Your route passes two restored rowhouses on Lemmon Street that safeguard the story of Irish immigrant labor. The Irish Railroad Workers Museum occupies two restored rowhouses on Lemmon Street that were built in the 1840s to house Irish workers employed on the Baltimore-Ohio Railroad and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. These were the people whose hands actually built the infrastructure of industrial America — men from County Cork, County Clare, and County Mayo who had fled poverty and arrived in Baltimore with little but their willingness to work.
The Irish workers in Baltimore dug canal channels, blasted railroad cuts through mountains, and laid thousands of miles of track under conditions that were brutal by any standard. Workers were paid in scrip redeemable only at company stores, housed in crowded barracks or shanties, and subjected to disease outbreaks — cholera epidemics killed hundreds of canal workers in the 1830s. Thousands of workers were buried in unmarked graves along the rail lines and canal routes.
The museum preserves two rowhouses that are among the oldest working-class homes in Baltimore, furnished with period artifacts that show how an Irish laboring family would have lived. Baltimore was one of the primary ports of entry for Irish immigration, and by 1850, Irish-born residents constituted nearly fifteen percent of the city's population.