Kim Trueheart’s gaze drifts past me, landing on the corner of Maine Avenue when I arrive to meet her. Stationed outside of the Liberty Rec & Tech Center, she watches from a motorized wheelchair as two adults hurl heated words at each other. The cacophony is heightened by kids fleeing the adjacent Liberty Elementary School and rushing into the open arms of after school activity.

Joyous shrieks of playground laughter flutter overhead, a troubling contrast against the adults’ exchange of threats. Expressing concern and frustration, along with a handful of choice words,Trueheart beckons me into the building and allows her team of volunteers to mediate the conflict, ensuring that it doesn’t become dangerous for students who will soon enter the rec center. 

Ensuring the daily presence of a protective eye is only a small part of Trueheart’s work as a founding director of the Liberty Village Project. Housed in the Liberty Rec & Tech Center, the volunteer-led non-profit brings local organizations together to serve youth, seniors and families, creating what some have praised as a community schools model. 

The Liberty Rec & Tech Center was constructed in 1977 as a safe space for neighborhood play, exercise and enrichment for all ages. Tucked into Northwest Baltimore’s Forest Park neighborhood just 3 miles north of where Trueheart grew up in Edmondson Village, the Center faced a major threat in 2012 when the Rawlings-Blake administration sought to shut its doors, one of 20 other targeted centers across the city. 

Trueheart, understandably worried about what the neighborhood might lose, used considerable might to protest the closure. After months of confronting the school board to demand that the center stay open, Baltimore City Schools unofficially handed her the keys to the rec center in November of 2012. As the city moved out, Liberty Village Project began to grow up in the building.

Now operating year-round, the Liberty Village Project serves over 500 community members and offers 150 hours of youth programming each year. For at least a mile in any direction, there is no other public, indoor recreational space. By keeping the lights on and the doors open at the Rec & Tech Center, Liberty Village Project meets the needs of a startlingly large patch of neighborhoods underserved by the city’s recreation facilities.

Map of Rec Centers within 1 mile of Liberty Village Project. Via Baltimore City Recreation and Parks Asset Explorer. Accessed March 19, 2025.

As the Liberty Village Project has evolved to offer a wide variety of life affirming programs to children, youth, their families and senior citizens, community members and government agencies alike have stepped up to support Trueheart in keeping the rec center open. She has secured grants from the Baltimore City Department of Planning, Frances-Merrick Foundation, Chesapeake Bay Trust, and the Baltimore City Children and Youth Fund, along with other private donors. Putting some of the heat on local businesses to give back, she also gets pallets of water bottles donated regularly by Carroll Motor Fuel. Right now, a women’s bathroom renovation, including a shower stall, is being funded by Liberty Elementary School. During our tour, she reminds Mike, one of the volunteers, not to lock it until they close at 4pm. “Keep it open, I want to make sure everyone can use it,” she said.

Always true to the mission of the Rec & Tech Center, Trueheart curates programs like the Baltimore Algebra Project, training high school students to tutor elementary school math; a marching band and successful basketball team; a fashion modelling program; a food pantry and mutual aid programs; public showers and restrooms; outdoor pool activities, and more. When the center has additional funding, it is able to offer field trips, photography classes, trauma-informed workshops, and other programs led by paid instructors. 

Trueheart lights up as she talks about sending five of the youth in her programs to participate in a Model UN Summit in the Dominican Republic last year, with help from the rec center’s summer program coordinator Kerrin Massureh. Amongst a group of students from across the Caribbean, Trueheart’s Maryland delegation was the only one from the United States. Students presented on economic disparity within large corporations, analyzing DEI policies and the impact of different business models on low-income communities. With an invitation extended for the Maryland delegation to return in the summer of 2025, Trueheart hopes she can raise enough money to send all of her summer youth instead of being limited to five. 

On February 10th of this year, Trueheart’s birthday, the city delivered its first official lease to the non-profit, granting them legal occupancy of the rec center—without rent or utility payments—for the next 15 years. This news is a relief to Trueheart, who hopes that the lease will allow Liberty Village Project to use state capital grants to replace the building’s broken HVAC system before students have to spend another summer in dangerously hot classrooms.

 Trueheart thanks God for the recent lease, adding “I didn’t need a piece of paper to do the work.” 

