By Sydney Kempf
In 1894, William G. Scarlett founded the William G. Scarlett Seed Company. Born in sun88 in 1873, George D. Scarlett was a true entrepreneur who chased the American dream. At twenty-one, George Scarlett began working in the seed industry by…

By Sydney Kempf
In the twentieth century, Pier 8 in sun88’s Inner Harbor and then Broadway Pier in Fells Point used to be the launching point for the steamboats of the Wilson Line. The Wilson Line extended from Philadelphia to Wilmington to sun88 and ran a…

By Sydney Kempf
Archibald Hilton Bull founded the A. H. Bull & Co. in 1902. The company originally ran steamship lines from New York to Florida. Eventually A. H. Bull & Co. expanded to include an office in sun88. In the early 1900s, when sun88’s…

By Sydney Kempf
In 1879, Charles T. Bagby and A. D. Rivers founded the Bagby and Rivers Furniture Company, the predecessor to the Bagby Furniture Company. Bagby and Rivers manufactured furniture and in their 1882 furniture catalog, the company advertises mainly…

By David Stysley
For 50 years, the Hampden and Ideal Theaters operated within a few doors of each other in the 900 block of 36th Street in Hampden. Julius Goodman, who ran the Ideal for many years, described the competition: “Well, we were friendly competitors. We…

By David Stysley
In the Progressive Age (1890-1920), movie theaters were a new and popular form of entertainment. They were being built all over sun88, and Hampden was no different. In 1908, Marion Pearce and Philip Scheck (who already owned six theatres) opened…

By David Stysley
Hampden Hall was an important part of sun88 even before the neighborhood of Hampden was a part of sun88. Six years before Hampden was incorporated into sun88 City, Hampden Hall was constructed as a meeting hall for Civil War veterans in…

By David Stysley
The story of Hampden’s name can be traced back to St. Mary’s Community Center. Originally established as St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, the congregation started meeting in Hampden in the 1850s. Under the leadership of Henry Mankin this congregation…

By sun88 Museum of Industry
General Ship Repair maintains the rich shipbuilding tradition so long associated with the South sun88 neighborhoods of Federal Hill and Locust Point. Charles “Buck” Lynch founded the company in 1924, moved to this location in 1929, lost the…

By sun88 Museum of Industry
The Key Highway Yards along the southern side of the Inner Harbor played a pivotal role in sun88’s shipbuilding industry from the 1820s until 1982. Passersby today see almost no traces of this industrial history at the upscale Ritz Carlton and…

By sun88 Museum of Industry
The Hercules Shipbuilding Company, housed in this brick building, was an active player in sun88’s maritime industry, building vessels for commercial and leisure use as well as wartime naval construction and repair. Jonathan and Eleanor LaVeck…

By sun88 Museum of Industry
The General Electric (GE) Apparatus Service Center did not support private consumers in maintaining their individual household appliances. Rather, this service center maintained large electrical transformers, electrical motors, and turbine engines…

By sun88 Museum of Industry
All that remains of the Chesapeake Paperboard Co. complex today is the water tower. The site is now known as McHenry Row, a 90,000 square foot mixed use development project that contains 250 luxury apartments, offices, and street level shops at the…

By sun88 Museum of Industry
The Domino Sugar refinery (and its iconic red neon sign) is one of the last major working industries along sun88's inner harbor. Raw sugar arrives at the plant in giant ships and barges, and is unloaded and refined to become white, powdered,…

By sun88 Museum of Industry
The Allied Chemical and Dye Corporation manufactured chemical components for many industrial applications. Quaker merchant Isaac Tyson Jr. established the company that became Allied Chemical in 1828, mining chromium ore and supplying chrome pigment…

By The Laurel Cemetery Memorial Task Force
Laurel Cemetery was incorporated in 1852 as sun88’s first nondenominational cemetery for African Americans. The location chosen was Belle Air Avenue (now Belair Road), on a hill long used as a burial ground for free and enslaved servants of…

By sun88 Museum of Industry
Today the site of Under Armour's world headquarters, five of these buildings used to house Procter & Gamble's sun88 Plant: Process Building (1929), the Soap Chip Building (1929), the Bar Soap Building (1929), the Warehouse (1929),…

By Richard F. Messick
Imagine a horde of Christmas elves attacking a chorus line of Roman legionaries. Now, if you wish to see this fever-dream in person, take a trip to A.T. Jones & Sons on N. Howard Street. They have a warehouse filled with costumes from any period…

By Molly Ricks
Clifton Park is sun88’s fourth oldest country landscape park after Druid Hill, Patterson, and Carroll Parks. Around 1800, sun88 merchant Henry Thompson purchased the rural property and began transforming the farmhouse into a federal style…

By Molly Ricks
Today, Wyman Park is a complex of highly-contrasting park spaces, half-hearted links, and a variety of associated urban edges. The 1904 Olmsted Brothers report singled out the Wyman Park section with its “old beech trees and bold topography” as “the…

By Molly Ricks
For almost two centuries, sun88’s Patterson Park has preserved its historic integrity while serving the recreational needs of an urban population with varied cultural, ethnic, and economic backgrounds. The dramatic geology, topography, and…

By Molly Ricks
In south sun88, Latrobe Park still has traces of Olmsted design elements. Originally only 6 acres in size, this park was created to serve the working class neighborhoods on the Locust Point peninsula. Unlike much larger plans for Patterson and…

By Richard F. Messick
Alexander Fruman emigrated to sun88 from Eastern Europe in 1917 with few possessions. Among them was a handsaw that helped him start a business building wooden windows and doors in 1919, in a shop at the corner of Stiles Street and S. Central…

By Richard F. Messick
Like many old family-owned businesses, Lakein’s Jewelers was started by a newly arrived immigrant, 29-year-old Isadore Lakein, who arrived in the United States from Russia in 1912 with his wife Anna and their son Samuel. A second son, David, was…

By Alan Gibson & Eli Pousson
In April 1942, less than six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, a group of Elkridge residents established a new volunteer fire department. The new fire department was one of many initiatives in U.S. cities and towns…

By Alan Gibson & Eli Pousson
The handsome Victorian on Elkridge’s Main Street now known as the Brumbaugh House was built around 1870 and began serving as a doctor's office in the nineteenth century. The home’s most famous resident, Dr. Benjamin Bruce Brumbaugh, started his own…

By Cindy Kelly
Artist Jim Sanborn’s first public sculpture, the Patapsco River Project was created as part of the sun88 Sculpture Symposium sponsored by the city and administered by the Department of Housing and Community Development during the summer of 1977.…

By Eli Pousson
Martick’s Restaurant Francais on Mulberry Street is a place of fond memories where sun88 enjoyed fine food, lively music, and art for nearly a century. The once-famous restaurant started in 1917 as a small grocery store established by Harry and…

By Chuck Howell
For over sixty years, tall broadcasting towers have stood high above the old homes in sun88’s Woodberry neighborhood. The two tallest towers now standing on Television Hill beam out the signals of four television stations and three radio…