If you are a parent like me, trips to new cities typically include obligatory tours of the local zoo, the children’s museum, parks, or the aquarium. If you are lucky your destination city offers even more in the way of hands on learning via lesser-known attractions. In Maryland one such place is The Baltimore Museum of Industry.
The building was designed to give visitors insight to the history of machinery in the city. But since its opening the museum has become a magnet for school groups and a place where parents can participate in hands on history lessons with their children.
The Baltimore Museum of Industry is located in a building that once housed the Platt Oyster Cannery, the last existing can company in Baltimore City. Tour guides will tell you that the original cannery is where much of the city’s immigrants worked. During the summer, they would can oysters and during the winter, they canned fruit.
Speaking of tour guides, the ones at The Baltimore Museum of Industry are very sensitive to kids’ attention spans and adjust their talks accordingly. The building was designed with young children in mind and you can tell. Its exhibits are geared toward kids-—from the pint-sized oyster-shucking stations to the moveable antique irons—-as the museum aims to teach its young visitors all about Baltimore’s industrial and labor history.
The museum also includes a cannery exhibit, which features a steam retort machine, one of the predecessors to pasteurization techniques used to sterilize food today. There are also wall-size photos recalling the days before child labor laws. Other displays include a collection of antique delivery trucks and one of only two working steam tugboats in the country. There are also working models of various printing presses, where kids can make prints to take home as souvenirs. The museum is also home to a replica of a garment-making factory.
The museum is located a few blocks from Fort McHenry along Key Highway (about a 1/2-mile walk south of the Inner Harbor). Admission for adults is $3.50. Children and seniors pay just $2.50.
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