Recognized this year by AFRO American Newspapers as one of Baltimore’s most influential people, Trueheart’s reputation is built upon being active on the frontlines of youth advocacy.

“I’m the most active activist around our children…I show up anytime children are on the agenda,” says Trueheart, whose career started off on a much different path. The 68 year-old left her home in Baltimore to join the Navy in 1977. Travelling the world, she didn’t begin to reckon with the guilt of managing advanced weapons development programs until 29 years of service had passed. Trueheart  tells me about sitting in her office in DC, where she abruptly woke up to the violence of the system she had played a major role in. 

“One day I said, I need to go home. Some of the things I had designed and put into operation…I built things that hurt people,”  Trueheart recalls.

Now, she guides people out of harm’s way. Returning to Baltimore City in 2006, she began to learn everything she could about the workings of state and city government. Several years of relationship building later, Trueheart began working with Maryland state representatives like Sen. Jill Carter to introduce and pass bills that addressed the needs of Baltimore’s youth. 

One of her biggest legislative achievements was helping to author HB 771 in 2015. The  measure passed just one month after Freddie Gray’s murder, requiring the Baltimore Police Department to publish annual reporting on hiring, civilian harm, and demographic data.

 “The police were not reporting truthfully what they were doing. So I wrote a [bill]…that outlined 16 items that I want a report on. And it’s law now. They have to write a report annually on the number of African-Americans on the force, the numbers of females on the force. How often are they doing recruiting within the city? How many incidents [with police] caused harm to individuals? When somebody’s hurt, I wanna know that y’all hurt them. How many of those incidents resulted in a hospitalization? It’s transparency that we did not have before,”  Trueheart says.

She also lobbied Annapolis aggressively for Code of Maryland Regulations COMAR 11.06.05. Passed in 2023, it offers free MTA services for public school students and youth workers in Baltimore City’s YouthWorks program. 

Trueheart’s process is straightforward. Using her knowledge of the local legislative process, she speaks directly with lawmakers, administrators and lawyers in Annapolis and Baltimore city halls to testify in support of bills she’s organized. She even campaigned to join Baltimore City Council in 2016. But her work doesn’t stop at city hall.

“I feel it’s my duty to show up, and if necessary, show out,” Trueheart tells me. 

“I show up at the Baltimore development meetings, the school board meetings, the city council meetings, at John’s Hopkins, and at the University of Maryland. I go down to testify, and I bring my folks to testify.” 

Trueheart’s footprint has transformed the landscape of advocacy, upgrading the available toolkit for activists cultivating needed solutions to the long critiqued contrast between the city’s inflating investment in its police department and the declining budget for youth recreation and employment.

Today, Trueheart isn’t ashamed about who she once was, seeing that her impulse to serve has remained consistent over the course of her career. She’s smoothly applied the program management skills she perfected in the Navy to managing programs at Liberty Village Project. 

“That’s why God put me here, to serve. [At first] it was to serve my country, but I’m really getting fulfillment serving my community. It’s a whole different level of service.”

Nearing the end of my tour on the second floor, I wonder quietly about empty garden beds, an empty greenhouse, and a pottery kiln sitting in the vacant art instructors room. 

“Do you have the capacity to grow food here?” I ask. Fuller arts and agriculture programming seems possible, but it looks to me that more volunteers are needed to use all of the resources the Rec & Tech Center has available. Picking up on the scarcity in my question, Trueheart sucks her teeth. 

“Look out that window there, and tell me what kind of capacity you see,” she says.

 Outside, noticing a field of tawny grass that stretches down the block, I feel my thoughts begin to shift. Trueheart is living proof that possibilities go on and on. To make them a reality, you only need to show up.

The post Person of the Month: Kim Trueheart appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

This story was originally published by Reckon, an award-winning national news organization that covers the people powering change, the challenges shaping our time, and what it means for all of us.

