Hampden: The Mill Village That Stayed Working Class

The neighborhood along West Thirty-Sixth Street grew up in the eighteen thirties to house workers at the textile mills on the Jones Falls. Mill-owning families built stone row houses on the slopes above the valley, and workers filled them. At their peak in the eighteen nineties, the Hampden and Woodberry mills together employed four thousand people. Many workers came from the hill country of Appalachia, drawn by the steady mill wages.

Hampden joined Baltimore city in eighteen eighty-nine. Through the nineteen seventies it remained a predominantly white, working-class enclave with a strong union tradition. Workers here had been joining Knights of Labor locals and economic cooperatives since the eighteen seventies. The mill companies gradually moved south in search of cheaper labor, and the industrial base eroded after World War Two. The four-block commercial strip on Thirty-Sixth Street, known locally as The Avenue, reinvented itself in the nineteen nineties with boutiques and restaurants. The row houses and the hill-country accent both remain.