John Payne, in his comprehensive 1798 tome, A New and Complete System of Universal Geography, noted the flouring mills along the Jones Falls near sun88. At the time, wealthy abolitionist Elisha Tyson owned two of the ten documented mills: one at the location of what is now Mill No. 1, and another in Woodberry. The Woodberry mill is described as a "handsome three story building, the first of stone and the other two of brick" that "can grind at least eighty-thousand bushels a year."
Tyson's Woodberry gristmill sold to Horatio Gambrill, David Carroll, and their associates who expanded the structure into a textile mill they called the Woodberry Factory. It was the partnership’s second venture in the area after buying and converting Whitehall gristmill (just south of their new factory) for textile production in 1839. The mills manufactured cotton duck, a fabric primarily used for ship sails during a time when clipper sailing ships dominated local trade. Through the low cost of raw cotton cultivated with enslaved labor and an ability to attract workers despite lower wages than competing mills in the North, the mills along the Jones Falls cornered the market. Their largest buyers were in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. They also found markets overseas in British provinces, South America, and England.
The Woodberry Factory was a purely functional building: a long, three story building designed to maximize daylight and accommodate the machinery powered by horizontal line shafts. A clerestory roof provided more light. Each floor housed machinery for a different step in the manufacturing process. A central stair tower was topped with a dome shaped bell tower. The bell rang on a schedule to call nearby workers to the factory for their shifts.
The new textile mills required a large workforce and this large workforce needed homes. To this end, owners erected mill villages close to their factories. Woodberry began as a string of Gothic Revival duplexes built of locally quarried stone and resembling country cottages. The homes included yards for growing produce, raising livestock, and planting flower beds. Gambrill erected a church in the village. A school was also built, although it was common for children of mill workers to drop out early to work in the mills and help support their families. In 1850, an all-in-one general store, post-office, and social hall was constructed near the railroad tracks.
Additional structures went up as operations grew and new technologies emerged. When the factory started using steam power in 1846, a boiler house was built on the side facing the Jones Falls. The factory acquired a fire engine some time before 1854; a shrewd acquisition considering the tendency for factories full of “cotton-flyings” (or fuzz) to catch fire and burn. The most significant addition to the site was Park Mill, built in 1855 to produce seine netting for fishing boats.
By the turn of the twentieth century, most of the mills in the Jones Falls Valley were brought under a national textile conglomerate, the Mount Vernon-Woodberry Mills. In the 1920s, the company began shuttering the mills in favor of its plants in the South. The Woodberry Factory was sold to Frank G. Schenuit Rubber Co. in 1924. In 1929, a six-alarm fire destroyed the building. Residents across the tracks had to evacuate their homes and the blaze was large enough to attract a reported crowd of 10,000 people.
Schenuit manufactured truck and automobile tires, and later manufactured aircraft tires for the military during World War II. The company became dependent on government contracts and nearly went bankrupt after the war. By the 1960s, the company began expanding into the home and garden industry by buying out smaller manufacturers that made wheelbarrows, industrial wood products, lawn equipment, exercise equipment, and lawn and patio furniture. By the 1970s, Schenuit had moved out of the tire business. In 1972, after Hurricane Agnes, Schenuit sold the Woodberry plant to McCreary Tire and Rubber Company. McCreary closed down just three years later when the company laid off all of the plant’s three hundred workers.
Park Mill sold in 1925, and over the next four decades, the mill was used by a variety of companies including the Commercial Envelope Company and Bes-Cone, an ice-cream cone manufacturing company established by Mitchell Glassner, who invented one of the early machines for that purpose.
Today, Park Mill is leased to a number of small businesses. The Schenuit factory remains empty after yet another fire, one of the only major industrial buildings in the Jones Falls Valley awaiting redevelopment.
Founded in 1863 by German immigrants Ludwig Hilgartner and Gottfried Schimpf, Hilgartner Stone has made some of the nation’s finest stonework for over one hundred and fifty years. Of course, the company has made a unique mark on both sun88’s sculpture and architecture during that time. The company’s work can be found at the sun88 Museum of Art, Greenmount Cemetery, Walters Art Museum, Maryland Institute College of Art, the sun88 War Memorial—along with other major landmarks. The company’s most widely used product, however, may also be one of the most humble: the city’s iconic marble steps.
