When Baltimore was “An Old Crab Town”

 

First Confederate Soldier Killed In The WBTS The Grandson Of Francis Scott Key Arrested By Lincoln

My shirt is ragged and my pants are tore.

I ain’t found nothin’ I’m a-looking for,

And I want to go back to Baltimore….

Good old Baltimore.”— lyrics from a country song recorded in 1954 by Sonny James

In 1910, when visitors would come to call on Confederate Veteran George Watts, he would “[rise] from a rickety chair” and receive them with a “sweeping” bow.[i]  “Old Man Watts, the [house] painter,” as he was known, was the embodiment of that Baltimore, that old Maryland, which Alabama native and wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, described as “very polite.” That Baltimore was regarded as a Southern city by most Americans.  And Baltimoreans themselves until more recently did not consider their city Mid-Atlantic or Northern. The Baltimore American advertised itself as The Daily Newspaper of the South; the Hotel Rennert, its bar and lounge the haunt of –some would say[ii]—Baltimore’s most famous resident, H. L. Mencken, boasted that it was The Palace of the South.  Still taking pride in its heritage in the late forties, Baltimore raised a monument to memorialize Lee and Jackson’s last meeting. And, as late as the era of hula hoops and rock n roll, the town had not completely lost its Southern ways and manners.  A buyer for a dress shop who traveled to the city frequently in the fifties recalled that it was charmingly rundown, slow-paced and “friendly.”   But that “amiable” and soft-spoken old port that Francis Beirne, a Virginian, wrote about in 1951 would soon be gone.

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