2

INFRASTRUCTURE

In an 1891 letter to Alfred Fryer, Roland Park Company general manager Edward Bouton hoped “that there will not be any objections from the authorities here, to our conducting our sewage into Jones’s Falls. Insomuch as down in the City the river is used as an open sewer, they ought not to object to our doing it to the limited extent that our needs will demand.”¹ To Bouton, resolving the issue of where sewage would go was one of the most important infrastructural decisions to make about planning Roland Park. Laying pipes would not be easy nor would it be cheap, but waste had to go somewhere, just as water had to be piped in, sidewalks laid, and lighting supplied. Moreover, any infrastructure needed to be maintained and periodically updated in accordance with financial, political, and technological considerations.

With British investors watching from a distance, it fell to Bouton to solve the puzzles of how to make Roland Park function. But that was not enough—he also had to ensure its long-term profitability. This meant not only planning the built environment but also experimenting with what Seth Rockman calls “the submerged architecture—material, legal, and ideological”—that would allow Roland Park to be “plausible in the first place.”² Over its first two decades, the Roland Park Company embarked on three interrelated projects: planning the built environment, advertising the new subdivision, and establishing the rules and relationships that would govern it. Taken together, the Roland Park Company was beginning an ambitious experiment with regard to how to lay out the infrastructure of one of the earliest planned segregated suburbs in the United States.

Under Bouton’s hand and investor oversight, planning, advertising, and rulemaking came to center on the same key principle: nuisance. Nuisances, in contemporary understanding, were things that potentially created disease or otherwise impinged on well-being.³ Thinking about nuisances was a way of thinking about people and property together. Planners and engineers, along with those in emerging medical and social science fields, deemed certain bodies and spaces as pathological dangers. They conflated sick people with unhealthy spaces and uses of those spaces. Nuisances comprised part of a broader discourse about health, hygiene, and the environment in the nineteenth century city. Nuisances were also a legal category that municipalities used in regulating, for example, where slaughterhouses or asylums could operate.⁴

Nuisance laws and nuisance discourse served as flexible state tools to manage people, police mobility, and regulate the terms of who could own property and where. There is ample evidence that nuisance law was drafted and enforced with race and nationality in mind. Its impact on the construction of difference, however, could vary. On one hand, it could collapse distinctions of citizenship, birthplace, and class into flattened categories such as “black.” But nuisance laws could also sharpen differences. Some of Baltimore’s earliest nuisance debates were about the presence of Haitians bathing in the Jones Falls. As the United States expanded west and overseas throughout the nineteenth century, regulating nuisances became a way to delimit citizenship and justify tactics of imperial population management.⁵

The Roland Park Company adapted nuisance law to suburban infrastructure by spearheading the use of restrictive covenants as a form of community-wide control. These nuisance laws went hand in hand with some of the earliest recorded racially restrictive covenants in the United States. Historian Nayan Shah notes that “the rationale of nuisance law underwrote the cultural logic of residential covenants.”⁶ Until the 1890s, the few communities entirely covered by covenants comprised a handful of the wealthiest communities in the country. The Roland Park Company targeted a different demographic, namely Baltimore’s affluent professional classes.

While restrictive covenants are some of the most well-known infrastructure of housing segregation, their origins as a form of suburban subdivision control remain murky. Much attention has been paid to the 1920s, when the spread of covenants coincided with the explosion of similar affluent planned suburbs across the United States. Omitted from that chronology is their experimental origins, as covenants were implemented by one developer at a time beginning in the 1890s. This tentative early usage changed markedly in later decades when both developers and homeowners in built-up areas hoped to emulate prestigious locales by adopting covenants for widely disparate neighborhoods.⁷ Looking at how the Roland Park Company took steps toward creating restrictive covenants opens up new possibilities for tracing their origins, analyzing their logic, and understanding how they complemented other infrastructures of segregated suburbs.

The history of nuisances and racial restrictions mirrored the Roland Park Company itself—refracting racial hierarchies through imperial projects. The precursors to Roland Park’s covenants included nuisance laws against Chinese-owned businesses in California, on the basis that Chinese people were inherently unclean and immoral.⁸ In this case, the covenants targeted Chinese renters as well as Mexican and Punjabi property owners and were subject to court rulings concerning both international treaties and Reconstruction-era civil rights cases.⁹ These legal precedents became known to the Roland Park Company when officials sought to specifically ban African Americans from Roland Park. But the chief person company officials turned to for advice was its sanitary engineer, whom it hired to design a sewer system. The engineer had gained experience working for the federal government in both the Caribbean and American cities. He would, company officials hoped, know whom to contact for examples of how to treat sewage and sanitary concerns in covenants.

So central were sewers to the creation of segregated suburbs that their environmental, social, and political ramifications spilled far beyond the boundaries of Roland Park to impact Baltimore City as a whole. To expand Roland Park after a decade in business, the company entered into negotiations with the newly formed Baltimore City Sewerage Commission to deviate from its master plan, which was designed to first serve areas most in need, including areas where disease, stench, and contaminated water were a part of daily life. Instead, the commission prioritized Roland Park houses, some of which were in Baltimore County. This episode elicited a set of questions similar to those raised during the 1888 annexation of the Belt: Who should access municipal infrastructure? Who would pay for it? What—and whom—would municipal government prioritize when considering future growth? These debates constituted some of the Roland Park Company’s first forays into forging formal relationships with government officials. Their negotiations over sewers shifted Baltimore’s political economy toward large developers.

The first two decades of planning Roland Park were full of experimentation, where the company worked out what types of tactics would be effective. In the process, they discarded alternatives. This was the case with the company’s marketing. After initial sales proved disappointing, British investors demanded a change in advertising themes to center on fears of disease and health. The Roland Park Company consequently played on whites’ fears that dirty and diseased racial others were gaining enough political capital and social mobility to start moving next door. Roland Park, they promised, could be kept healthy—employing a conflation of race, class, and disease that worked to their advantage. Roland Park, a planned suburb, was a better, healthier place to live because of the company’s careful planning and guarantee of social homogeneity. The company thus wedded its quest for profits to classing diseased bodies and dirty streets as quintessentially urban.

RESTRICTIVE COVENANTS

As previously mentioned, the Roland Park Company’s initial experiments had the backing of British finance. British investment made possible the creation of development companies with far more capital and potentially bigger projects than had been undertaken in older sections of many American cities. The larger scope of the projects meant that firms like the Roland Park Company faced a longer timescale for making a return on investment. Unlike the typical builders of Baltimore’s row houses with short turnover time and limited capital, Roland Park Company general manager Edward Bouton sought methods to guarantee returns year after year.

Shortly after the founding of the Roland Park Company on July 30, 1891, Bouton began the daily operations of subdividing, planning, and selling the land in Roland Park. Though it held both the former Oakland and Woodlawn estates, the company opted to first focus all its efforts on the latter. This initial effort, Plat One, consisted of one hundred acres. Shareholders were prepared for the company to not turn a profit in 1891 as Plat One lots were not yet ready for sale. Because the Roland Park Company had Lands Trust capital from other enterprises, it was able to operate even when unprofitable. With a development scheme they knew would be realized slowly over time, financial backers remained committed to a multiyear investment, holding out for the possibility of long-term profits. British investors floated loans to the company with capital from its other investments, secured on the company’s property; the largest loan was $65,000.¹⁰ The Roland Park Company, unlike most local builders or individual property owners, had those resources.