Born in Hessen, Germany in 1832, Ludwig H. Hilgartner immigrated to the United States at age nineteen in 1851. Hilgartner found work as a stone-cutter and, in 1863, worked with stonemason Gottfried Schimpf to form a new stone company, Schimpf and Hilgartner. By 1870, the company maintained an office on Lexington Street in downtown sun88 and a busy workshop at the southwest corner of Pine and Mulberry Streets. Just a few years later, in 1873, Hilgartner bought out Schimpf. By the next decade, Hilgartner’s two sons were learning the business as apprentices and eventually joined the firm, changing the name to L. Hilgartner and Sons.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hilgartner’s thirty horsepower stone-cutting engine turned sun88 County marble into thousands of steps to supply the city’s building boom. The company grew over the years to such an extent that by 1910, it opened a branch office in Chicago. Hilgartner even added a marble purchasing agency in Carrara, Italy and a workshop in Los Angeles to feed the demand created by new aqueduct projects and a burgeoning movie business in California.
The onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s hit Hilgartner hard. The company was able to survive thanks to business from the Dupont Company, which had plenty of money and did a lot of building, taking advantage of cheaper prices for labor and materials at the time. All the same, the company had to layoff a substantial portion of its workforce and close some of its factories. Hilgartner continued to shrink until 1971 when the firm was sold. Once the largest finisher of slab marble in the U.S., Hilgartner had shrunk to just seven employees.
Over the last thirty years, the firm has slowly come back to life. Though much of Hilgartner’s stone work has been on a grand scale, some of its smallest works are marble door stops. Probably made with scrap marble, they were popular at the turn of the last century. They made a brief resurgence in 1976 when Hilgartner offered them at the sun88 City Fair, where the company set up a booth to showcase its work. The City Fair, begun in 1970, was held for 21 years as a venue to showcase sun88’s neighborhoods and institutions. The small door stops were so popular that Hilgartner started receiving orders for them to commemorate weddings, births, and other special occasions. The company’s current owner, Tom Doyle, purchased the firm in 1986 and led the business to grow and take on large projects again.
One of Hilgartner’s recent projects was the conversion the former Maryland Masonic Grand Lodge on Charles Street into “The Grand” event venue. When they started on the project, Hilgarten’s masons were surprised to find a room elaborately decorated with a wide array of marble. A little research revealed that the room began in the early twentieth century as a Hilgartner showroom that promoted the company’s offerings. Today, the room is back in operation as one of the most extravagantly decorated ladies rooms visitors are likely ever to see.
Good fortune has played no small part in keeping Hilgartner Stone alive for over 150 years. If it wasn’t for a move from downtown to south sun88 in the early years of the twentieth century, the business would have burned down with the rest of the heart of sun88 during the 1904 fire. Since it became one of the few stone companies still in business after the fire, it flourished during the rebuilding. In addition to restoring stone in old buildings, such as St. Ignatius Church on Calvert Street, today Hilgartner also does plenty of new construction like a chapel in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City and a new floor under a dinosaur exhibit at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. The company left its long-time home on Sharp Street in 1975 to move to 101 W. Cross Street, and, in 2016, moved again to the current location on Severn Street.
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Like the countless seeds the Meyer Seed Company has sold over the past hundred years, the story of this long-running legacy business starts with water. Before he held a seed bucket or a watering can, the company’s founder, John F. Meyer, worked as a sailor, eventually becoming first officer of the schooner Katie J. Irelan. On September 22, 1897, on a voyage carrying scrap iron from sun88 to Wilmington, North Carolina, a severe storm swamped the ship. Another ship struggling through the storm spotted the Katie J. Irelan in distress and rescued Meyer and his crewmates less than two hours before the 708-ton ship sank into the ocean. Meyer retired from sailing the next year. Later, Meyer fondly recalled the eleven years he spent on the “adventurous yet hard life” at sea before he “drifted back to sun88 and decided to stick to dry land.”
Meyer started selling seeds for the long-established Bolgiano Seed Company at the northeast corner of Pratt and Light Streets. In September 1910, he partnered with German immigrant G.W. Stisser to form the Meyer-Stisser Seed Company initially located at 32 Light Street. After the end of World War I, Stisser returned to Germany so, in 1921, Meyer bought out his interest in the business. By 1927, the business boasted a proud motto: “Sterling quality, courteous treatment and punctuality.”
Meyer’s assistant, Webster Hurst, Sr., bought out Meyer (but kept the name) in the 1930s. Today, three successive generations of the Hurst family have continued to run the company and devote their lives to selling seeds. Apparently, the seed business is as much about cultivating people as plants. At least two of the current employees have been with the company for over thirty years. Charles Pearre, a former employee, worked for over fifty years selling and developing seeds. In addition, there are even customers who have bought Meyer Seed for multiple generations.
