History of the Appalachian people in Baltimore

The Appalachian community has historically been centered in the neighborhoods of Hampden, Pigtown, Remington, Woodberry, Lower Charles Village, Highlandtown, and Druid Hill Park, as well as the Baltimore inner suburbs of Dundalk, Essex, and Middle River.

White Appalachian people in Baltimore are typically descendants of early English, Irish, Scottish, Scotch-Irish, and Welsh settlers.

[4] During the Great Depression, thousands of white residents of the Appalachian Mountains migrated to Baltimore as well as to other industrial northern cities such as Detroit, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, and Muncie, Indiana.

Most of these white workers were from Appalachian states such as West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee and came to Baltimore to work at the Glenn L. Martin Company and other major defense plants.

[9] During and following World War II, many Southern and Appalachian workers also settled in Sparrows Point, an industrial area just outside of Baltimore city.

These migrants came to work for the Bethlehem Steel plant and largely hailed from rural areas and mining towns of West Virginia and Central Pennsylvania.

These coal-mining families settled in Baltimore in the 1950s and 1960s, searching for better jobs and better socioeconomic conditions than their parents and grandparents generations had access to.

Dickens became the most prominent woman in bluegrass music and was a lifelong champion of the issues of women and the working-class through her pro-labor union, feminist lyrics.

[17][18] The majority of Southern and Appalachian migrants during the Hillbilly Highway and the Great Migration, both white and black, were native-born and Protestant.

[23] The Jewish community in Baltimore helped fund the construction of the B’nai Shalom Congregation in Bristol, located in the Appalachian region of Western Virginia.

White Appalachian people and Southern African Americans (including African-Appalachians) were migrating to Baltimore in great numbers between the 1920s and the 1960s, prompting comparisons between the two groups of newcomers.

In a 1960 article from The Baltimore Sun, J. Anthony Lukas praised the "pride and independence" of Appalachian white people while lamenting that "after two centuries of isolation in the hills, these original Americans are forced into the cities where they find themselves scorned by relative newcomers to these shores."

Mencken believed that "filthy poor whites from Appalachia and the Southern Tide-water" engaged in incest and were animalistic in their "habits and ideas".

The report concluded that "within recent years, and especially now, the minority of Southern Mountaineers, an increasing drain on the city's economy, is crying for citizen interest and action."

[31] The author of the report, Ferne K. Kolodner, was a community and civil rights activist who sought to ameliorate the ails of urban poverty.

Pigtown's Appalachian population hails from West Virginia and Western Maryland, economic migrants who came after World War II.