Your walk begins in Baltimore's oldest continuously inhabited neighborhood, the birthplace of its maritime identity. Fells Point was established in 1763 by William Fell, a Quaker ship carpenter from Lancashire, England, who recognized that this stretch of shoreline offered the deepest natural anchorage on the upper Chesapeake Bay. Shipyards rose along the waterfront and quickly earned a reputation for building some of the fastest vessels in the world — the Baltimore Clipper, a sleek, sharp-prowed schooner designed for speed, became famous on every ocean.
During the Revolution, privateers sailing from Fells Point preyed on British shipping so effectively that London newspapers called Baltimore a nest of pirates. Frederick Douglass was hired out to work in the Fells Point shipyards as a young enslaved man in the 1830s, caulking ship hulls alongside free Black workers who introduced him to the idea that a man might be free. The neighborhood absorbed wave after wave of immigrants — Irish fleeing the famine, Poles and Ukrainians from Eastern Europe, Greeks and Italians — each group leaving churches, markets, and taverns that still stand today.
The cobblestone streets, the Federal-style rowhouses with their white marble stoops, and the working waterfront make Fells Point the most intact colonial neighborhood in the city.