This financial cushion also gave Bouton time to gather ideas about how to adopt restrictive covenants, which he took over two years to finalize. It is unclear how Bouton learned about restrictive covenants or when the Roland Park Company decided to use them. At least one developer advertised them in Kansas City when Jarvis, Conklin, and Bouton built houses and resided in Hyde Park, but they still were highly uncommon.¹¹ So, too, was the way Bouton considered using them. Covenants enumerated the rules in the contract a homebuyer signed to purchase property. The Roland Park Company used the type of agreement known as a deed restriction, where rules were inserted directly into the property’s deed. By the early nineteenth century, a handful of American builders began to impose restrictions on individual or small groups of lots, often with a short expiration date that allowed builders to make a profit and move on. It was much rarer for restrictions to cover an entire subdivision, and those that did comprised a handful of the wealthiest planned communities in the country.¹² If each lot in Roland Park contained a similar set of restrictions, it could function as a type of community-wide control for Baltimore’s professional classes.

FIGURE 2.1  Plat One of Roland Park.

(Courtesy of the Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries)

Bouton took the better part of two years to make inquiries, which, from the start, connected the final product to concerns about health. First, in September 1891 he asked the sanitary engineer hired to design Roland Park’s sewers, George Waring, for “detailed suggestions” on how to treat sewers and cesspools in the deeds.13 Waring replied with a “memorandum of points” with the proper “legal phraseology” to be included. He also advised Bouton to write to three people with ties to wealthy planned communities with restrictions: the mayor of West Orange, New Jersey, which was home to Llewellyn Park; the manager of Wayne, Pennsylvania; and a lawyer from Tuxedo Park, New York. Finally, he suggested that Bouton obtain copies of a single lot with deed restrictions in Sudbrook, a summer community in Baltimore County then under construction. Bouton followed Waring’s recommendations.¹⁴

These earlier restrictive covenants were influenced by nuisance legislation crafted in response to sanitary issues in the nineteenth century. Over the course of the nineteenth century, nuisance law became the chief tools by which municipal governments expanded state capacity and regulated property.¹⁵ Baltimore City’s early laws set fines for animal obstructions, the presence of pigs in the street, and the dumping of manure.¹⁶ By the time of the 1888 annexation, Baltimore’s nuisance laws restricted certain industries to the east of the city, establishing the industrial and working-class character of the eastern section of the Belt. Baltimore was not unique in this regard; throughout the country, government officials, increasingly aided by newly professionalized planners and engineers, marked spaces and uses as dangers to public health.¹⁷

Waring’s career mirrored this trajectory. He engineered the drainage system for Memphis after the newly created National Board of Health sent him there to end the city’s yellow fever epidemic—which had led to the passage of city nuisance laws. After stints around the world, Waring selected healthy campsites near Havana, Cuba, during the Spanish-American War for incoming American troops. There Waring’s job was to, as one of his colleagues put it, “make clean and wholesome a city which has so frequently transmitted yellow fever to our shores.”¹⁸

Bouton sought not only to create restrictions but to restrict African American ownership and residence in Roland Park. This reflected Bouton’s particular understanding of how race worked in Baltimore. None of the deed restrictions Bouton received from the people Waring had recommended contained racial restrictions. He also surmised that a racial restriction might rest on shakier legal ground than other types of restrictions. In 1893 he asked company lawyers whether it was permissible. He did not ask about the legality of deed restrictions in general or of nuisances; instead, he inquired whether he could insert a restriction into Roland Park’s deeds that banned African Americans from both purchasing property and living in its homes.

The lawyers called it a novel question they had not considered before, further indicating that Bouton was bringing a new legal instrument to Baltimore. After researching the matter, both lawyers—one a future appeals court judge and the other president of the Maryland Bar Association—answered that it was unequivocally illegal. Citing case law, they argued that it was illegal to make the buying and selling of property inconvenient. Prohibiting African Americans from purchasing property constituted an inconvenience, which was greatly compounded because of Maryland’s sizeable black population. A restriction against African Americans would also be an “embarrassment” because they comprised the “whole class of people” for whom the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was ratified. The attorneys acknowledged that legal precedent expressly limited the amendment’s reach to state actions and not private contracts, but “the significance” of the amendment and its promise of equal civil rights for blacks and whites “was too great to be overlooked.” Besides, they concluded, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Barbier v. Connolly (1884) that “all citizens” had the same right to acquire property.¹⁹

Referencing Barbier v. Connolly complicated the way Bouton and the attorneys conceived of Roland Park’s racial restriction as a black-white binary. Bouton had inquired only about banning African Americans, and the attorneys’ response largely hinged on this rather than on racial restrictions in general. Yet, Barbier applied more broadly. Like Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1885), it pertained to a San Francisco nuisance law intended to shut down Chinese-run laundries.²⁰ Curiously, the lawyers did not cite a court case from less than a year before that directly pertained to racially restrictive covenants, Gandolfo v. Hartman (1892).²¹ Gandolfo revolved around the legality of a racial restriction against Chinese renters on a lot in San Buena Ventura, California. It was struck down on two grounds: the Fourteenth Amendment and an 1880 treaty between the United States and China.²²

The final Plat One deed restrictions contained eight provisions. Many served both an aesthetic and socioeconomic function. For instance, houses constructed on lots had to cost a minimum amount penciled in by the company. Likewise, lots could only be used for residential purposes, precluding owners from deriving multiple forms of income from their property. Residents also paid a maintenance fee for Roland Park’s sewers, street repair, and lighting, proportional to the amount of property they owned. Any outbuildings such as stables had to be set back a specified amount per lot, which varied depending on the lot’s location. Bouton pulled the provision that only one house was permitted per lot from Waring’s sources, again excluding flexible income-generating rental arrangements.²³

Other provisions also reflected Waring’s influence; the deed restrictions’ longest and most detailed set of clauses delineated what constituted nuisances. They prohibited cesspools, privy vaults, the keeping of swine, and any use “which shall by noxious or dangerous to health.”²⁴ The deeds also specifically banned hospitals, asylums, and factories, pairing places for the sick and disabled with industrial hazards, a combination found in Baltimore City nuisance ordinances.²⁵ Ultimately, Bouton opted not to include a racial restriction.

PLAT ONE PHYSICAL INFRASTRUCTURE

As Bouton weighed restrictions, he juggled the daily tasks of developing Roland Park’s physical infrastructure. As part of its planning efforts, the company spent large outlays of capital for sewer, water, and electric systems as well as a network of paved roads intended to increase the value of its lots.²⁶ At this time, it was still rare for a developer to construct infrastructure without the help of the government; infrastructural systems were intricate works that required money, labor, and political will. Once again, the Lands Trust support and its long-term financial considerations shaped Roland Park’s development.

Plat One covered a relatively flat one hundred acres on the eastern portion of the company tract, bounded by the Stony Run stream on the east, Cold Spring Lane on the south, and a small eighteen-year-old neighborhood called Evergreen on the southeast. Jarvis and Conklin brought in a landscape architect, George Kessler, to plan the streets. The German-born Kessler, like Bouton, had become acquainted with Jarvis and Conklin in Kansas City. He brought to the project an initial design that met Bouton’s call for “a first-class suburb.” Kessler agreed with Bouton and hoped to see Roland Park “developed into a great city.”²⁷ Kessler’s response reflected the lack of a rigid distinction between suburban and urban spaces.

