Joppa, Maryland, A Ghost Town That Outlasted Baltimore

There are almost no traces left of Joppa, but for sixty years this was a busy tobacco port on the Chesapeake. Founded in seventeen oh seven on the Gunpowder River, Joppa became the county seat of Baltimore County in seventeen twelve and for a time rivaled Baltimore itself as a tobacco-shipping hub, with about fifty homes, a church, a jail, inns, shops, and warehouses. Then the river began to silt up.

Upstream farming and land clearing sent so much sediment downstream that the harbor slowly became impassable. When the county seat moved away in seventeen sixty-eight, Joppa declined rapidly. By eighteen fourteen it was nearly abandoned.

The name survives as a neighborhood in Harford County, a footnote to a colonial city that simply disappeared beneath the mud.