The Rich & The Petty: How Creeping Changed the Baltimore Skyline

demetria lucas January 20, 2016

Meet Isaac E. Emerson. He earned a chemistry degree, then moved to Baltimore and opened up a pharmacy. Soon he had three pharmacies.

Emerson noticed that his customers were always complaining of headaches. The products he was selling weren’t doing the trick. He, being a chemist and all, decided to make a concoction that would cure what ailed them.

This is how we get Bromo Seltzer, which turned out to be a mild tranquilizer and was lethal in high doses. The FDA banned the product in the 1980s. But the company had almost a 100-year run and amassed millions before that happened.

But that’s not what we’re here to talk about.

House Porn: Inside Hampton Estate, Baltimore's Largest Plantation & The Largest House in America (in 1790)

demetria lucas January 15, 2016

Most people have the idea that you have to wander around the Deep South to see an actual plantation. Ok. Let me speak for myself. I thought that. And I once made a point to drive an hour from New Orleans to see Plantation Row in Edgard, Louisiana. Another time, I drove 4.5 hours from Atlanta to Low Country, South Carolina to see Magnolia Plantation.

Turns out, I could have driven 45 minutes from where I grew up and BOOM: Hampton Estate. In its heyday the owners, the Ridgelys, had 25k acres of Baltimore's finest land— for the locals, that includes Lutherville, White Marsh, and parts of Baltimore City— and 300+ enslaved men and women, white and black, to work their grounds.

Who knew?