President Street Station

About this property

The President Street Station in Baltimore, Maryland, is a former train station and railroad terminal. Built in 1849 and opened in February 1850, the station saw some of the earliest bloodshed of the American Civil War (1861–1865), and was an important rail link during the conflict. It is the oldest surviving big-city railroad terminal in the United States. In 1997, a preservation campaign and renovation project was completed, enabling the station to be operated as Baltimore Civil War Museum. The Baltimore and Port Deposit Rail Road (B&PD), founded in 1832, completed a rail line from Baltimore to the western shore of the Susquehanna River in 1837. The railroad's Baltimore terminus was on the east side of the basin now known as the Inner Harbor at the southern end of President Street. The B&PD exchanged freight cars with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O), the oldest railroad line in the country, established in 1827, which had built a track along Pratt Street, to the eastern basin harbor area from its original Mount Clare depot on the western side of the central business district. The B&PD and its merger successor company, the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad (PW&B), transferred passengers to the B&O's first downtown depot at East Pratt and South Charles streets by a horse-drawn car on B&O's connecting track. (The Baltimore City Council prohibited the operation of locomotives on this track for reasons of frightening horses and fears of fires). By 1838, the PW&B was carrying passengers from further northeast through Philadelphia to Baltimore, where they could transfer to the B&O and continue west to Ohio or by a new branch line further south to the national capital at Washington, D.C. The PW&B started building its own station at the southwestern corner of President Street with Canton Avenue with train yards, including a roundhouse, shops and freight warehouses of about six square city blocks, extending east along Canton Avenue, later renamed Fleet Street. The Greek Revival-style station opened on February 18, 1850. In addition to the brick head house with a distinctive arched roof, the original station also had a 208 feet (63 m) long barrel vaulted train shed over the tracks. The PW&B added a similarly styled freight house, adjacent to the south of the passenger station, in 1852. On February 23, 1861, President-elect Abraham Lincoln, traveling in secret after abandoning his inauguration whistle stop train tour, transferred from the President Street Station to Camden Station in order to thwart the Baltimore Plot assassination attempt. The station was involved in the Baltimore riot of 1861, as Massachusetts state militia troops bound for Washington, D.C. were being pulled in several connecting horse cars and later marching to the B&O Camden Station, ten blocks west and were attacked by an angry mob of Southern and Confederate sympathizers, with a large number of civilians and four soldiers killed and many people wounded in the ensuing melee. On Friday, April 19, 1861, Baltimore Southern sympathizers attacked the passing 6th Massachusetts infantry regiment of the state militia and the "Washington Brigade" of Philadelphia from the Pennsylvania state militia. Both units were heading to Washington to reinforce defenses in response to the requests for troops in his proclamation declaring the existence of an insurrection by President Lincoln after the firing on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor in South Carolina by newly organized Confederate States military forces a few days earlier.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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