Baltimore Museum of Industry: The City That Canned America

The brick building sitting on Baltimore's waterfront south of the Inner Harbor has the distinction of being the only surviving oyster cannery building in the city, which is a remarkable thing to say about a place that once had more than a hundred canneries lining its harbor shores. Today it houses the Baltimore Museum of Industry, a testament to a city that was, for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one of the great manufacturing capitals of the world.

Platt and Company built this cannery in eighteen sixty-five, right after the Civil War, on the waterfront district of Locust Point. Chesapeake Bay oysters arrived by the bushel, shucked by armies of workers, packed into tin cans sealed by hand, and shipped across the country by rail. Baltimore's canning industry was processing over ten million dollars of goods annually by eighteen eighty, employing close to thirty thousand workers. The city did not just can oysters. It canned tomatoes, corn, and fruit from the Maryland Eastern Shore, and it pioneered the industrial techniques that made mass food preservation possible in America.

The canneries were joined by steel mills, copper smelters, garment factories, and shipyards. Bethlehem Steel's Sparrows Point plant, a few miles east, was once the largest steel mill in the world. Baltimore built the ships that carried American goods to global markets, and its workers, many of them African American migrants from the rural South, immigrant families from Poland, Lithuania, and Greece, built those ships by hand.

Mayor William Donald Schaefer proposed the museum in the late nineteen seventies as factories were closing and jobs were leaving. The Platt cannery opened to visitors in November nineteen eighty-one. It preserves working machinery, the tools of individual trades, and the stories of the people who made them run, a monument to a Baltimore that is still visible in its bones, if you know where to look.