The neighborhood was named after Ross Winans, (1796-1877), a famous inventor of railway steam engines for the old Baltimore and Ohio Railroad at its beginnings in 1828 and later other American lines when he later set up foundries and shops adjacent to the B.

The Mount Winans neighborhood began as a tiny village, alongside a myriad of railroad tracks, southwest of old "Washington Boulevard", (later U.S. Route 1), and established on the west side of Hollins Ferry Road in 1869-1870, known initially as "Hullsville".

In 1871, the historic Sharp Street Methodist Church, one of the first African heritage (then-called "Colored" or "Negro") churches founded in Baltimore, then located on South Sharp Street, below and southwest of the downtown central business district in the "Sharp-Leadenhall" section of old South Baltimore, (west of "Federal Hill"), an early African-American neighborhood in the city, purchased a lot in Hullsville for its Mount Auburn Cemetery to the east along the south-bound Old Annapolis Road, near the future community to the east of Westport, developed by the 1880s along the western shore of the Middle Branch (also known as "Ferry Branch" and earlier known in colonial times by its two coves - "Ridgley's" and "Smith's").

[5] Industrialist Ross Winans, (1796-1877), purchased a portion of the enormous stand tract of land southwest of old Baltimore Town of 2,368 acres "Mount Clare" estate, originally owned by Dr. Charles Carroll, the Barrister, (1723-1783), owner and builder in the 1750s of the historic "Mount Clare" mansion of Georgian styled architecture (in future Carroll Park) on his "Georgia" Plantation overlooking the several piers of his waterfront facing Ridgley's Cove during the colonial era of the later-known Ferry or Middle Branch of the Patapsco River in the 1860s.

With his similarly wealthy and talented, inventing, and industrious son Thomas Dekoven Winans, also recently returned from extensive Imperial Russian continental railroad-building projects and traveling throughout the vast transcontinental empire of Russia of the "Czars"/"Tsars" (Emperors) of the mid-19th Century, Nicholas I and Alexander II.