Archives & Research

Baltimore Museum of Industry Research Center

Unlike many of America’s museums, the Baltimore Museum of Industry’s collections do not document the lifestyles of the elite. You will not find fine art or furnishings. Rather the 100,000 objects the BMI holds document the often-overlooked people in history-the workers, small business people, and citizens who built America. Baltimore has long been recognized as one of the nation’s premier industrial centers, home of the nation’s first passenger railroad; the world’s largest copper refinery; the oldest gas company in America; the first traffic light, and a multitude of other technological innovations. Baltimoreans have a reputation for taking great pride in their city’s identity as a “working man’s town”—a pride that has been enhanced and celebrated by the City’s renaissance and emergence as a major tourist center.

The BMI’s collections are evocative reminders of Baltimore’s great history. They explain to the average citizen more effectively than any textbook how the City developed from a small trading post to a thriving, industrial world center of manufacturing and commerce in a scant few decades, and how the citizen’s ancestor, no matter his or her station in life, race, ethnic background, or occupation, contributed to this development. This heritage, central to Baltimore’s image of itself, is only being preserved at the BMI. Baltimore has entrusted the BMI with its artifacts, images, and records- creating one of the nation’s best and broadest collections of industrial items relating to a particular place and its past experiences.

The industries represented by our collections include canning, printing, metalworking, garment manufacturing, cargo-handling, ship-building, transportation, food processing, baking, machine tooling, banking, pharmaceuticals, and public utilities. Our artifacts include close to 200 pieces of historic industrial machinery, over 6,000 tools, over 10,000 workplace fixtures, and nearly 50,000 light bulbs! Part of the collection also includes Baltimore-made products, signs, advertising products, labor-related objects, work clothing, safety accessories and office equipment.

Some highlights of the collection include an historic 1850s shipyard bell; an early wooden gas pipe laid by the nation’s first gas company; a rare 1820s “Acorn” printing press; a 1922 Linotype machine-a typesetting machine that revolutionized the printing industry and was invented in Baltimore; antique sewing machines, an 1980s electric car used to deliver goods around our city, and our most recent addition, the collections from the Mount Vernon Museum of Incandescent Lighting.

In addition to our collection of industrial artifacts, we maintain a significant archives, caring for over two hundred and fifty file, manuscript, and film collections focusing on historic Baltimore area trades and industries, a related library with over 5,000 rare and contemporary volumes, and 250,000 photographs and negatives.