Frederick Douglass Park & Marine Railway - Thames & Philpot Streets
The Living Classrooms Foundation will operate a repair facility for historic vessels at this site. This new park (authorized in 1995) honors historically important African-Americans who worked along this shore. In the 1830s Frederick Douglass, then a slave, caulked ships being built nearby. A generation later just after the Civil War, African-American Isaac Myers founded the Chesapeake Marine Railway & Dry Dock Co., located on block west at Philpot and Wills Sts. That successful ship repair facility was one of the first and most ambitious black-owned and operated businesses in America.