Baltimore Museum of Industry

Baltimore Museum of Industry
1415 Key Highway
Inner Harbor South
Baltimore, MD 21230
410.727.4808
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Baltimore’s Inner Harbor was chiefly a light freight commercial port and passenger port until the 1950s, when economic shifts caused a steep decline in freight and passenger traffic. Rotting warehouses and piers were initially replaced by open, grass-covered parkland that was used for recreational purposes. In the following decades the Inner Harbor was transformed into a major cultural and economic area of the city. A major milestone was the construction of Harborplace, a waterfront festival marketplace which officially opened in 1980. Since then, the Inner Harbor has become the home to many tourist attractions, including the National Aquarium in Baltimore and the Maryland Science Center.

The Baltimore Museum of Industry was founded in 1977 for the purpose of preserving the City’s rapidly disappearing industrial heritage. A few years after its founding the museum moved to the Inner Harbor’s historic Platt Oyster Cannery building, a setting which contributes a definite air of authenticity to the facility. Special galleries recreate parts of a cannery, a garment loft, a machine shop and a print shop. Exhibits are dedicated to major industrial companies that made the region a base of operations, such as food industry giants McCormick & Company, Domino Sugar and Esskay Meat Products.

What I found most interesting was the gallery dedicated to early forms of commercial road transportation. Exhibits include a moving truck (“moving” is used here to mean “relocating”) purchased in 1914, a refrigerated meat truck from 1917, an ice cream wagon from the 1850s, an oil tank wagon from around 1915 and a telephone company truck used in the 1930s. There is plenty to see in the Baltimore Museum of Industry; in order to give this article some focus I’ll concentrate on what I saw in this single gallery.

In 1896, Isaac Davidson began Davidson Transfer & Storage with a single horse and wagon. The company expanded and eventually they advertised 24 hour service routes between Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York. The company exists today in the form of Davidson Transfer, an affiliate of United Van Lines. This Autocar was purchased in 1914 and made daily runs from Baltimore to Washington D.C. It had a top speed of 20 mph with solid rubber tires and a crankshaft motor.

This 1917 refrigerated meat truck delivered Esskay Quality Products. The name Esskay came from the initials of the two founder’s last names. Their Highlandtown, MD meat packing plant became one of the largest on the Eastern seaboard. The Highlandtown plant was closed in 1992, but Esskay continues to produce a variety of food products, including the official hot dog of the Baltimore Orioles and the Baltimore Ravens.

Jacob Fussel owned this horse drawn ice cream wagon. He had started out as a milkman, and would occasionally find himself with a surplus of cream at the end of the day. He used the surplus to make ice cream and sell it for a price far below that charged by confectioners. The ice cream was quite popular and Fussel abandoned milk distribution altogether. In 1851 he opened Baltimore’s first wholesale ice cream factory, and was later to open plants in Washington D.C., Boston and New York. Ice cream was preserved by mixing salt with water and then freezing the combination, which has a lower freezing point than pure water. The problem was that when the solution dripped on wagon springs and gears it caused them to corrode rapidly.

Louis Blaustein, a Russian immigrant, borrowed money from a friend and with his son Jacob founded the American Oil Company (later absorbed by the Amoco Corporation) in 1910. They distributed kerosene to the Baltimore region from this 200 gallon horse-drawn tank wagon, and revolutionized the business by storing their product in a metal tank, instead of leaky wooden barrels. With the growing popularity of automobiles, gasoline became the main product. A later key innovation of theirs was the drive-through gas station, the first of which was opened on Cathedral Street in Baltimore.

The Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company (now part of Verizon) ordered this Ford Model A truck to be custom built for telephone installation. The truck was retired in 1934, after which time the Grosche Battery Company used it for service calls and delivery of automobile batteries. A founder of the C&P Telephone Company restored this truck in 1960.

You can find antique Hubley toy trucks and Marx toy cars and trucks on my Vintage Toys website.