The first week of June finds me listening to the mechanical roar of passing cars along Route 15, a steady thrum over what might otherwise be a tranquil patch of forest in the eastern hills of Catoctin Mountain. They call this the unquiet place. Tires scream across asphalt, racing to climb the ramp stretching above the vernal pools and chestnut oaks calling this weary Appalachian soil home. I can barely see the highway through the sun-dappled canopy dancing in the wind overhead, but the sound is an undeniable intrusion. Extending my senses past its grating presence, I strain to focus on the vibrations of the earth. The whisper of water moving catches my ear. Leaves hshhh against each other. A mourning dove cries. Then, a truck blares its horn in the distance, drowning it all out. I have traveled about 60 miles west from my home in Baltimore City, Maryland to see this rocky soil and hear its song, pulled by a current of curiosity about Black geographies and our collective determination to hold on to the ruins of our past.

This is the soundtrack of Renner Cemetery, a forgotten burial site of an unknown number of Africans enslaved at the Catoctin Iron Furnace, a nearby historic ironworking village once sprawling across 7,000 acres of hardwood forest. After the furnace ceased operation in 1903, the cemetery sat forgotten and overgrown until a highway expansion project in 1979 excavated its 35 gravesites, 32 of them containing skeletal remains among other related artifacts. It is believed that hundreds more Black workers remain buried at the site, in a privately owned patch of forest just beyond the furnace’s current property line. Archeologists at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History took possession of the excavated remains and may still hold them, although today some may consider this theft, as they were not acquired with informed consent. Their discovery enabled local historians to reinterpret the role that African ironworkers played in the industrial history of the United States, especially in Maryland. Their research since 2015 has confirmed that at least 271 captive workers were enslaved at the furnace between 1770s and 1840. With much still unknown about these captive workers, the project of defining their legacy continues to unfold. 

Almost fifty years after rediscovering these remains, a growing coalition of historians, biological anthropologists, archeologists, and geneticists are using today’s DNA analysis technology to study the legacy of enslavement and connect with their possible descendents. Craniometric and stable isotope analysis reveal that some of the people buried at Catoctin Furnace had West and Central African ancestry, particularly of the Wolof and Mandinka of Senegambia and the Kongo of Central Africa. It indicated that almost half of those buried in the cemetery came from the same five families. Updated pathology and demography assessments also provide deeper understanding of the pain endured by these people during their lifetimes, including birth defects, sickle cell disease, arthritis, dental decay, and spinal injuries from overworking.

I parked just off Catoctin Furnace road, dotted on both sides with original cottages preserved from the 18th century operation of the furnace. Save for a few foreboding “private property” signs, these are mostly part of the Museum of the Ironworker, immersing visitors upon arrival.

The site and its structures show the evidence of tremendous care, a feeling which follows as you walk a gravel slope leading deeper into the forest – the African-American Cemetery Interpretive Trail. Standing at the end of this half-mile walk is the silhouette of an enslaved man, an attempt to capture the invisibility of the stories of these workers whose names and stories may never be recovered.

It seems that Black histories still remain captive here at the feet of the Catoctin Mountains. I sit on a wooden bench carved with adinkra symbols and I, too, am an unquiet place. My body and mind wrestle to make meaning of this site of enslavement, reckoning as I always have with the burden and privilege of memory. The forest is determined to rewild the land at Catoctin, foliage crawling over the leftover slag and brick embedded in soil to render the Anthropocene obsolete. I wonder at our unnatural impulse to conserve as historians. So many centuries of science have been dedicated to this process – preservation. Keeping. Many cultures who don’t subscribe to this obsession have been systematically erased from existence. If nothing else, this has left their humanity intact. It is hard to find an archive today that doesn’t read as a catalog of violence.

June Jordan asks: what shall we do, we who did not die? It seems that we must adapt. We will syncretize our traditions, as Indigenous peoples have always done, in order to survive. As a Black memory worker, it is my task to listen — to the land, to the people, and to my bodymindspirit. It is my task to honor our dead and protect our living. It is my task to document history while remaining humbled and inspired by the notion that all history is fiction. As I walk well-maintained trails connecting the ironworking village ruins to the museum, I find that the legacy of enslaved African ironworkers is felt more than seen — a current buried beneath the polished veneer of historical interpretation. It comes through to me in three unforgettable channels: cultural, ecological and genealogical legacy.

Cultural Legacy

It is evident that the labor and technical skill of enslaved Catoctin Furnace workers have had an undeniable impact in the state of Maryland, despite being erased for centuries. Their knowledge of the iron production process makes the furnace stand out among countless other projects aiming to reflect the legacy of those whose ancestors were trafficked across the Atlantic into slavery. 

