“We Had It Hard... but We Enjoyed It”: Class, Poverty, and Pride in Baltimore’s Hampden

Abstract

The Hampden community was established as a paternalist manufacturing village in the mid-19th century in Baltimore’s northern suburbs. Since then, its poor and working-class citizens have struggled for power in a variety of ways. A relational view of the paternalist system posits that power structures are composed of relationships between people, classes, and the means of production. Written statements from the past are important sources of information about class and poverty, but the authors of such statements tend to be from the middle or upper classes. The archaeological record provides another line of evidence for understanding poverty. Artifacts and features from the Mackey site (18BC164) illustrate some of the material strategies that people used to navigate the complex and changing class system at the turn of the 20th century. Understanding these strategies has implications for the contemporary community, which bases many planning decisions on its understanding of Hampden’s past.