Meyer Seed is now located in a nondescript warehouse on Caroline Street between Harbor East and Fells Point. Stepping inside, however, offers a rare sight—hundreds of varieties of seeds displayed in big banks of wooden drawers and long rows of bins used by countless customers over the decades.The company’s wide variety of seeds for sale has helped Meyer Seed compete with “big box” stores that don’t offer nearly the same range of options for gardeners.
Meyer Seed has been around long enough to see some of their seeds rise and fall in popularity. After the “Long John” melon was developed in Anne Arundel, County, Meyer Seed was the first company to start selling the melon’s seeds in 1930. But, in the decades after World War II, very few farmers or gardeners planted what are now known as “heirloom” plant varieties like the Long John melon. Fortunately, in 2004, David Pendergrass of the New Hope Seed Company in Tennessee learned of the long defunct melon and obtained some starter seeds from the USDA. The plants grew and Pendergrass reintroduced the melon to the world in 2007. Whether it’s seeds for heirloom melons or cutting edge organic gardening seeds, for over one hundred years, Meyer Seed remains at the center of sun88’s seed world.
When sun88an William Painter invented the bottle cap in 1891, it didn’t take long for beverage companies (beer brewers in particular) to realize its value, and for Painter to realize he needed to build significant manufacturing facilities to keep up with demand. Painter's enterprise, the Crown Cork and Seal Company, opened its first big production facility in 1897 on Guilford Avenue and not long after expanded by opening a larger complex on Eastern Avenue in Highlandtown in 1906. The Guilford Avenue complex continued as the base of operations for custom building the sealing machinery while the Highlandtown complex acted as the hub of Crown Cork and Seal’s manufacturing operations.
In 1910, the Highlandtown complex expanded again to include two new buildings. Both used mill construction with brick exteriors and granite trimmings as well as new advances like fireproof elevator shafts, fire escapes and ventilators. The five story building had two massive water towers that held 15,000 gallons each to be released in case a fire broke out inside.
Crown Cork and Seal’s Highlandtown complex became the base of machinery production in 1928 after the owners abandoned the Guildford Avenue plant. Despite its modern fire protections, however, the added activity at the complex and its constantly whirring electrical machines were at high risk of fire. In 1940, managers at the building made twenty-six calls to the fire department, almost all of which appeared unnecessary, until one signaled a very real five-alarm fire. Despite the loss of $500,000 in baled cork, the company minimized the damage and kept churning out bottle caps for the world’s beer brewers.
In 1958, Crown Cork and Seal moved its headquarters from sun88 to Philadelphia and the owners sold a group of thirty buildings, including the Guilford Avenue complex, to the city for $1.5 million. The Highlandtown plant continued to operate for nearly 30 more years, but finally closed in 1987 as use of aluminum and plastic containers rose and the demand for glass bottle caps waned. Today the building houses artist studios and light manufacturing and is occasionally used by movie studios.
Before the rise of textile mills, the fast-flowing water of the Jones Falls instead powered gristmills supplying sun88's lucrative flour trade. Whitehall Mill was established as a gristmill in the late 1700s and owned by James Ellicott, a member of the same family that settled Ellicott City. In 1839, David Carroll, Horatio Gambrill, and their associates purchased the mill from Ellicott and converted it to a textile mill for weaving cotton duck, a tightly woven canvas used to make ship sails.
Over the years, the mill was expanded, burned, rebuilt, renamed, and converted to a number of different commercial uses. To house their workers, Carroll and Gambrill built Clipper Village, a cluster of homes located across from Whitehall for the mill's workers. The capacity of the mill was doubled in 1845 and the mill was converted to steam power to keep up with manufacturing demand. By 1850, forty men and sixty-five women were working at Whitehall Mill with an output of 220,000 yards of cotton duck. Carroll and Gambrill quickly expanded by converting other gristmills along the Jones Falls to textile mills.
The three-story granite factory burned in 1854 and, after it was rebuilt, renamed Clipper Mill in recognition of the ships that used the cotton duck cloth for sails. By this point, William E. Hooper, a sailmaker who expanded his business to selling raw cotton to the textile mills, had joined as a partner. In the 1860s, Gambrill sold his shares in the company to Hooper and opened Druid Mill. After another fire in 1868, Clipper Mill was rebuilt at twice its size. The mill was sold in 1899 to the Mount Vernon-Woodberry Cotton Duck Company, a national conglomerate. In 1902, the mill manufactured the cotton duck for Kaiser Wilhelm's yacht, which was christened by Alice Roosevelt as the Meteor III. In addition to ship sails, the mill manufactured other heavy canvas items such as mail bags for the U.S. government.
