The President Street Station in Baltimore, Maryland, is a former train station and railroad terminal. Built in 1849 and opened in February 1850, the station saw the some of the earliest bloodshed of the American Civil War, and was an important rail link during the conflicts. Today, it is the country's oldest surviving big-city railroad terminal in the United States and is home since its restoration/reconstruction/renovation in April 1997, to the Baltimore Civil War Museum.HistoryThe Baltimore and Port Deposit Rail Road (B&PD), founded in 1832, completed a rail line from Baltimore to the western shore of the Susquehanna River in 1837. The railroad’s Baltimore terminus was on the east side of the "Basin" (now known as the Inner Harbor), at the southern end of President Street. The B&PD exchanged freight cars with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O), (oldest railroad line in the country - established 1827) which had built a track (along Pratt Street) to the eastern Basin harbor area from its original Mount Clare depot on the western side of the central business district. The B&PD and its merger successor company, the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad (PW&B), transferred passengers to the B&O's first downtown depot at East Pratt and South Charles streets by a horse-drawn car on B&O's connecting track. (The Baltimore City Council prohibited the operation of locomotives on this track for reasons of frightening horses and fears of fires). By 1838, the PW&B was carrying passengers from further northeast through Philadelphia to Baltimore, where they could transfer to the B&O and continue west to Ohio or by a new branch line further south to the national capital at Washington, D.C.
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