Kessler laid out five curvilinear east-west streets intersecting six parallel north-south streets, each named after an investor, such as Fryer, Capron, and Sheldon Avenues. All had broad, tree-lined sidewalks. Lots backed directly against existing Evergreen properties. Kessler did not opt to connect Roland Park’s streets with those of predominantly white Evergreen, but he created no boundaries between Roland Park and the older community of narrow brick and frame houses. Residents along the border of both neighborhoods would look directly onto each other’s lots. Work proceeded over the course of 1891 and 1892.

Meanwhile, the company’s sewer system took shape under the direction of Waring. A system of pipes emptied, by gravity, into two disposal fields on the periphery of Roland Park, where workers used rakes to spread the waste over layers of gravel. The sewage filtered through layers of sand and soil underneath to separate out solids before emptying into the Jones Falls at Cross Keys or the Stony Run stream by Evergreen. A series of underground flush tanks forced water through the pipes twice a day.²⁸

The company’s sewers raised concerns among Evergreen residents, who went before the Baltimore County commissioners to complain that the company sewage disposal field near Evergreen was “not only disagreeable but unhealthy.” The commissioners dismissed the complaints, but Bouton worried that Evergreen residents could still take the company to court alleging it violated the very nuisance laws that informed Roland Park deed restrictions.²⁹ Bouton predicted a stream of lawsuits from residents motivated by a “universal spirit of antagonism which a poorer class or settlement will have against a better class.” At the end of 1898 the company identified the Evergreen resident they thought would have the strongest claim against the company and paid him $500. Bouton hoped settling with him would “break the backbone of litigation.”³⁰ Waring installed screens by the disposal field to improve its filtration process and overall appearance.³¹ Both strategies proved ineffective.

Evergreen resident Charles Hull took the company to court seeking damages relating to the disposal field. Hull had sold land to the Roland Park Company for the eastern disposal field in 1892 but charged that the sewage harmed his health and rendered his remaining property valueless. Twice a day, pipes discharged the waste from Plat One and it was spread out over the field, to be dried and filtered through layers of soil and gravel. Hull alleged that each time this occurred, a “horrible, sickening, loathsome and disease breeding stench” arose and drifted over the area anytime the wind blew. The courts affirmed the company’s right to operate the disposal fields, even if they created an “alleged nuisance.”³² Following the verdict, the company gradually reengineered the sewage system to shift more of the sewage disposal from the site near Evergreen west to the one near Cross Keys.

ADVERTISING

After a year and a half of preparing Plat One, the company opened its lots for sale in 1893. The timing could not have been worse, as the United States plunged into a severe economic depression. Few could buy a house even if they wanted to. Sales were so poor, in fact, that the trickle of prospective buyers began asking about rumors that the Roland Park Company could not pay its contractors, which raised the possibility that the company’s creditors could seize the property to settle the debt.³³

Bouton perceived an additional reason why Roland Park’s lots were not selling: Baltimoreans did not understand the planned suburb. His suspicious were confirmed when the company tried to mortgage several of its lots to meet payroll. Much to Bouton’s frustration, local bankers did not consider the property secure. Bouton blamed their decision on “the extreme backwardness among Baltimoreans,” who, in his view, failed to recognize the value of property in planned suburbs. Bouton considered it necessary to educate Baltimoreans to “want more than brick walls and cobbled streets” or even the most upscale Baltimore row house.³⁴

British investors also grew impatient. Jarvis and Conklin relayed a message to Bouton: raise the company’s profile through better promotions. In response, Bouton reevaluated the company’s advertising strategies. The company’s earliest ads had emphasized Roland Park’s proximity to Baltimore City. “Roland Park is almost within a stone’s throw with the present city limits,” read one ad. “In Roland Park you can shake hands with your city friend and open your own door with the other hand.”³⁵ As part of the mandated retooling, Bouton decided to drop ads that highlighted Roland Park’s proximity to the city.

Instead, at the urging of investors, Bouton changed tactics to emphasize the contrast between Roland Park and Baltimore City. From London, Alfred Fryer suggested the specific difference to accentuate: healthiness. Why not, he wrote, use the company’s sewer system to distinguish Roland Park from Baltimore City, where people largely relied on cesspools? In one of several letters written over a course of months, Fryer encouraged the company to incorporate into its marketing “a brief, pungent article solely on the subject of ‘Drainage.’ ”³⁶

Fryer directed the Roland Park Company to advertise sewers at a time when the biggest Lands Trust Company investors were as interested in municipal sanitation and water infrastructure as they were in land. Leaving the Concretor behind in Antigua, Fryer had invented the Destructor, an influential early garbage incinerator patented in 1874. His engineering firm, Manlove, Alliott and Fryer, obtained a contract with the London municipal government for its use on a wharf on the southern bank of the Thames, part of an enormous new waterfront space first used for sewage disposal and later as the main receiving point for all of London’s trash.³⁷ The firm would subsequently appear in directories as specializing in sugar machinery and refuse disposal. Bright, too, in the early 1890s focused his capital on his home city, as a director of the Manchester Ship Canal Company.³⁸ Set to become the largest river navigation canal in the world, the Manchester Ship Canal would allow ships from the Irish Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean beyond, direct access to the city.

With the help of the Lands Trust Company, beauty and safety were added to health as qualities Bouton used to define the planned suburb in contrast to the city. Advertisers had emphasized health, safety, and the beauty of land long before the 1890s, especially healthfulness and beauty, but seldom did they do two things: refer to those qualities as characteristics of suburban space and position the suburb in opposition to the city. Before 1890, in articles and classifieds, “suburb” usually appeared in the plural and denoted little more than a periphery. It applied to almost any type of property on the outskirts of a city. In Baltimore this included row houses and farms for sale.³⁹ The few exceptions Waring cited were for the very wealthy, and they all drew on the nineteenth-century romantic tradition of harnessing the picturesque of an imagined European past spearheaded by Andrew Jackson Downing, whose 1841 book on British country estates made him an influential tastemaker.⁴⁰

The Roland Park Company was uniquely positioned to exploit public health and safety issues playing out in the public sphere by advertising that they could build their own infrastructure. Fryer’s suggestion proved particularly appropriate for marketing to Baltimoreans, who increasingly complained about the city’s sewage problem. An editor at the Baltimore News described the effect of sewage emptying into the harbor as “a 2000-horse-power smell that lays limburger cheese in the shade.”⁴¹ The lack of adequate sanitary infrastructure contributed to periodic outbreaks of cholera and typhus as the effluent from the growing city’s leaky cesspools flowed into the Jones Falls or through open gutters downhill toward the harbor. Pragmatically, Roland Park’s potential buyers, most of whom lived closer to downtown, could more easily envision existing problems in the city than imagine a planned subdivision.

