This stretch of waterfront once echoed with caulking mallets, the same trade that trained Frederick Douglass and later gave rise, under Isaac Myers, to the first Black-owned shipyard in America. Frederick Douglass — born Frederick Bailey in 1818 on a Maryland Eastern Shore plantation — was sent to Baltimore as a young boy and hired out to work in the Fells Point shipyards, learning the trade of ship caulking. In this work he was surrounded by free Black workers and Irish immigrants, laboring alongside men who could come and go as they pleased, collect their own wages, and make their own choices.
The contrast with his own condition was acute. In the shipyards he also learned to read, partly by tricking young white boys into teaching him letters, partly by studying the letters stamped on ship timbers. He escaped from Baltimore in 1838, borrowed a free Black sailor's identity documents, and boarded a train to freedom.
Twenty-five years later, Isaac Myers — a Baltimore-born free Black man — organized the Chesapeake Marine Railway and Dry Dock Company here after Black caulkers were driven out of the white shipyards by labor competition. Myers's cooperative enterprise employed 300 Black workers and operated successfully for years, a demonstration of Black economic self-sufficiency in the Reconstruction era. The park commemorates both men and the African American maritime community that shaped this waterfront.