing even to mention the inability to get the company to show up for the mediation meeting.

There are more details about this strike in the primary documents, and there are many more primary sources I have yet to consult, but from the research I have done so far I have been lead to the following interpretation of why so few people were willing or able to tell Bill Harvey about the strike in 1979-1980: For those who participated in the strike, it constituted a painful memory not simply because they lost but also because they felt betrayed. They likely felt betrayed not only by the company itself, but also by the BFL, which moved on to other business quickly and more or less forgot about the Mt. Vernon mills workers, as well as the non-striking workers in their own company, who chose to stay with the "company union" rather than join the United Textile Workers. Perhaps more importantly, however, many people could not remember the strike not because it was a painful memory for them, but because at the time it simply had not been a big deal to them. Less than half of the Mt. Vernon mills workforce went on strike, and they were likely more concerned with holding on to their jobs regardless of their participation in the strike (by November of 1923, several months after the end of the strike, the company had reduced its workforce to under 1,000 people). Furthermore, a good portion of Hampden's workers didn't even work for the Mt. Vernon mills, but worked instead for the Hooper Manufacturing Company, which experienced no labor disputes that year. Thus, the supposedly largest strike in the state in 1923 (largest in terms of lasting the longest; there were shorter strikes that summer in Baltimore that involved far larger numbers of workers) seems not to have been as big a deal as we might assume, especially after its first month and a half.

If anyone has any more information regarding this strike or other perspectives on it (or even on organized labor activity at other times in Hampden's history), I'd love to hear from you.