The three most common features of Roland Park’s advertising—air, water, and waste—all had potent sensory analogs: the smell of sewage in Baltimore’s harbor, the soot from its factories, and rotting piles of garbage semihidden in its alleys. Roland Park’s sewage had “no unhealthful effect” like that of the cesspools that predominated in Baltimore City. Roland Park’s “pure water” would “never become contaminated” because the company owned the adjacent land and could keep the soil clean.⁴² The headline of an article about Roland Park in the Baltimore Daily News blared, “SUBURBAN DEVELOPMENTS: How Baltimore Is Forging to the Front. Roland Park Suburb. Magnificent Improvement by Foreign Capital. The Addition to Be Provided with Pure Water and Scientific Sewerage—Progressive Policy of the Company.” The newspaper was owned by Charles Grasty, a Roland Park Company investor for whom a Plat One street was named.⁴³

Ads also began to allude to diseased people and the dangers of social heterogeneity. African Americans, immigrants, and poor whites bore the brunt of the fatalities from local epidemics because they tended to be concentrated in the lowest elevations of the city, which also had the laxest enforcement of existing health codes. These environmental disparities gave rise to and reinforced wealthy white Baltimoreans’ views that associated these groups with disease, making them what the Roland Park Company euphemistically termed “undesirable neighbors.” Undesirable neighbors were more likely to be disease vectors, based on their class, race, or place of birth. “In buying a home,” went one ad from 1895, “a location should be chosen which is protected from unhealthful surroundings and undesirable neighbors.”⁴⁴

The focus on disease signaled that Roland Park was a domestic safe haven for even the most vulnerable members of the household, while Baltimore City was depicted as a place of disorder, sickness, and loss. On one occasion in 1894 the company’s publicist wanted to rush a particular ad into print to “make everybody thoroughly believe that there is some reliability in the reported dangers of typhoid fever and other troubles.”⁴⁵ The company relied on local popular knowledge that typhoid was especially lethal for children. Attempting to conjure a parent’s worst nightmare, the publicist considered adopting the theme of “sewers” and “deaths of children.”⁴⁶ Playing on fears of waterborne typhoid in the city, prospective homebuyers could sample Roland Park’s water at the company’s office or, should they choose to visit, at the company’s springhouse itself on the site of the former Cross Keys water source.⁴⁷

As a result of these and other measures, sales improved. Tourists and sightseers began to take the streetcar to get a glimpse of Roland Park. Bouton became optimistic given that Baltimoreans “had not heard of suburban living.”⁴⁸ By the end of the decade 1,697 people lived in Plat One.

PLAT TWO AND CROSS KEYS

With the change in the company’s fortunes, the company began plans to subdivide the Oakland tract, adjacent to Cross Keys. Plat Two’s terrain was more varied than Plat One. Replete with deep ravines, sharp dips and rises, and an old rock quarry, it required more creative street planning and posed more challenges for laying infrastructure. The company hired the Olmsted Brothers landscape architecture firm in November 1897 to begin work on Plat Two. The firm already had a prominent reputation. Its founder, Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., had designed New York’s Central Park and Riverside, Illinois and had begun work on Sudbrook, Maryland, though the project slowly progressed throughout the 1890s without ever coming to full fruition. While Kessler laid out Plat One, Olmsted and his sons, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and John Charles Olmsted, were planning the monumental White City at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The two brothers took over the firm in the 1890s as their father’s health declined. Commissions included municipal parks, real estate developments, and university campuses.⁴⁹

The Olmsteds and Bouton worked together closely to refine the details of Plat Two, as the Olmsteds insisted that all work be highly collaborative with their clients. As with Kessler’s Plat One, the Olmsteds’ plan emphasized the visual separation between Baltimore City and Roland Park. Like Bouton, the Olmsteds had a set of principles about what suburban space should be like, which they adapted to each place depending on local conditions and the needs of their client. These included curving streets named after local landscape features. Streets names, they advised Bouton, should “avoid citified designations such as street and avenue and use instead the word road.”⁵⁰

The result of their collaboration was a preliminary master plan for Plat Two. The plan advanced the precedent of disregard and outright contempt for the lives and property of people in Cross Keys. Whereas Kessler had called for weak borders between Roland Park and Evergreen, the Olmsted Brothers called for a hedge to ring the western edge of the plat where curving streets wound around the top of the steep hill that sloped down into the Jones Falls Valley. The hedge cut off sight lines toward the Cross Keys houses immediately below while still permitting sweeping views of the valley.

The Olmsted Brothers designed Plat Two to serve aesthetic, moral, and socioeconomic purposes. They laid out winding roads that encoded how residents should spend leisure time strolling on meandering paths and taking in the beauty of the surroundings. The Olmsted Brothers placed a premium on the value of beautiful views. In the tradition of Andrew Jackson Downing, they believed that creating a picturesque landscape would inspire moral uplift through the leisurely contemplation of nature. This conception of nature depended on the obfuscation of Cross Keys. It was not the first time the Olmsted firm had erased evidence of African American life in order to realize that vision; their father had done the same in designing New York’s Central Park.⁵¹

With the black residents of Cross Keys obscured by the hedge, the brothers planned streets to intersect at triangles, which allowed them to add more trees and shrubs to highlight the area’s “naturalistic beauty.”⁵² Bouton endorsed the plan strongly enough that he had the company purchase two houses from black residents of Cross Keys to move them away from the Roland Park property line.⁵³ In doing so he reinforced the fantasy of developing empty land, which had appealed to company investors and, once it was paired with healthiness, also to home buyers.

The company’s Plat Two plans hit a snag, however, when Bouton discovered African Americans living in the middle of Roland Park property. The lot belonging to the Moonier family was completely surrounded by company property. The Olmsteds recommended to Bouton that the company purchase the property. Bouton agreed and requested two sets of plans, one reflecting the scenario in which the company acquired the lot and another in which “the objectionable features of their ownership of the property would be reduced to a minimum” in the event the company was not able to acquire the land. The Olmsteds supplied the alternate plan a week later. In it, the property’s only means of access was through a back alley.

FIGURE 2.2  Roland Park streets planned by the Olmsted Brothers.

(Courtesy of the Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries)

Bouton next contacted O. Parker Baker, a lawyer who was a member of a white family that owned land in Cross Keys and employed the sixty-five-year-old heir Louisa Moonier as a live-in servant.54 Bouton paid Baker to “conduct some outside investigations, to find out exactly who the owners are, and what their several interests are in the land.”⁵⁵ Baker identified the twelve heirs with an interest in the property, all of whom lived in Cross Keys and Washington, D.C.

Baker was unprepared to have to negotiate on price. “Had a meeting on Monday night with the colored people,” who were “demanding more money,” he reported to Bouton. During the meeting, he had “almost secured” everybody’s signature on a contract of sale when a husband and wife, Dennis and Clara Fenton, disputed the value of the land in question, saying the Roland Park Company had undervalued it by 50 percent. Eight more heirs joined with the Fentons in naming a price of $2,000 rather than $1,000, to be divided by the twelve.⁵⁶

Bouton responded by informing Baker that the surveyor and company indeed had made an error. Whereas they initially thought the Moonier property totaled one acre, it was only half an acre. Therefore, the initial offer of $1,000 for the property actually reflected a value of $2,000 per acre. The Fentons and the Roland Park Company disputed the size of the property. The Fentons continued to claim the land was one acre while the company said half an acre based on what “had been used and occupied.” With neither side able to settle the acreage, the Fentons countered by asking for a rate of $3,000 per acre, which would still net $1,500 for the half, a 50 percent gain from the company’s offer. Baker stood up in the meeting and said any more money was “out of the question.” He then threatened to go to court and open a partition and sale proceeding, which would force a sale of the interests held by the ten heirs who had refused the initial offer. By the end of the meeting, the remaining heirs, including the Fentons, offered to sign the contract for a rate of $1,800 per acre. The matter of acreage size was left unresolved. Baker had hired a title company, which found the 1818 transfer of a half acre to Solomon Moonier but nothing after. Subsequent generations of Mooniers could have plausibly expanded the property to one acre, especially given the common practice in Cross Keys of making additions to homes. However, the subsequent paucity of records reflected the precarity of African American claims to property in the nineteenth century.⁵⁷

FIGURE 2.3  Olmsted Plan 2210-13, a preliminary plan of Plat Two by the Olmsted Brothers showing the location and proposed treatment of the Moonier property.