In Maryland alone, there are 177 known historic African-American burial grounds. The threats to these sites of enslavement, resistance and liberation prompted the Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture to take action in 2022. Working alongside preservation groups and descendent communities, they conducted a study documenting the needs of historic African-American cemeteries in the state. The resulting report made recommendations for how to best empower these legacy projects with state resources and legal protection. The report recognizes Catoctin Furnace Cemetery the “most complete cemetery of its kind associated with the early industrial history of the United States,” noting the skill that enslaved Africans had with iron. Catoctin is uplifted as a case study accompanied by photos and a watercolor illustration by artist Lucy Erwin.

In the heat of a majestic Baltimore rowhome, artist-educator Antonio Lyons tells me what he’s learned about legacy — that it is a way of protecting life and materials, a vehicle of trust between the past and the future, and a gift to the generations to come. “I think some of that is tied to age, right?” His usually playful confidence softens to something more earnest and open. “You start having these fundamental questions like, why am I here? Do I need to be here? What am I leaving behind? Do I need to leave anything behind?”

Antonio and I are part of a collective of historians, archivists, artists and organizers stewarding the legacy of prolific Baltimore artist Valerie J Maynard. He is one of many cultural workers participating in this effort, many of whom are her chosen family. Despite no genealogical ties to Maynard, this collective represents the vibrant cultural legacy of not only the artist, but the community she cultivated and the skills she shared with them.

As we spoke that morning before continuing the work of archiving Maynard’s live-work studio in Baltimore’s Station North Art District, Antonio described her legacy as a depository of knowledge, a reflection of her community bonds. “[A] culmination of a life within a community aesthetic is far more powerful, you know. It’s a lot richer thing to leave behind.” That her memory and her contributions to the world have brought together so many beautiful stories, organizations and collaborators both during and after her lifetime, is what cultural legacy feels like. Working with the foundation taught me this and allows me to recognize it in the Catoctin project in nearby Frederick County.

Historians believe that ironworkers were stolen into slavery not at random, but because of the scientific knowledge they had developed in their homeland – iron production. This knowledge was transferred into the United States through the transatlantic slave trade, where it became a core part of the Industrial Revolution. Recentering the contributions of the enslaved to this industrial period allows us to see more clearly the cultural impact of African ironworkers. Theirs is a legacy of technical and technological innovation, recorded clearly in the catalog of violence known as the archive. It is a legacy that has quite literally moved mountains and continues to do so through the collective efforts of a state-wide network of organizers, many volunteering or underpaid for their time. These efforts are evidence that these stories matter deeply to the local community in Frederick County and to folks engaging in Black cemetery projects across the country. Witnessing the passion of this group of people during my own visit this summer seeded hope in the weary soil of my own mind. In my head, a voice echoes softly, love is the legacy.

Ecological Legacy

The geology of what is today known as Catoctin Mountain Park has been creating a welcoming environment for human use since our species has inhabited this land. According to the National Park Service, the peoples of the Piscataway and Susquehannock tribes were first attracted to the Catoctin stone formations ideal for making arrowheads, knives and other tools. Springs served as important sources of water for these early American Indians and later, the settlers who would name the land Maryland. The establishment of the colonies and the following industrial period made the area a focal point for industry, agriculture, and hunting.

The operation of an iron furnace like Catoctin has a legacy far beyond its impact on human life. It also changes the natural environment – in over a century of operation, thousands of acres of trees were cleared and burned to make the charcoal used to turn ore into pig iron. Research indicates that massive deforestation may not be the only legacy of these industrial sites. Soils tested from around similar iron furnace sites dotting the Pennsylvania countryside showed elevated levels of manganese – in some, almost 17 times the naturally occurring amount. This amount of pollution can harm vegetation and be toxic for many species of trees, especially saplings. “Even if the sources of manganese pollution are no longer active,” said Elizabeth Herdon, lead researcher of the 2010 study, “the remnants remain in the soil. We need to consider the kinds of contamination left over from the past that might impact us today.”

