William Fell, the English colonist who gave his name to the Fells Point waterfront, was no admiral, not even a captain, perhaps not much of a seaman at all.
"I don't think they themselves -[the Fells] - were masters of any vessels," says Lesley Humphreys, the exhibit coordinator at the new Fells Point Maritime Museum that opens today on Thames Street. "They built the ships, but I don't think they sailed them."
Even how many ships they built is problematic, says Geoffrey Footner, a maritime historian who lives on Fell Street. No records of their shipyard seem to exist.
But the Fells were canny real-estate speculators. Which adds a certain irony to the opening of the new museum. The last vestiges of the working waterfront at Fells Point - the tugboats that grace the foot of Broadway - are threatened by developers who'd like to turn the Recreational Pier into upscale shops and housing. History sometimes seems to spin like a top while remaining in the same place.
William Fell, a shipwright, followed his brother Edward to America in 1732 from Swarthmore in Lancashire, England. Edward already had a store on the east bank of the Jones Falls. He and William Jones had a charter to develop Jones Town, the neighborhood we now call Old Town.
William Fell soon bought his own tract of land, roughly bounded by today's Broadway, Bond, Lancaster and Thames streets. He built a mansion and eventually acquired the thousand acres or so that became Fells Point. A tavern quickly appeared on the southwest corner of his original tract, about at Bond and Thames, where Duda's Bar, a Fells Point institution in itself, thrives today. Fells Point has never lacked for taverns since.
William died in 1746 and he's buried along with his brother, son and grandson in a little plot sealed in concrete at 1607 Shakespeare St.
In 1763, William's son Edward laid out plots for development on the land he inherited and gave the streets the names that some still bear today - Shakespeare and Lancaster, for example. Edward died three years later and his wife, Ann Bond Fell, carried on.
In the new museum, Ann's portrait is considerably larger than her husband's.
"He actually was not as large in Fells Point as she was," says Nancy Davis, deputy director of the Maryland Historical Society. The new museum is "a cooperative venture" of the historical society and the Society for the Preservation of Federal Hill and Fells Point. The preservation society owns the building; the historical society developed the museum.
"He died before Fells Point really came of age and she was the one who really pushed it forward," Davis says. "She was the more significant."
Her advertisement announcing she would carry on the development appeared in the Maryland Gazette on July 31, 1766, promptly after Edward's death. A reproduction is in the museum.
"From what we gather," Lesley Humphreys says. "She was an excellent sales person. She really was able to figure out ways to sell Fells Point. She did a very good job."
The museum building is a historic artifact in itself. It's at 1724 Thames St., facing the harbor more or less, midway between the Daily Grind coffee shop and The Cat's Eye Pub, another longtime Fells Point refuge. Most recently, the Daily Grind occupied the first floor and George Figgs' Orpheum Cinema, an art-film movie house, was on the second.
"It's an unusual-looking building and people will be fascinated and attracted by [it]," Davis says.
The building is long and narrow and goes all the way back to Lancaster Street; it will connect some day with the garden of the preservation society's Robert Long House, which fronts on Ann Street, around the corner from the museum. It was built about 1858 as a trolley barn, for Fells Point's first horse-drawn trolley line.
"They believe the horses were kept on the second floor," Davis says, "and the trolley cars were kept on the first floor."
So how do you get a horse on the second floor?
"There was a ramp in the back of the building, and the horses were walked up."
There's actually evidence they were up there.
"The horses chewed the wood," Davis says. "They were bored, and they chewed the wood. So there's a lot of chewed wood on the second floor."
The building remained a trolley barn until the end of the 19th century, when streetcar lines were electrified. It became a warehouse for metals and rope and various nautical wares.
Designers and craftsmen were still putting the museum exhibits together early last week, so the place had the jumbled look of the China Sea Marine Trading Co., the nautical antique emporium Steve Bunker ran there for many years before the Daily Grind moved in. Bunker, a professional old salt, wandered Fells Point with a parrot or two on his shoulder.
