Keeping Up With the Jones Falls

The Jones Falls is one of four subwatersheds within the City of Baltimore, along with Baltimore Harbor, Gwynns Falls and Herring Run. Together, these four areas encompass 194 square miles of land, 454 miles of streams and more than a million residents.

The Jones Falls subwatershed is a jagged triangle shape, wedged between the Gwynns Falls and Herring Run subwatersheds on either side and Baltimore Harbor below. It covers a wide swath on its northern end in Baltimore County, sweeping eastward from Worthington and Garrison over to Timonium, Lutherville and Towson. It then tapers sharply as it funnels southward, encompassing a long list of Baltimore City neighborhoods—from Barclay and Charles Village to Reservoir Hill, Woodberry and many more.

The watershed gets its name from the Jones Falls stream—the largest waterway that feeds into Baltimore's Inner Harbor. From its headwaters in Greenspring Valley, the Jones Falls stream flows southwest over 18 gently sloping miles before it empties into the Inner Harbor near Aliceanna Street. Here, it joins the Patapsco River and, eventually, the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.

The stream is named for David Jones, an early settler who acquired 500 acres along its banks in the 1660s. He also lent his name to the historic Jonestown neighborhood, one of the oldest communities in Baltimore City and home to the Aquarium's Animal Care and Rescue Center. Jonestown was founded in 1732, separate from the adjacent Baltimore Town. Located east of what's now President Street, Jonestown was first home to wealthy landowners as well as merchants, artisans, and laborers, including both free and enslaved African Americans. In the 1800s, Jonestown became the port-of-entry neighborhood for immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Italy and Eastern Europe, including Eastern European Jews who established a vibrant marketplace along Lombard Street.

The Jones Falls stream has played a prominent role in the region throughout its history. Like all Baltimore waterways, it first supported the original inhabitants of the Chesapeake region, including the Piscataway, Nanticoke and Susquehannock tribes, among many others. They harvested the plentiful fish and shellfish from local waters, grew crops in the fertile soil, and hunted game in the surrounding forests and fields.

Later, after white settlers moved in, the Jones Falls helped fuel Baltimore's early development, powering machinery for mills built on its banks to produce flour, paper, textiles and more.

The Jones Falls was dammed in the 1850s to create Lake Roland to provide drinking water to city residents. (Because it could not meet demand, Lake Roland was removed from the water system in 1915.) The Jones Falls is credited with helping contain the Great Baltimore Fire, which burned more than 1,500 buildings across 86 city blocks in February 1904. The fire started about where the CFG Bank Arena stands today; it burned for more than 30 hours, pushing eastward backed by high winds until it reached the Jones Falls. There, the stream halted its spread.

The stream also lends its name to the Jones Falls Expressway, or JFX, a snaking highway that has sped residents, commuters and visitors into and out of Baltimore City since it was built in the 1960s. The Jones Falls stream and the JFX run roughly parallel to one another from the point where Interstates 695 and 83 meet in Baltimore County. Just as smaller roads feed into these major highways, smaller waterways flow into the Jones Falls.

Tributaries

The Jones Falls subwatershed has many waterways that feed into its namesake stream. Some of these tributaries are fairly large—such as Deep Run, Slaughterhouse Branch, Stony Run and Western Run—but most are small and unnamed.

One Jones Falls tributary, Sumwalt Run, is the subject of a public art installation called Ghost Rivers. The project also brings to light the historic practice of burying waterways in urban areas. Created by artist Bruce Willen, Ghost Rivers explores the hidden history and path of Sumwalt Run, which was buried in the early 1900s and now flows through underground culverts beneath Baltimore's Remington and Charles Village neighborhoods.

Most of the lower Jones Falls itself was buried around the same time and remains largely invisible today. In 1915, city officials built a 7,000-foot-long system of massive underground tunnels to contain the Jones Falls. The tunnels were then covered over with paved roads, including Fallsway. This was done in part to control flooding; the stream was also seen as a health hazard thanks to unchecked pollution from industry and untreated sewage. Of course, these wrongs that officials were attempting to right by burying the Jones Falls were caused by people themselves, who built infrastructure too close to the waterway and dumped pollutants into it.

