“It is a 2000-horse-power smell that lays limburger cheese in the shade,” proclaimed an editor on the stench of Baltimore’s harbor during the heat of summer in 1897. Such commentaries became increasingly frequent in Baltimore’s newspapers as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Remarkably, in 1900, this city of a half million people did not have a comprehensive sewage system, making Baltimore one of the last cities of its size to hold that dubious distinction. Cesspits and privies, not designed to handle modern plumbing equipment, overflowed into the Jones Falls and other channels of the city. Open gutters carried street wastes into the stagnant waters of the harbor where it mixed with household sewage. Until the 1910s, Baltimore remained a city of open gutters, a source of embarrassment and consternation to most of the city’s leaders and elite. Municipal government did not ignore the question of sewers; the city council appointed and paid for sewerage commissions in the 1850s, 1880s, and 1890s—commissions that invested considerable time and effort reviewing sewer technologies in Europe and North America—producing working plans for Baltimore, but the city was unable or unwilling to implement them. Only in 1905 did the city finally begin to build comprehensive sewers. Baltimore’s case is peculiar in the amount of time it took to pass a referendum to build sewers, but the case also demonstrates some common characteristics of the evolution of infrastructure provision in North American cities. Prior to the Civil War, few municipalities built or financed large-scale public works. Long considered the domain of entrepreneurs, urban services such as water, roads, and transportation only slowly folded into the purview of the municipality. In the case of sewers, few but the wealthy were willing to pay for the underground conduits to carry away wastewater and human waste. Sewers served as a convenience to customers but did little if nothing at all to improve conditions in the city.
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