(The Baltimore Sun posted the following article by Liz F. Kay on its website on June 29.)
BALTIMORE — After the collapse of Baltimore’s B&O roundhouse’s roof in February, the celebration of the birth of American railroading was canceled at the beginning of the line – but it continues at the end.
Through July 6, the Ellicott City B&O Railroad Station Museum will offer talks, tours and other events highlighting the railroad’s role in the transformation of America. The station was the first terminus of the original 13-mile B&O track.
“Railroad history is so important – it revolutionized America so much more than any form of transportation ever has,” said Lisa Mason-Chaney, the museum’s executive director.
The Baltimore B&O Museum intended to re-create the Fair of the Iron Horse, a 1927 pageant in Halethorpe commemorating the first century of railroading. But when the roof of the roundhouse gave way under the massive drifts that accumulated during the Presidents Day snowstorm, the museum’s efforts shifted to reconstruction.
Its Ellicott City counterpart, which had scheduled a series of events coordinating with the downtown celebration, chose to carry on. The Ellicott City museum pays homage to the 1927 international festival with a scale-model reproduction of some of the trains that were on display there, Mason-Chaney said. Part of the proceeds will be donated to the restoration effort, she said.
As the oldest railroad station in the United States, the museum has a stake in 175 years of train history, she said. The Ellicott City station was built in 1831, three years after the B&O began laying tracks from Baltimore.
“We’re trying to tell this wonderful story to as many people as possible,” Mason-Chaney said.
But it wasn’t always pretty.
This weekend, re-enactors at the museum demonstrated the labor unrest, prejudice and poverty that faced the Irish immigrants who worked on the railroads after famine struck their country in the late 1840s.
Workers risked catching diseases, injuring themselves or even dying while building viaducts, bridges and tracks for the railroad. In return, they received $13 a month and three meals a day, said Tim Ertel, who leads a group of Irish laborer re-enactors.
Often, workers would travel between sites in “camp cars,” essentially boxcars used as makeshift dormitories, giving rise to the term “Hell on wheels,” said Edward Williams, chief curator at the Baltimore B&O Museum and former director of the Ellicott City station.
They weren’t paid regularly, however. That, combined with rivalries left over from Ireland and the scorn of established residents, fueled unrest, including clashes involving more than 2,500 Irish workers in Cumberland in the winter of 1850-1851, Ertel said.
To demonstrate the workers’ frustration, Ertel and a band of three men strode up Main Street yesterday carrying shovels and picks. Ertel, wearing a felt hat, wool trousers and torn boots, climbed onto the balcony of Ellicott’s Country Store to try to garner support from the shoppers picking their way through the historic district’s antique shops and galleries.
“They harass us day in and day out!” he shouted across the street, where re-enactors outfitted as the local militia watched warily to keep the peace.
“They don’t harass the Germans, do they?” shouted Jim Sickle, portraying a fellow laborer.
The group then headed back to the museum, and after a brief standoff in Tiber Alley, made their way to the station museum to demand back pay owed to them.
But Nicole Boyd, a 15-year-old Westminster resident portraying a passenger waiting for the train, didn’t think they deserved any money.
“Pay you for what?” she said. “You don’t do anything but gamble and drink!”
Yesterday’s attractions also included re-enactors from the Fire Museum of Maryland in Lutherville and Richard D’Ambrisi, a pharmacy technician who portrayed an apothecary and demonstrated pre-Civil War dental surgery.
Other local historical sites such as the Patapsco Female Institute Historic Park, Thomas Isaac Log Cabin and Howard County Historical Society will also be open during the week in honor of the 175th anniversary.
The festival helped ease some of the disappointment of visitors who had planned to attend the Baltimore celebration.
Bob Hartzell, 43, had driven for three days from Janesville, a town in southern Wisconsin, to attend the Baltimore fair with his family.
They learned that the event at the roundhouse was canceled from a Baltimore police officer they stopped yesterday morning to ask directions. He told them that Ellicott City was celebrating instead.
“There was construction going on, but we didn’t know it was reconstruction,” Hartzell said.
But he said he wasn’t disappointed by Main Street’s quaint atmosphere.
“We’ll see more than the museum,” Hartzell said.