The stream is shunted underground between Howard Street and Maryland Avenue, near the Maryland Institute College of Art and Penn Station, and reemerges between President Street and the Port Discovery Children's Museum downtown. While there has been talk in recent years of "daylighting" or unburying portions of the lower Jones Falls, once upon a time, the stream's burial was seen as a cause for celebration. A monument called Flow of Waters Diverted commemorates the stream's burial; it was moved from its original location but still stands today on a small wedge of land where Fallsway, East Biddle Street and Guilford Avenue meet.

Neighborhoods

The post-colonial development of Baltimore City was largely driven by its streams and rivers, which provided waterpower for mills. According to writer and historian John W. McGrain, the first mill to be built on the Jones Falls was Hanson Mill, established in 1711 near where Baltimore City's Fallsway Impound Lot sits now. Mills and factories sprung up all along the banks of the Jones Falls steadily from that point on. Early records were scarce, and facilities frequently changed owners and names, but remnants of these industries can still be seen along the Jones Falls and its tributaries, in city neighborhoods like Hampden, Woodberry and Mount Washington.

The Washington Cotton Factory was built in 1810 at the confluence of the Jones Falls and Western Run. Later called Mount Washington Mill, it produced cotton duck, a thick fabric used to make ships' sails, and was the first mill in the state of Maryland to manufacture textile goods. The mill complex also included a dye house, carpentry shop, machine shop and housing for workers. Mount Washington Mill later merged with other nearby textile mills in the Hampden/Woodberry area and became part of the Mount Vernon Mills conglomerate. Facing declining sales after World War I, Mount Vernon Mills eventually sold off most of its Baltimore factories.

Several buildings from the Mount Washington Mill remain today, making it the oldest surviving cotton manufacturing facility in Maryland and the third oldest in the United States. These buildings now house a Whole Foods, Starbucks, liquor store, event space and more. All but one of the two-story brick houses where mill workers once lived were demolished to make way for the JFX. The sole surviving duplex now holds an ice cream shop and custom frame store

Green Spaces

Just south of Mount Washington, roughly between the neighborhoods of Hampden and Remington, remnants of another mill remain. Rock Mill, also called Timanus, was a grist mill built in the late 1700s or early 1800s. The mill sat on the east bank of the Jones Falls below a curved dam with a tall arched bridge beyond. The mill had closed by 1915 and was razed by the city in the 1930s. That curved dam remains, though, and is now known as Round Falls. While the falls are slightly off the beaten path, they're along the route of the Jones Falls Trail, a 10-mile hiking and biking route that currently runs from Cylburn Arboretum to the Inner Harbor. The Jones Falls Trail forms a segment of the 3,000-mile East Coast Greenway, which connects 15 states from Maine to Florida.

The Jones Falls subwatershed is also home to the 745-acre Druid Hill Park, Baltimore's first large public park and the third oldest established park in the U.S. Druid Hill is home to the Maryland Zoo, Rawlings Conservatory and Botanic Gardens, a public pool, disc golf course, tennis courts, a reservoir, walking trails and more. Other large green spaces within the Jones Falls subwatershed include the Exeter Street Community Garden in Jonestown, Irvine Nature Center, Lake Roland, Meadowood Regional Park, Wyman Park and the Wyman Park Dell.

Connection Point

At the point where the buried lower Jones Falls stream reemerges downtown behind the Port Discovery Children's Museum, it's hemmed in by rocks and concrete, barely visible to drivers on President Street, which runs directly beside it. Its muddy banks long ago covered over, it moves steadily along, parallel to the traffic, before quietly joining the Inner Harbor at Aliceanna Street.

There are no monuments celebrating the many benefits the Jones Falls has brought to the city over time, but there are people across the city working to restore and protect it. The Jones Falls Research Project at the University of Baltimore engages students in a comprehensive ecological assessment of the lower stream. The volunteer-based Friends of The Jones Falls preserves and restores the stream and the areas surrounding it. Blue Water Baltimore regularly monitors water quality, plants trees and implements green infrastructure along the length of the Jones Falls and other Baltimore waterways. It also advances policies and regulatory actions that protect and improve the health of local rivers, streams and the harbor. Earlier this year, for example, Blue Water Baltimore and its attorneys announced a settlement agreement for alleged Jones Falls pollution violations.

These combined efforts not only benefit the Jones Falls itself, but also the Inner Harbor and the rest of the Patapsco River, as well as the Chesapeake Bay and Atlantic Ocean—which is good news for people and wildlife alike.

Historic artwork of the Jones Falls in the 1820s is from the New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Updated on October 8, 2024 for clarification purposes.