The B&O Railroad: America's First, and What It Cost

On August twenty-eighth, eighteen thirty, a steam locomotive named Tom Thumb raced a horse-drawn car over thirteen miles of Baltimore and Ohio Railroad track. The locomotive lost. A mechanical failure in its engine left it falling behind in the final stretch, and the horse won. The newspapers reported the race with a mixture of mockery and fascination.

It did not matter. Within a decade, the argument was settled. The horse was grazing in a field somewhere; the railroad was building west toward the mountains. The Baltimore and Ohio had been chartered in eighteen twenty-seven, the first common-carrier railroad in the United States, meaning the first line that carried freight and passengers under contract for paying customers rather than for a single company's private use. Mount Clare Station, here in Baltimore, was its origin point. By eighteen fifty-three the line had reached the Ohio River at Wheeling. The economic geography of the entire Appalachian corridor shifted in consequence.

But the railroad that the founding generation built as a triumph of commercial engineering was, by eighteen seventy-seven, also the railroad that its workers had reason to despise. The B and O had cut wages twice in two years. On July sixteenth, eighteen seventy-seven, workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia, walked off the job. The strike spread to Baltimore within forty-eight hours. Camden Station, less than a mile from where you are standing now, was where the confrontation came.

The state militia was ordered to move the strikers. A crowd that contemporary accounts estimated at fifteen thousand gathered at the station. The militia fired. Contemporary sources recorded deaths in the range of nine to twelve; precise counts varied between newspaper accounts and official reports filed in the days after the shooting. Federal troops arrived under orders from President Hayes, the first time in American history that the United States Army was dispatched to suppress a domestic labor strike. The template set that summer in Baltimore would be used again, and again, for the next seventy years.