Low ceilings and worn wood floors greet you at an address on Thames Street that has poured drinks since 1775. The Horse You Came In On Saloon has operated in one form or another at this address on Thames Street since 1775, serving the sailors, dockworkers, merchants, and — if local legend is to be believed — literary figures who populated Fells Point through the centuries. The bar's most famous claimed customer is Edgar Allan Poe, who is said to have been a patron in the weeks before his mysterious death in October 1849.
Poe was found delirious on a Baltimore street wearing clothes not his own; the last confirmed sighting of him was in Baltimore, and some accounts place him at this bar or establishments nearby in his final days. Whether Poe drank here or not, the atmosphere is entirely consistent with what you might imagine of a nineteenth-century Baltimore waterfront bar: low ceilings, wood floors scarred by generations of boots, and a long bar polished by a century and a half of elbows. Fells Point was one of the wettest neighborhoods in one of the wettest cities in America — sailors ashore spent lavishly at the waterfront taverns, and the competition for their business was fierce.
The bar has survived Prohibition, urban renewal, and the complete transformation of its neighborhood. It remains a genuine piece of working Baltimore, not a reconstruction of one.