"But they tell me Captain Emerson's a practical man, and I reckon what he _mainly_ meant was that he made his money out of this-here Bromo Seltzer, and he was darn glad of it, so he thought he'd put him up a big Bromo Seltzer bottle as a kind of cross between a monument and an ad." If the bottle tower represents certain modern concepts of what is suitable in architecture, it is nevertheless pleasant to record the fact that many honorable old buildings--most of them residences--survive in Baltimore, and that, because of their survival, the city looks older than New York and fully as old as either Philadelphia or Boston.

But in this, appearances are misleading, for New York and Boston were a century old, and Philadelphia half a century, when Baltimore was first laid out as a town.

Efforts to start a settlement near the city's present site were, it is true, being made before William Penn and his Quakers established Philadelphia, but a letter written in 1687 by Charles Calvert, third Baron Baltimore, explains that: "The people there [are] not affecting to build nere each other but soe as to have their houses nere the watters for conveniencye of trade and their lands on each side of and behynde their houses, by which it happens that in most places there are not fifty houses in the space of thirty myles."[1] [1] From "Historic Towns of the Southern States." The difficulty experienced by the Barons Baltimore, Lords Proprietary of Maryland, in building up communities in their demesne was not a local problem, but one which confronted those interested in the development of the entire portion of this continent now occupied by the Southern States.

Generally speaking, towns came into being more slowly in the South than in the North, and it seems probable that one of the principal reasons for this may be found in the fact that settlers throughout the South lived generally at peace with the Indians, whereas the northern settlers were obliged to congregate in towns for mutual protection.
Thus, in colonial days, while the many cities of New York and New England were coming into being, the South was developing its vast and isolated plantations.

Farms on the St.Lawrence River and on the Detroit River, where the French were settling, were very narrow and very deep, the idea being to range the houses close together on the river front; but on such rivers as the Potomac, the Rappahannock and the James, no element of early fear is to be traced in the form of the broad baronial plantations.
Nevertheless, when Baltimore began at last to grow, she became a prodigy, not only among American cities, but among the cities of the world.