Class, Community, and Materiality in a Blue-Collar Baltimore Neighborhood: An Archaeology of Hampden-Woodberry

Abstract

Hampden and Woodberry, two neighborhoods located in what is today central Baltimore, Maryland, are in many ways typical of the American working-class experience. At the same time, however, they are unique products of a particular historical, dialectical interaction between local culture and the larger forces of a constantly evolving capitalist political economy. As the patterns of domestic and world trade evolved and Maryland’s economy became more industrial in nature during the 19th century, gristmills along the Jones Falls in Baltimore County were converted to the production of cotton duck, or sail cloth. By the 1840s the sister communities of Hampden and Woodberry began to emerge as a distinct community; in the 1870s Hampden-Woodberry became the world’s foremost center for the production of cotton duck. After World War I, however, the mill companies began the process of divesting themselves of their Baltimore operations. Following deindustrialization, residents of Hampden-Woodberry struggled with high unemployment, drug abuse, and racial violence during the 1970s and 1980s. Beginning in the late 1980s, however, a wave of gentrification has slowly resurrected the local economy even while long-time working-class residents have been left out of the process of revitalization.

This thesis addresses the question of the nature of the changing relationship between global capitalist political economy and local culture in Hampden-Woodberry. I draw from recent scholarship in anthropology to posit that materiality, or the ways in which the material world is a fundamental ingredient in the creation of social experience, has been and continues to be the link between the global and the local, providing both the means by which and the medium in which the dialectical relationship between these two scales is played out. I utilize archival, archaeological and ethnographic research to explore the ways in which types of material culture as varied as space and landscape, ceramics, printed texts, and performance have been crucial to the long-term development of class consciousness (for both the working class and the middle class) in Hampden-Woodberry, as well as the creation of community and the contestation of its meanings and social boundaries from the 1840s to the present.