Baltimore

On 7 February 1904 a fire started in a downtown warehouse and burned for thirty hours, taking about fifteen hundred buildings across seventy blocks. Fire companies came from Washington, Philadelphia and New York and found their hose couplings did not fit Baltimore's hydrants — which is the reason the United States has standardized fire hydrant fittings today.

Nobody died. The district was rebuilt within two years, and the photographs of the ruins and of the rebuilding are the most complete record of any American urban fire of the period.

Fort McHenry guards the harbor entrance and is where Francis Scott Key watched the British bombardment through the night of 13 September 1814 and wrote the verses that became the national anthem. The flag he saw was thirty by forty-two feet, deliberately oversized. Photographs of the fort from this period show it in use as an army post rather than a monument.

The Baltimore and Ohio was the first common-carrier railroad in the United States, chartered in 1827, and the city has never stopped being a railroad town. The Mount Clare shops, the roundhouse, the Thomas Viaduct of 1835 — all of it appears in the archive, and the B and O ran its own photographic department.

Baltimore is a row-house city and the white marble steps are its signature. They were scrubbed weekly, by hand, and photographs of women doing it were a genre in themselves. The stone came from quarries just north of the city.

The harbor was working throughout — oyster boats, the skipjacks that dredged under sail because Maryland law required it, canneries, and the immigration pier at Locust Point, which was the second largest entry point in the country after Ellis Island.

Around five hundred and ninety images name Baltimore.

The Canal Terminus That Powered Itself With a Waterfall