Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
The head of Chesapeake Bay, on either side of the Susquehanna River,
is composed of various broad estuaries, with small streams entering
them. To the eastward the chief is Elk River, and to the westward are
the Gunpowder and Bush Rivers, with others. Not far above the Severn
is the wide tidal estuary of the Patapsco, so named by the Indians to
describe its peculiarity, the word meaning "a stream caused by back or
tidewater containing froth." A few miles up this estuary is the great
city and port of the Chesapeake, Baltimore, so named in honor of Lord
Baltimore, and containing, with its suburbs, over six hundred thousand
people. The spreading arms of the Patapsco, around which the city is
built, provide an ample harbor, their irregular shores making plenty
of dock room, and the two great railways from the north and west to
Washington, which go under the town through an elaborate system of
tunnels, give it a lucrative foreign trade in produce brought for
shipment abroad. From the harbor there are long and narrow docks, and
an inner "Basin" extending into the city, and across the heads of
these is Pratt Street. This highway is famous as the scene of the
first bloodshed of the Civil War. The Northern troops, hastily
summoned to Washington, were marching along it from one railway
station to the other on April 19, 1861, when a Baltimore mob,
sympathizing with the South, attacked them. In the riot and conflict
that followed eleven were killed and twenty-six were wounded. A creek,
called Jones's Falls, coming down a deep valley from the northward
into the harbor, divides the city into two almost equal sections, and
in the lower part is walled in, with a street on either side. Colonel
David Jones, who was the original white inhabitant of the north side
of Baltimore harbor, gave this stream his name about 1680, before
anyone expected even a village to be located there. A settlement
afterwards began eastward of the creek, known as Jonestown, while
Baltimore was not started until 1730, being laid out westward of the
creek and around the head of the "Basin," the plan covering sixty
acres. This was called New Town, as the other was popularly termed Old
Town, but they subsequently were united as Baltimore, having in 1752
about two hundred people.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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