Elkridge Landing: The Port That Almost Beat Baltimore

Before Baltimore existed as anything more than a surveyor's line on a map, the tobacco port at Elk Ridge Landing was already sending ships down the Patapsco River toward the Chesapeake. The oldest settlement in Howard County, Maryland, Elkridge began in the late sixteen hundreds when Puritan colonist Adam Shipley received a land grant from Lord Baltimore along the Patapsco. By the early seventeen hundreds it had grown into a bustling port that rivaled the tiny new settlement of Baltimore in commercial importance.

In seventeen thirty-three, the Maryland General Assembly passed an act to lay out a town at Elk Ridge Landing, though formal incorporation was not completed until later attempts. Hogsheads of tobacco were rolled down Rolling Hill to the waterfront, loaded by enslaved laborers onto oceangoing ships, and carried to British markets. Iron, grain, and lumber followed. For decades, Elkridge Landing was the dominant port at the head of the Chesapeake tidewater system.

Then came an enemy no fort could stop: silt. Decades of deforestation upstream loosened the soil, which washed down the Patapsco and slowly clogged the river channel. By the mid-eighteen hundreds, Elkridge Landing could no longer accommodate deep-draft vessels. Baltimore, with its better-protected harbor on the Chesapeake proper, had surged ahead beyond competition. The landing silted over entirely by eighteen sixty-eight.

But Elkridge gave America something else. When the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the first common-carrier railroad in the United States, needed to bridge the Patapsco River gorge between Elkridge and nearby Relay, engineer Benjamin Henry Latrobe the Second designed the Thomas Viaduct, built between eighteen thirty-three and eighteen thirty-five. Named for Philip E. Thomas, the first president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, it is the first multi-span masonry railroad bridge built on a curve in the United States, and some historians consider it the oldest multiple-arch stone railroad bridge in the world. It is still in active service today, carrying Amtrak trains over the same gorge where tobacco ships once waited to load.