Pigtown, Baltimore

The Name — Pigs, the B&O, and the Smell of Working-Class Baltimore

The name Pigtown is not a metaphor. It is a literal description of what happened on the streets of this southwest Baltimore neighborhood from the 1860s through the early 20th century: pigs were driven through the streets. The B&O Railroad's stockyards, which received livestock from farms throughout Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, were located adjacent to the neighborhood. When animals were unloaded from the freight cars for weighing, inspection, or transfer, they were driven on the hoof through the streets of the surrounding residential area on their way to the slaughterhouses and processing facilities that clustered south and west of the railroad yards. The pigs were the most numerous and the most memorable of the animals driven through the streets, and the name they gave the neighborhood stuck despite the attempts of successive generations of residents and city officials to replace it with the more dignified "Washington Village."

The smell that accompanied the pig drives was a constant feature of neighborhood life — a olfactory marker of poverty and industrial proximity that distinguished Pigtown from even the other poor working-class neighborhoods of Baltimore. The stockyards themselves generated continuous odors that, combined with the open sewers and inadequate sanitation of an overcrowded working-class district, made Pigtown one of the most challenging residential environments in the city. Public health surveys from the 1880s and 1890s consistently identified Pigtown alongside the poorest tenement districts of east Baltimore as areas of exceptional overcrowding, inadequate sanitation, and high rates of typhoid, cholera, and tuberculosis.

For the Irish families who lived here, the conditions were a bitter echo of the worst aspects of what they had escaped. Many had come from the western seaboard of Ireland — Connacht's impoverished smallholding communities, Mayo and Galway villages that had been devastated by the Famine — and had arrived in America with nothing more than their passage money and whatever they could carry. The B&O stockyards offered immediate employment: rough, smelly, dangerous work, but work that paid a cash wage. The cheap row houses of Pigtown offered the cheapest rental accommodation in west Baltimore. The result was a concentration of the most recently arrived, the most economically precarious, and the least advantaged of Baltimore's Irish immigrants in a neighborhood that bore the marks of that concentration in every aspect of its physical environment.

The B&O Railroad — The Engine That Built Pigtown

The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was Pigtown's reason for existing. The B&O's Mount Clare Shops — the locomotive and freight car manufacturing and repair complex that was one of the largest industrial facilities in America by the 1870s — occupied a vast site immediately northwest of the neighborhood, and the railroad's freight yards stretched along the neighborhood's northern edge. The Irish workers who staffed the yards, worked the maintenance shops, and handled the freight that moved through the B&O's Baltimore terminal lived in the streets south of the tracks that were cheapest to rent and closest to the work. Pigtown was, in this sense, a company town built in the shadow of America's first major railroad.

The B&O had been built largely by Irish labor. The railroad's earliest construction gangs in the 1820s and 1830s were Irish immigrants who brought to the work the experience of building the canals of Ireland and Britain. As the railroad expanded westward through Maryland and into Virginia and Ohio, it created a moving labor frontier that Irish immigrants followed, settling the towns and neighborhoods along the line as they went. The workers who returned to Baltimore — or who never left — settled in proximity to the railroad infrastructure that had employed them, and Pigtown was the densest result of that settlement pattern. The Mt. Clare neighborhood adjacent to the B&O Shops had a similarly Irish character, and the two neighborhoods formed a continuous belt of Irish working-class Baltimore south of the railroad.

The B&O employed not only laborers but skilled tradesmen — locomotive engineers, firemen, conductors, mechanics in the Mount Clare Shops — and the Irish community of Pigtown spanned the full range of railroad employment from the least skilled to the moderately skilled. The skilled railroad jobs were among the best employment available to working-class men in 19th-century Baltimore: they paid steady wages, offered a degree of union protection from the 1880s onward, and provided a career structure that pure day labor did not. The aspiration of the Pigtown Irish laborer was to move his son from the stockyards to the locomotive cab — and for many families, over the course of two or three generations, this aspiration was partially realized.

St. Martin's Church and the Political Machine

St. Martin's Catholic Church was the spiritual and social center of Pigtown's Irish community, playing the same role that St. Patrick's Broadway played in Fell's Point and St. Mary Star of the Sea played in Federal Hill. The parish organized the community above the level of the individual household, providing the school that educated Irish children in a Catholic environment, the societies and sodalities that structured social life, and the network of mutual aid that cushioned the hardships of poverty. St. Martin's records are among the primary genealogical resources for tracing Pigtown Irish ancestry, documenting baptisms, marriages, and deaths in the neighborhood from the parish's foundation through the 20th century.

The political machine that Pigtown's Irish community built was one of the most effective in Baltimore's Democratic Party structure. Ward politics were the primary vehicle for Irish political power in American cities throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and Baltimore's Irish neighborhoods were no exception. The ward bosses of the Pigtown precincts delivered votes for the Democratic organization, and in return received patronage — city jobs, police appointments, contracts, and the accumulated benefits of political loyalty. For a neighborhood as poor and as economically precarious as Pigtown, this patronage was not merely political but a matter of survival. The policeman on the beat, the clerk in the city office, the foreman at the railroad — these were positions that could be filled through political connection, and the Irish community mobilised its voting strength to secure them.

The machine politics of Pigtown shaped the neighborhood's relationship with Baltimore City government for decades. Irish-American ward politicians who emerged from Pigtown's working-class Irish community were figures who understood intimately the desperation that poverty produces, and who were willing to use political power as a direct instrument of community survival rather than as an ideological project. Critics of machine politics — and there were many, mostly from Protestant and middle-class Baltimore — saw the Irish ward bosses as corrupt. The residents of Pigtown, who received coal in winter and jobs year-round from the machine's operations, assessed them differently.

Babe Ruth, Overcrowding, and the Neighborhood That Survived

George Herman Ruth — Babe Ruth — was born on February 6, 1895, at 216 Emory Street in the southwestern corner of the Pigtown neighborhood, in a building attached to the saloon his father ran. Ruth's birthplace is now a museum, one of the few surviving physical markers of the neighborhood's Irish and working-class heritage. The Ruths were German-American rather than Irish, but the neighborhood into which George Herman Ruth was born was overwhelmingly Irish in character, and the street culture of Pigtown — rough, poor, rooted in the Catholic parish and the railroad yard — was the world that shaped his earliest years. Ruth's later description of his Baltimore childhood as one of "bare knuckle poverty" was consistent with what census records and public health surveys confirm about Pigtown in the 1890s: it was one of the most overcrowded and economically deprived neighborhoods in a city that had plenty of competition for that designation.

The overcrowding in Pigtown during the 1880s and 1890s reached levels that public health authorities documented with alarm. Row houses designed for single families housed multiple households; basement rooms that were barely habitable were rented to the most recently arrived immigrants; the streets were used for storage, sanitation, and the passage of livestock in ways that made the neighborhood function simultaneously as residential district and industrial thoroughfare. Mortality rates, particularly infant mortality, were significantly higher in Pigtown than in more prosperous Baltimore neighborhoods, and the periodic outbreaks of typhoid fever that swept through working-class Baltimore repeatedly struck hardest in Pigtown's densely packed streets.

Also explore: Fell's Point, Baltimore · Canton, Baltimore · Federal Hill, Baltimore · Locust Point, Baltimore · Irish Surname Origins Tool · Irish County Heritage Tool