(Courtesy of the National Park Service, Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site)

Even with the signed contract, Bouton refused the offer, calling it “ridiculous” and opting to open the partitioning proceeding in court rather than negotiate the price. A partitioning proceeding would remove the negotiating power of the Fentons. Unbeknownst to the Fentons, however, bringing them to court would serve another purpose for the company. Baker had falsely assumed that because the Mooniers were black, they never held title to the property. Bouton then sought to have a title guarantee company insure the title in order to gain a clear legal claim to the land once the company purchased it. The agents of the title company, however, objected “to taking the title from the descendants of a colored man long since deceased” based on a standard sales contract. They would insure the title only if the Roland Park Company initiated a court proceeding in which the Mooniers “proved their pedigree” by tracing their lineage back to Solomon Moonier and establishing that the land “devolved” to them. It was in Bouton’s interest, therefore, to bring the Mooniers to court.58

The Fentons hired a lawyer who suggested a final figure of $800 to be split among them and the other eight heirs who refused the initial offer. Of this number, each person received $100 for each one-twelfth stake in the property. The two heirs who had signed the earlier contract, by contrast, received $78.34 for their shares.⁵⁹ Baker informed the Fentons they should sign the blank deed and contract of sale he prepared, but that the company would delay paying them until after the court proceedings, where they would have to establish their “pedigree” on record. The Fentons refused. Baker then arranged to pay them before the court proceedings because he could unofficially establish pedigree quickly on his own. Bouton agreed to the plan the next day. The whole ordeal lasted seven months from the discovery that the Mooniers’ land lay in the center of Plat Two.⁶⁰

Bouton framed his decision to the British investors as a win: the cost of the Moonier land, comprising “a little less than an acre,” including court fees and expenses, totaled $1,400. In contrast, the company had paid $1,500 an acre for Plat One land in 1891. The cost of the land purchase was therefore “about the same” as previous costs. The figure also included payment of $190 to Baker, whose earnings totaled more than any of the Mooniers received for their shares.⁶¹ From the outset, Bouton characterized dealings with the Mooniers as “tedious.”⁶² Rather than approaching negotiations as a matter of business to be worked out, Bouton worked within a legal system that discounted blacks’ claims to property and negotiated in bad faith.

By October 1899, only one matter remained. The Mooniers had used part of the lot for the family graveyard. Now that the Roland Park Company was going to subdivide the land, Bouton saw the graveyard as “a sore place in the midst of our holdings.”⁶³ Bouton once again contacted Baker, who notified family members they had six months to remove the bodies. “If they are not moved within a short time,” he stated, the Roland Park Company would do it.⁶⁴ It is unclear who ultimately disinterred and relocated the bodies that generations of Mooniers had buried over the span of ninety years. Bouton, however, looked forward to finally being able to subdivide and sell the Moonier land. The new owners, he said, would “not be objectionable.”⁶⁵

Even after the Mooniers were dispensed with, the existence of Cross Keys remained objectionable and threatening as far as the company was concerned. When Roland Park was still under development, a dog bit a white child living in Plat Two, exposing the boy to rabies. The boy and his family lived on Hillside Road, the only Roland Park street to directly intersect with Cross Keys on Falls Road. H. R. Mayo Thom and his wife contacted the Roland Park Company offices several times over the next week to discuss what measures needed to be taken in response.⁶⁶ Apparently with the approval of the company, Thom and another man armed themselves with shotguns and descended the hill. The subsequent newspaper coverage of what happened next described “a fusillade of shots and wild sounds.”⁶⁷ The men killed every dog they saw, stopping only when Cross Keys residents hid the remaining dogs inside their homes. One month later the company secretary and treasurer, Richard Marchant Jr., attended a meeting of the Roland Park Civic League, a volunteer neighborhood organization that served as a liaison between residents and the company. He suggested that the civic league form a committee on dogs in order to “suppress as far as possible” any further cases of rabies in Roland Park. Marchant recommended that Thom chair the committee and praised how he had worked together with the company.

The company’s incorporation of antiblack violence into the operating apparatus of Roland Park mirrored the increasing incidents of violent dispossession of black property in areas throughout the country.⁶⁸ The sanctioning of the dog culling, like the bad-faith negotiations of the Mooniers’ land, was merely one part of a pattern of actions the company took to define the social and economic relationships they considered crucial for Roland Park’s success. Healthiness, including controlling black lives and property, was, after all, one of Roland Park’s most valuable commodities. Thom had aided the Roland Park Company in this respect because doing so helped to assure current and future white residents that the company would deliver on the promises of the planned suburb free of nuisances.

While on one hand, controlling black bodies and property was seen as key to creating a healthy community, on the other hand, African American labor proved one of the key means by which white residents maintained clean, sanitary homes. In time, the company came to treat Cross Keys and Evergreen as crucial pools of labor for Roland Park. The Roland Park Company created a hierarchy of jobs for men based on race, employing white Evergreen residents as firemen and policemen as well as grounds crew foremen. Cross Keys residents worked in Roland Park as mechanics, groundskeepers, cooks, and servants.

Day employment in Roland Park became a family affair. Cross Keys resident Gert West began working as a cook in Roland Park at age eleven. “My grandmother cooked for the Slagles in the big house,” she remembered, “and my father and uncle were their chauffeurs.”⁶⁹ When she got older she began walking up the hill on a dirt path to work at two more Roland Park houses.⁷⁰ Cross Keys women also took in washing to do at home. Taking in washing enabled women to have more control over their own labor and time than if they lived with their employers. The company, however, made doing laundry in Cross Keys more difficult when it built a springhouse on the site of the primary Cross Keys water source, cutting off access to residents and partially destroying a second recreation spot popular among Cross Keys residents.⁷¹

The discourse on racial and class norms went both ways. Roland Park residents may have brought certain ideas about interracial and interclass interactions with them when they moved in, but the Roland Park Company likewise participated in establishing racialized labor norms that governed daily life. The company provided advice to residents about how to employ a black labor force. Company officials suggested, for instance, that residents hire local African American men to cut their grass because they could be paid less than white men.⁷² In another case, an incoming resident argued that it was in the company’s interest to pay for the construction of a separate bathroom for his black servant because in the event the house was sold in the future, it was a “fact” that the next residents would also require one.⁷³ The company obliged.

Indeed, Roland Park homes were unviable without domestic labor. Defying the literature that held that nuclear families formed the core of planned suburbs, early Roland Park households often were large because they consisted of a variety of family arrangements.⁷⁴ Frank Zimmerman was a typical Roland Park resident. He bought a lot in Plat One using money he made as a superintendent at the Boston-based John Hancock Life Insurance Company.⁷⁵ Zimmerman lived in the house with his mother, four siblings, their spouses, an aunt, and a nephew, all of whom were born in Maryland, like the majority of Plat One residents. One of his brothers clerked at the same life insurance company, while Zimmerman’s brother-in-law Albert Stroble sold real estate. None of the women worked a wage-earning job. Eighty percent of Plat One’s households employed at least one live-in servant. Of these households, 54 percent employed only blacks, 28 percent only whites, and 18 percent hired black and white workers.⁷⁶ In terms of people rather than households, African Americans constituted 62 percent of all live-in labor. It was not until the first decade of the twentieth century that newer sections of Roland Park began to consist primarily of nuclear families of parents and children.⁷⁷ Even then, households tended to employ one to four servants, 53 percent of whom were African American. As was typical in the United States, women composed the vast majority of the live-in labor who performed chores ranging from scrubbing floors to gardening.⁷⁸ Black women formed the largest group (51 percent), followed by white women, black men, and white men, respectively. Most of the women were listed in the 1900 census simply as “servant,” though some were identified as nurses, cooks, and seamstresses. Even as Roland Park demographics shifted toward more affluent buyers and more nuclear families, reliance on domestic labor remained consistent.