In 1925, the mill was sold to Purity Paper Vessels, a firm that manufactured paper containers that could hold semi-liquid foods. The mill's cotton manufacturing machinery was shipped to Mount-Vernon-Woodberry Company's Southern mills in Tallassee, Alabama and Columbia, South Carolina. During the year of the sale, several elegiac articles appeared in the sun88 Sun that looked back on the time when sun88's cotton duck manufacturing was at its peak and its clipper ships dominated international trade. Purity Paper Vessels later sub-leased part of the building to the Shapiro Waste Paper Company. In 1941, half the building was leased by the Army Quartermaster Office to be used as a warehouse for the Third Corps Area.
By the 1940s, the I. Sekine Brush Company, a maker of men's grooming products and toothbrushes, occupied the mill. The company was founded in 1906 and had been operating plants in sun88 since 1928. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, H.H. Sekine, who had been living in the United States for over twenty years, was arrested and interrogated, along with dozens of foreign-born sun88ans connected to nations on the Axis side. At the time, Sekine was operating a factory in Reservoir Hill that the government shut down for two weeks. When it reopened shortly before Christmas, Sekine paid all his employees in full for the time they lost during the closure. Over time, portions of the Clipper Mill property were leased to other companies, including Penguin Books, The Maryland Venetian Blind Manufacturing Corporation, and Star Built Kitchen Units. Sekine maintained operations at the Whitehall mill location until 1992 when it was sold to Komar Industries.
Most recently, developer Terra Nova Ventures transformed the building into a mixed use development with a planned market. Architects Alexander Design Studio restored much of the long neglected mill, bringing new life to the historic structure. Numerous improvements were made for flood prevention, including the construction of a pedestrian bridge over Clipper Mill Road.
Mt. Washington Mill—historically Washington Mill, part of Washington Cotton Manufacturing Company—is one of Maryland’s earliest purpose-built cotton mills. In the early nineteenth century, the Napoleonic Wars and the Embargo Act disrupted imports and created new demand for locally-made cotton goods. When the nearly four stories tall stone Mt. Washington Mill began operation in 1810, it could fill this new market.
Located near the center of the complex, the mill was first powered by the current of the Jones Falls. Indentured servants, primarily young boys, worked to make fabrics like ginghams and calicos. The operation grew and the mill began hiring more men, women and children as workers. Most lived nearby in Washingtonville, a company town that, by 1847, included a company store and nearly forty homes between the factory and the railroad tracks. Workers were called to their shifts by the sound of the bell ringing in the mill's cupola.
The mill passed through several hands before 1853 when industrialists Horatio Gambrill and David Carroll acquired the facility. The pair had been quickly erecting textile mills in the Jones Falls Valley for the production of cotton duck, a heavy canvas used primarily for ship sails. By 1899, it had become part of the Mt. Vernon-Woodberry Cotton Duck Company — a large conglomerate of textile mills comprising fourteen sites in Maryland and beyond — which would eventually control as much as 80% of the world’s cotton duck production until 1915, when the conglomerate split apart.
Washingtonville the mill village was soon overshadowed by the residential suburb of Mt. Washington, established in 1854 on the other side of the tracks. Mt. Washington became a fashionable neighborhood for middle-class sun88ans looking to get out of the city—sun88 remained easily accessible by train. Life in Mt. Washington was much different than life in Washingtonville. Children were under little pressure to drop out of school to work in the mills to support their families, homes were spacious and built to fine standards, and residents had access to plenty of leisure activities and entertainment, such as at the "Casino" where all sorts of exhibitions and games and held.
In 1923, Washington Cotton Mill was purchased by the Maryland Bolt and Nut Company and repurposed for the production of metal fasteners like bolts, nuts, screws, and rivets. Industrial buildings were added to the campus and existing ones were outfitted for working steel. In 1972, Hurricane Agnes wrecked much of the industrial campus and in response, the factory was sold to Leonard Jed Company, a manufacturer of industrial supplies. It was sold again in 1984 to Don L. Byrne, a manager at the plant, before being redeveloped by Himmelrich Associates in the 1990s for office and commercial use.
Washingtonville never underwent the same revitalization. The village was largely razed in 1958 to make way for the Jones Falls Expressway leaving only a single duplex house still standing today.
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