Baltimore

The city of Baltimore, Maryland, founded in 1729, began as a tobacco, grain, shipbuilding, and slave trading port built on the tidal portion of the Patapsco River near the Chesapeake Bay. A unique mixture built on English, German, Irish, West and Central African, and Scots-Irish influences with legacies left over from the local Algonquin populations formed the basis for the city’s early culinary culture. In 1782 General John Eager Howard lent some of his land for the establishment of Baltimore’s famous Lexington Market, where it still stands on the original site. During the 1850s, it accommodated an estimated fifty thousand people on market days. Allegedly, writer Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. visited the market in 1859 and christened it “The Gastronomic Capitol of the World.”