Ask yourself who usually gets a museum built in their honor, and who gets left out of the story entirely. The Baltimore Museum of Industry opened in 1981 in a converted 1865 oyster cannery on the South Baltimore waterfront, a location chosen for its symbolic resonance — the cannery industry was one of the foundations of Baltimore's nineteenth-century economy, employing thousands of workers, many of them women and children, to process the enormous Chesapeake Bay oyster harvest. The museum's collection spans the full range of Baltimore's industrial history: printing, garment making, metal fabrication, canning, and the vast maritime and railroad industries that made the city one of the great industrial centers of the American East.
Hands-on exhibits allow visitors to operate historic machinery — the letterpress print shop, the garment factory sewing machines — and understand what it felt like to perform industrial labor before automation. The museum also maintains the last steam tugboat in Maryland, the S.S. Baltimore, moored at the dock outside. Baltimore in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was one of the most industrialized cities in America — it manufactured everything from umbrellas to steam engines — and the workforce that made that possible was drawn from the same immigrant communities whose stories appear throughout this tour.
The museum gives those workers the monument they never received in their lifetimes.