NEW CAPITAL, NEW SPACES, NEW NETWORKS

As the Roland Park Company experimented with how to develop and maintain its subdivision, it also created new spaces that reconfigured Baltimore’s social, political, and financial networks to the benefit of the company. The results further narrowed the definition of what constituted a planned suburb. One of those spaces at the center of Roland Park life was the country club. Bouton and the Olmsteds placed a premium on greenery, but Roland Park lacked any parks. Instead, it had a country club that attracted Baltimore’s most powerful citizens. Extending down the hill and along both sides of Falls Road, the Baltimore Country Club was situated on part of the former Oakland estate, just north of Plat Two and Cross Keys.

The Baltimore Country Club was one of the first places the company used to create social and political networks that would be advantageous to its business. Like other country clubs, it arose out of a longer genealogy of male social clubs that proliferated in nineteenth-century cities.⁷⁹ Bouton joined the Baltimore social clubs that were home to the city’s affluent white Christians—the clubs were often segregated by race and religion—when he moved to Baltimore to run the Roland Park Company. He then rummaged through the membership rolls to fill the Baltimore Country Club with lawyers, politicians, and bankers. Social clubs were often located in built-up sections of the city. Country clubs, by contrast, had ample room for outdoor activities. At the country club members including Baltimore City mayors could meet for a meal or hash out deals over a game of golf. Bouton, an active member and avid golfer, often dined at the club and struck up correspondence with its members. Once at the club, its president, Decoursey Thom, the brother of dog committee member H. R. Mayo Thom, advertised Roland Park homes for sale.

The country club, like the planned suburb in general, remained an unfamiliar type of space in Baltimore in the 1890s. As a result, Bouton worked to construct the two in relation to each other. Bouton used the Baltimore Country Club to talk with members about what he called “suburban living.”⁸⁰ The route from the Roland Park streetcar stop to the club became the company’s showpiece street. Club Road consisted of thematically uniform Tudor Revival homes on half-acre lots. Bouton carefully selected buyers from the ranks of the country club for half of the Club Road houses and encouraged them to nominate the rest. This would ensure that those concerned about privacy would have “acceptable neighbors,” while the company would gain “unpaid sales agents.”⁸¹ The country club and Club Road constituted didactic spaces where the company could shape Roland Park’s social and political networks.

The country club also provided the Lands Trust Company with a potential pool of local investors. In 1898 Lands Trust directors considered the possibility that it held too many shares in the Roland Park Company. It sent a request to Bouton to try to sell Roland Park Company shares to country club members and new Plat Two residents.⁸² It is unclear whether Bouton successfully followed through. Lands Trust shareholder doubts continued to multiply in 1899 and 1900, and the company became less willing to grant Bouton’s frequent requests for more money to fund further Roland Park expansions. As a result, Bouton began conversations about the Lands Trust Company selling its stake.⁸³

The Lands Trust Company directors decided to end their involvement in 1903. The Roland Park Company required more daily oversight and financial support than the company’s directors wanted to maintain. A British representative of the Lands Trust Company told Bouton that although investors considered Roland Park to be one of its “best assets” (the Roland Park Company paid dividends of $45 per share), it had become difficult “to be in as close touch and sympathy” with the daily requirements of developing Roland Park as it would be for Americans, with whom Bouton could “readily discuss and plan at any time.” The Lands Trust board encouraged Bouton to pursue a Baltimore-based reorganization of the Roland Park Company in order to buy out the Lands Trust’s shares. Bouton’s reputation as a general manager was good and real estate conditions were favorable enough in Baltimore that they could secure any price they set. Getting a local group together would, they predicted, enable the new iteration of the company to easily form relationships with Maryland financial institutions and continue into the future.⁸⁴

Bouton looked to his social clubs for his new collaborators to reorganize the Roland Park Company. As he did with the country club, Bouton mixed his social networks and business networks; by 1903 he was listed in Baltimore’s annual social register blue book, as was the Baltimore Country Club itself. Bouton reached out to members of the Maryland Club and another institution where he held membership: Baltimore County’s Elk Ridge Hunt Club, a former fox-hunting club that had evolved into a country club and social hub for former country estate owners and city businessmen.⁸⁵

New investors came from the ranks of these and other elite social clubs. One investor, the president of the Baltimore Trust and Guarantee Company, became a member of the Baltimore Country Club’s board of governors. Another, one of Baltimore’s wealthiest and most well-known businessmen at the time, Robert Garrett, owned some of the area’s last country estates, just beyond the city line. He, too, became a member of the country club’s board.⁸⁶ By the start of 1904 the Roland Park Company could count seventeen investors, including Bouton. Eleven were based in the Baltimore area. Of these, seven were members of the Maryland Club and four were members of both the Maryland Club and Elk Ridge. The remaining six investors, who lived elsewhere, consisted of Jarvis and Conklin, a relative of Conklin’s, a relative of Bouton, and an associate of Jarvis, Conklin, and Bouton from Kansas City.

After the Roland Park Company’s reorganization, Bouton continued pursuing the priorities he had previously developed under the Lands Trust Company. Bouton, now company president, worked with the Olmsteds to change the street names of Plat One to bring them into thematic alignment with the later plats. Gone were the likes of Fryer, Capron, and Sheldon Avenues, to be replaced by Woodlawn, Oakdale, and Upland Roads.

ROLAND PARK AND THE BIRTH OF BALTIMORE’S SEWER SYSTEM

The Roland Park Company’s dichotomy of city and suburb hinged on Baltimore City lacking its own sewer system. That changed while Roland Park was still being developed, and with it so did Roland Park’s relationship to the city. On February 7, 1904, a fire swept east across downtown Baltimore. By the time it was extinguished the next day, it had leveled Baltimore’s central business district. The fire created a rare moment of political unity. Politicians with a history of disagreement believed Baltimore had a chance to rebuild its downtown to be bigger and more technologically competitive than ever before. They included some of Maryland’s most prominent politicians, who saw an update of the city’s infrastructure as the linchpin in any rebuilding plan. Baltimore, they pointed out, was the largest city in the United States that lacked a comprehensive sewer system.

Prior calls for a sewage system had stalled in the state legislature. This time, however, the state allowed Baltimore City to hold a referendum. Voters decided whether to allow the city to issue $10 million in bonds to create a municipal sewer system, with repayments over seventy-five years, the heaviest of which were scheduled for the 1910s. Senator Isidor Rayner declared, “[If] these loans are rejected we cut loose from every progressive city in the Union and proclaim … that we do not propose to take a single step that will improve our environment or promote our success.” The measure passed with 60 percent of the vote.⁸⁷ Baltimore would finally get a comprehensive sewage system.

