"
If the bottle tower represents certain modern concepts of what is
suitable in architecture, it is nevertheless pleasant to record the fact
that many honorable old buildings--most of them residences--survive in
Baltimore, and that, because of their survival, the city looks older
than New York and fully as old as either Philadelphia or Boston. But in
this, appearances are misleading, for New York and Boston were a
century old, and Philadelphia half a century, when Baltimore was first
laid out as a town. Efforts to start a settlement near the city's
present site were, it is true, being made before William Penn and his
Quakers established Philadelphia, but a letter written in 1687 by
Charles Calvert, third Baron Baltimore, explains that: "The people there
[are] not affecting to build nere each other but soe as to have their
houses nere the watters for conveniencye of trade and their lands on
each side of and behynde their houses, by which it happens that in most
places there are not fifty houses in the space of thirty myles."[1]
[1] From "Historic Towns of the Southern States."
The difficulty experienced by the Barons Baltimore, Lords Proprietary of
Maryland, in building up communities in their demesne was not a local
problem, but one which confronted those interested in the development of
the entire portion of this continent now occupied by the Southern
States.
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