Mount Clare Shops

The Mount Clare shops of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, built in the 1830s, formed part of the B&O Railroad's nerve center during the Civil War, when the rail system was vital to Union victory. Soldiers departed from here for the front lines while foodstuffs and weapons were loaded onto cars to support the Union war effort. The B&O's tracks ran south to Washington, D.C., and west to the Ohio River across Maryland and West Virginia, the front line of Union territory. B&O Railroad president John Work Garrett worked so closely with President Abraham Lincoln that the line was nicknamed Lincoln's Railroad, and Garrett and the B&O also cooperated with the U.S. Army's United States Military Railroad to coordinate the Union railroad war effort. In the seven weeks after the war ended, about 206,000 Union troops returned home on the B&O Railroad. The Mount Clare shops were expanded with an ironworks in the 1850s, allowing the B&O to develop Bollman Bridges, the first iron railroad spans in the United States. The United States Military Railroad hired 10,000 free and formerly enslaved Black workmen, the first instance of the federal government paying African Americans for their work.

Baltimore, Maryland · United States