Rayner’s appeal was accurate—Baltimore City indeed lagged behind cities of similar size—but paying for a system with bonds was hardly par for the course. Instead, many cities relied on special assessment to pay for infrastructure. The Milwaukee and Detroit sewer systems were completely paid for by special assessment, a process in which property owners of a neighborhood paid for a service proportionally to the value of their property. Chicago financed its sewage system by bonds before switching to special assessment after a major annexation in 1889, when property owners in its new wards had to pay for extensions of the system into their areas. In all three cases, this led to unequal distribution of services. Baltimore itself was no stranger to special assessments for much of the nineteenth century.⁸⁸

To begin the process, the mayor appointed a five-person sewerage commission composed of businessmen and sanitary engineers, with the mayor acting as member ex officio. Despite a promising start buoyed by the referendum’s large margin of victory, the Baltimore Sewerage Commission quickly encountered obstacles. Shortly after forming in 1905, its members could not locate the old records and maps of the previous, unsuccessful sewerage commissions of the late nineteenth century.⁸⁹ The incident marked the first of many delays the commission faced due to missing, incomplete, or inaccurate records.

Recent changes in city government also posed obstacles. Seven years prior to the creation of the Sewerage Commission, a new charter reorganized Baltimore’s government along functional lines with bureaucrats rather than politicians in prominent positions. Like so many similar attempts throughout American cities at the turn of the century, it was an effort to break machine politics and the resulting patronage system where the criteria for municipal jobs was, first and foremost, political loyalty. At the same time, the mayor also gained more power over the city council. The new charter shifted power away from the local Democratic machine, which had suffered electoral defeats in 1895, and gave new institutionalized advantages to the city’s wealthy citizens, as was often the case during Progressive-Era reforms.⁹⁰ In fact, it was the wealthiest sections of the city that most strongly supported the sewage loan referendum.⁹¹ The machine made subsequent electoral gains, but the criteria for Baltimore City positions were now likely to include some type of expert qualification.

The Sewerage Commission itself was a mixture of machine politics and the turn toward expertise, with its politicians and sanitary engineers. The limited extent of municipal transformations meant that few procedures existed for the engineers planning the sewer system to coordinate with the six other city departments—some of which were also new—to perform work necessary to construct the system. As a result, the Sewerage Commission engineers met with frustration and further delays.

The chief engineer, Calvin Hendrick, oversaw daily operations and helped draft preliminary plans for the system. Hendrick found his attempts to create a scientifically informed rational master plan for the sewage system repeatedly stymied by inaccurate data as well as by members of other city departments. There was rarely a report from Hendrick that did not contain the phrase “considerable expense.” On one occasion he wrote that in seeking information from various city departments, “we have found the records very incomplete. In many cases on opening up a street we find the actual conditions at variance with the record plans, which have caused us considerable expense in changing our construction.” So frequently did Hendrick receive inaccurate information from other departments that he prefaced the commission’s work with a disclaimer: “This information is gathered from various City Departments and corporations and placed on our contract drawings, with a note that we are in no way responsible for its accuracy.”⁹²

Members of other departments adopted an adversarial approach as they staked out their jurisdictions while coordinating with the Sewerage Commission. The City Engineer’s Office, which oversaw street paving, butted heads with the Sewerage Commission on how to split expenses. The city engineer wrote to Mayor J. Barry Mahool that his office spent $15,000 in 1908 in “repaving and readjusting intersections” because the Sewerage Commission needed to lay drains. In the engineer’s opinion, the money was “properly chargeable to the construction of sewers and not chargeable to the Repairs of Roads and Streets as it has been charged.”⁹³ Meanwhile, Hendrick continued to write anxiously about losing precious time to departmental coordination issues. The mayor called a series of meetings to resolve disputes between the two agencies, in which the minutiae of street paving became the grist by which municipal actors worked out how the city distributed and paid for public goods.

Frustrated city engineers began turning to sources outside city government to remedy their data shortages and avoid cooperating with their colleagues. The Roland Park Company became one of these. After over a decade and a half in business, the company had planning experience, information about northern Baltimore’s land and resources. Through their work they had compiled a repository of soil samples, maps, and comprehensive topographical surveys of northern Baltimore, all privately paid for—and precisely the type of records Hendrick and others needed. Members of the Topographical Survey Commission—which supplied city agencies with data—borrowed supplies and maps from the company.⁹⁴ Chief Water Engineer Alfred M. Quick wrote to the company requesting information on the area because he did not trust the accuracy of information furnished by the Topographical Survey Commission.⁹⁵

The company and the municipal government shared personnel as well as information and supplies. Both the city and the company sought people from the limited pool of professionals with planning and engineering credentials at a time when that training was still relatively rare. Hendrick consulted for the Roland Park Company as it was expanding its own sewer system at the same time he was leading similar efforts for Baltimore City.⁹⁶ Hendrick was not alone in moving between company and city payrolls. The company’s landscape architects, the Olmsted Brothers, planned Baltimore’s park system precisely as it planned another expansion of Roland Park in 1905.

Despite the Roland Park Company’s business relationship with Hendrick, his initial plans did not prioritize the northern section of Baltimore City. The company was displeased with that decision because it potentially complicated the company’s decision to expand yet again, crossing the city-county boundary line for the first time to subdivide land just inside the city’s northernmost limits. However, the Sewerage Commission justified the decision by noting that it considered both current and likely future patterns of density and population growth in determining which areas of the city would first receive sewers as part of its comprehensive plan. Hendrick stressed in annual reports of 1905 and 1906 that while the population of that section was increasing and the city opened more streets there every year, it did “not compare with the necessity and obligation to sewer the old portions of the City.”⁹⁷ The population remained too sparse; further downtown, the higher density of people and homes had already been creating public health hazards.

FIGURE 2.4  Roland Park houses under construction along the city-county line. These homes would be connected to Baltimore City sewers.

(Courtesy of the Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries)

In addition, completing sewers downtown would raise the property value of the city’s more expensive land in the district that had burned, thus increasing potential tax assessments that could fund future system construction. In northern Baltimore, by contrast, the streets remained too “scattered and disconnected” to adequately add new houses to the system, which by its nature necessitated connecting pipes to each other under existing streets. Furthermore, Hendrick considered northern Baltimore an “outlying district.”98 By all measures, in terms of public health, population density, property value, and actual engineering considerations, northern Baltimore would have to wait for municipal sewers if the Sewerage Commission stuck to its need-based master plan.

But the Roland Park Company did not want to wait to expand into northern Baltimore City; it wanted the city to lay out sewers for the company’s new city section as soon as possible. Given the relatively sparse population in the north part of the city and the slow progress of construction, the company knew it would construct the houses well before the commission began work in the area. Suggesting a solution, company officials wrote to the Sewerage Commission proposing to fully lay out and pay for sewer pipes according to the commission’s plans and have the city incorporate those pipes into the general system when it reached the area.⁹⁹ At that time, the municipal government would fully reimburse the Roland Park Company and pay “fair compensation” for taking private drains into the city system.¹⁰⁰ These terms formed the framework of an initial agreement between the city and the company. The parties still had to work out the specifics, however.

Those specifics included who would carry out the work. The city wanted to assign men to supervise the construction, and the company agreed. Shortly thereafter, a conflict arose over what types of plans the commission would supply for the company. Hendrick opposed designing the project. During a routine commission meeting, he stated, “If we prepare plans for the Roland Park Company, as requested, it will not be possible to refuse similar requests made by other property owners, and our engineering department would be unable to handle the large number of cases.”¹⁰¹ As a result, the commission supplied only general information on how it was constructing its system and some guidelines for the company to follow. This information was generic enough for Hendrick to feel comfortable supplying it as frequently as needed.¹⁰² Even with the agreed-upon general information, the Roland Park Company benefited when its network of planners overlapped with those of Baltimore City.

