A Walking Tour of Port Deposit, Maryland
An historic river town, extending for approximately one mile along the east bank of the Susquehanna River, Port Deposit had several names prior to 1813, when the governor gave the town its present name. An inconsequential collection point for lumber floating down river from Pennsylvania at the time, the town was bypassed by the marauding British during the War of 1812 who bypassed the Town in favor of burning a warehouse across the river.
Within the span of a quarter century, however, Port Deposit had risen in importance in the lumber, grain, coal, whiskey, and tobacco trade, being the furthest point downstream on the Susquehanna River, and the furthest navigable point upstream for ships plying the Chesapeake Bay. While the lumber floating down river provided the country with building materials, one of Port Deposit’s own industries produced building material of unmatched quality. By the early nineteenth century the granite deposits of the town were, from an engineering standpoint, to have few rivals. It was, however, the tone and texture of the stone that made it a favorite aesthetic choice. The quarries, located north of the town, provided the granite used for many churches, schools, and buildings in Baltimore, Washington, and Philadelphia. Many of Port Deposit’s buildings, constructed of this granite, provide the town with an unrivaled tradition of stone masonry. With all the work available in the mills, factories, fisheries and lumberyards of Port Deposit the town grew into prominence, becoming the eighth largest city in all of Maryland on the eve of the Civil War. The town had its first bank in 1834 and for many years was the only place between Wilmington and Baltimore where banking could be conducted.
It was not, however, until 1889 that the first countywide free school system was put into place. An outspoken critic of the school system was the industrialist, Jacob Tome who arrived in Town in 1833 penniliess on a log raft and became one of the wealthiest men in the country. He personally subsidized the Port Deposit school system and after his death in 1898 a boarding school for boys, considered the most beautiful “Prep School” in the United States was established on the high bluff overlooking Town.
The completion of the Conowingo Dam in 1927 and the rise of concrete as a building material instead of stone hastened the decline of Port Deposit. The Tome School for Boys closed in 1940 and the next year the sprawling campus was taken over by the U.S. Navy to become the principal training center on the East Coast during World War II. In 1947 the recruit-training section was closed, and thereafter used only sporadically by the Navy, finally closing in 1976. Industry revived briefly in Port Depost in 1980 when the Wiley Manufacturing Company occupied much of the water front to manufacture tunnels under the Baltimore Harbor for I-95.
Today Port Deposit retains much of its 19th-century character. Our walking tour of the granite buildings and historic structures in this one-street deep town will begin at its center in the Town Square and go in both directions...
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