The Roland Park Company connected the new sewers it constructed to the existing company sewer system already in place for the company’s Baltimore County sections. Hendrick warned the Sewerage Commission in 1909 that the Roland Park Company needed to make provisions to disconnect the new pipes from Baltimore County houses once they were incorporated into the city’s system. This provision, however, did not become part of a formal agreement with the company.¹⁰³ The next year, Bouton requested permission for the company to drain both city and county houses with the new pipes. Hendrick again cautioned against setting a precedent of the city “undertaking the care of houses in the county, when there are numerous sections throughout the City demanding and needing drainage relief.” Furthermore, the Sewerage Commission had doubts about the legality of servicing county sewage under the terms of its Enabling Act.¹⁰⁴

At the end of 1910, in letters to the commission justifying its connections to county houses, Bouton stated that the pipes still belonged to the company, so jurisdiction was not an issue. More importantly, the city was not being reasonable by forcing the company to separate its “city interests” on one side of the city line from its adjacent “county interests” on the other side. After all, Roland Park as a whole had increased Baltimore City tax revenue and future construction promised additional benefits. In a sharp contrast to the theme of its advertising, the Roland Park Company sought to blur the boundaries between city and suburb in order to secure municipal resources. The Sewerage Commission dodged the problem by approving the connections on the basis that the sewer still belonged to the company. It did not comment on tax revenue.¹⁰⁵

Despite the tensions, the city’s relationship with the Roland Park Company was far more amenable than with other parties. Indeed, the city regularly favored the Roland Park Company. In the working-class immigrant neighborhoods of East Baltimore, the Sewerage Commission faced threats of over one hundred lawsuits for insufficient sewage. In response, it built a drain “to avoid further damages.”¹⁰⁶ But it took the one hundred suits for the commission to act. No single suit merited a response, but en masse, petitioners created enough of an economic concern in a concentrated area that the commission took action. By contrast, the Sewerage Commission read out the Roland Park Company’s requests for Sewerage Commission services at meetings and entered them into the official record. Hendrick responded promptly, and the commission decided on the merits of the company’s requests. One request from the Roland Park Company garnered more action than the first ninety-nine need-based requests from the residents of East Baltimore.

In the end, the Sewerage Commission supplied the Roland Park Company with plans, labor, and supervision. It changed its geographic and need-based schedule at the request of the company that had lent it knowledge and supplies. The houses the new pipes served would otherwise have been hooked up to the Roland Park Company’s nearby private sewage system, including houses in Baltimore County that fell outside the service area of the city sewer system. As a result, it added extra houses into the total number of residences the city’s system would serve. The Sewerage Commission diverted its own budget to reimburse the Roland Park Company twice over: for the cost of the construction as well as the condemnation costs required to officially take control of the works that it supervised in the first place. The commission made the arrangement knowing that condemnation costs would be high because the appraised value of the land under which the pipes ran would increase due to the added infrastructure. Taxpayer-approved bond money thus flowed to the Roland Park Company and away from the areas of Baltimore City with high morbidity and mortality due to poor sanitary conditions.

Even though it made a big difference in Roland Park’s underground infrastructure, by 1910 Roland Park’s political borders mattered little visually as it crossed the city line. Instead, the company continued to plan Roland Park with the division of suburban and urban space in mind. This was the case when the company planned a pair of apartment buildings on their newly opened University Parkway, which linked Roland Park’s southern section to Plat Two. It hired architect Edward L. Palmer Jr. for the job. Palmer suggested that the company pay close attention to the heights of the buildings. Anything taller than four stories, Palmer asserted, “would miss entirely the general character which would make [Tudor Arms] a fitting entrance to the development beyond, the idea being to attach these buildings to Roland Park and not to the City.”¹⁰⁷ Palmer, along with Bouton and the Olmsteds, envisioned a gateway as a transition area from urban to suburban space. Roland Park itself would continue to be marketed as a unified district that looked, felt, and functioned according to the company’s vision of a suburb. In effect, Bouton successfully accumulated the city’s resources to bolster Roland Park’s infrastructure below ground while reinforcing its boundaries above.

CONCLUSION

By 1910 the Roland Park Company’s political gains and social networks had surpassed the Lands Trust Company’s assurance to Bouton that a locally owned version of the company would succeed. Yet, few of the major figures who helped shaped the nature of Roland Park’s success remained connected to the company. Fryer and Bright had both died before the turn of the century. Waring had died after contracting yellow fever in Cuba. Surviving associates continued their work around the world. Jarvis and Conklin had severed connections with the Lands Trust after declaring bankruptcy. They both remained shareholders in a personal capacity and friends with Bouton, but offered little input on company operations. Their business priorities became managing currency in Cuba for the U.S. government.¹⁰⁸ The Olmsteds grew the landscape architecture firm begun by their father and took on commissions in the U.S.-occupied Philippines and the Caribbean. Like others tied to the Lands Trust and Roland Park companies, business brought them to Cuba. There, on what was then known as the Isle of Pines, an island claimed by both Cuba and the United States, they worked with a New Jersey–based company to develop a settlement for Americans. The result was a planned community with a country club, an enclave that was the real estate version of what Waring achieved for U.S. troops in the Caribbean: a “clean and wholesome” space for Americans in a country they associated with contagious disease.¹⁰⁹

Between 1891 and 1910 the Roland Park Company developed and expanded its eponymous subdivision. In the process, its daily street-level experiments in laying infrastructure, restricting access, and advertising led to Baltimore’s new spatial and social geography in which people came to think of the “suburb” not simply as the periphery but as a planned space that could be controlled and kept safe from the threats of unhealthy and undesirable people. These tactics came in response to the long-term needs of British investors, but continued after the investors had moved on.

Planning Roland Park did not stop with the street layout or the advertising campaigns or the revisions to street names. The Roland Park Company performed the daily work of promoting those ideas and maintaining them, whether it was taking out an ad in the newspaper or facilitating its residents’ vigilante violence in Cross Keys. From its restrictive covenants to its hedge and its country club, Roland Park was premised on conflating aesthetic and socioeconomic concerns. Company ads came to warn about “unhealthful surroundings and undesirable neighbors” plaguing city life. But at Roland Park, with the help of the company, residents could live peacefully, relying on African Americans as sources of labor. Retooling nineteenth-century precedents, Bouton found new ways to emphasize that certain people could be nuisances to be managed accordingly. These modes of management and thinking about people became baked into the very DNA of the planned suburb.

Over time, Roland Park gained a reputation as one of Baltimore’s most desirable neighborhoods. What began with Plat One just north of the 1888 city line had expanded in all directions and now lay in both Baltimore City and Baltimore County. Yet the company marketed a unified space where the political border mattered less than the boundaries of the company’s holdings. This was the result of two processes over two decades: carefully cultivating the image of what a planned suburb was and using its capital reserves and planning experiences as leverage to negotiate with municipal government. The spaces it built and the nascent networks the company helped configure enabled it to weather the exit of the Lands Trust Company while continuing to grow, following a similar model developed with British capital. By 1910, at the close of the Roland Park Company’s second decade, Bouton no longer doubted whether Baltimoreans understood the concept of the planned suburb. Instead, he was emboldened to incorporate refined and hardened exclusionary tactics into the company’s next development. As he did, Baltimore City emerged at the center of a national debate on the politics of housing segregation.