The 2009 Catoctin Mountain Park Geologic Resources Inventory Report indicates that there is a noticeable difference between the vegetation near the furnace and the vegetation elsewhere in the park. Soil surveys show that soils on the eastern slope of Catoctin Mountain are “acidic, thin, sandy loams with high permeability”, and only able to support a few tree species. On the other side of the park, the soil is deeper and more moist, orange and rich in minerals. These soils can support a wider variety of tree species, including sugar maple, basswood, hickories, white ash, beech and tulip poplar.

Though industrial iron production ended as the furnace closed in 1903, humans continued to build dams, bridges, camps, roads and other developments that created air and water pollution. The former furnace’s 7,000 acres sat idle until 1936, when the National Park service took ownership and began to remediate some of the environmental degradation caused by iron production. Since then, attempts have been made to restore the natural processes and features that were present at Catoctin Mountain prior to the furnace operation and to make the landscape accessible to the public. According to the National Park Service, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, conducted the initial restoration efforts. The New Deal was responsible for many of the historic structures within the park, as well as planting as many as 5,000 trees – red maples, pitch pines and other native species.

While there are no recent surveys of Catoctin Furnace soil available that confirm whether or not manganese pollution may be a lasting ecological legacy of this site of enslavement, it is clear that the natural world is hell bent on reclaiming the forest. Trees, young and persistent, seem to perch over stone furnace stacks, waiting for a chance to swallow them whole. With the Biden-Harris administration pledging $725 million to clean up legacy pollution nationwide earlier this summer, the question of ecological legacy looms equally large over the Catoctin project, despite most of their capacity being focused on cultivating their descendent community.

Genealogical Legacy

Though a recent study by the Catoctin Historical Society in partnership with 23andMe identified 2,975 people living today who are significantly related to the families buried in the forgotten cemetery over 150 years ago, strikingly little is known about what happened to the enslaved families after 1840. Forensic evidence suggests that a high concentration of closely related possible descendants may still reside in Maryland, suggesting that some may have stayed in the region. Property and land grant titles suggest that the African ironworkers could have been transferred to nearby Antietam Ironworks further west in Maryland. Building a descendent community to co-steward this project with the Catoctin Furnace Historical society may surface documents, oral histories, and family trees that tell a fuller story.

“Sometimes it takes seeing something tangibly and interacting with folks tangibly to understand the impact of what actually happened in the place,” descendent communicator, Hess Stinson, explains to me over the phone. “Some of the lore around the area was that it was mostly almost always settled by people of purely European descent. And when these ancestors’ bones came up, it really showed the proof.” 

Stinson works with the Catoctin Furnace Historical Society to cultivate and structure the descendent community and guide them into a position of power alongside the other historians in the Catoctin Furnace Historical Society. Since January, Stinson has made space to listen to community members, connect them to the resources they need, and of course, connect them to each other. So far, the Catoctin Furnace Descendants Group has grown steadily as community members receive ancestry results. 

Identifying these descendants is a critical part of what Stinson calls the co-stewardship model. “We’re looking for these people so they can help shape the future of the Catoctin Furnace Historical Society…this place is part of their legacy.” Stinson admits it is rare that descendants of the enslaved participate in the historical interpretation and strategic visioning for these kinds of research institutions. The perspective of Black community members, especially those who may still live locally and have a relational understanding to the place, seems to be what is needed most to address the archival erasure of African ironworkers.

“I just believe [it’s important] because there are, right now, people want to erase our history and they want to control the narrative of how it’s being told. And I think it’s important for us to be…able to tell the truth.” says Mrs. Donna Nelson, a Catoctin Furnace Descendants group member who spoke with myself and my colleague Danielle Buckingham during our oral history collection this summer. Sitting on creaky rocking chairs inside a period room of the Collier House, it felt as if we had time traveled to have this conversation in 1820. Mrs. Nelsons words would have been just as true then as they are today.

As of June, 23andMe has begun to analyze the genetic data of community members in the group to confirm who is significantly related to the enslaved Catoctin families buried at Renner. Their technique is different from other sites like MyTrueAncestry, where inconsistencies in results have left community members like Watu Mwariama unsure about the accuracy of the results. 

Doubtful of the technology and those who wield it, Mwariama understands his possible connection to Catoctin through family oral histories passed down to him. Growing up his grandmother would tell him of ancestors who used to work in and around Frederick and warned him of the racial terror she endured there. As a boy, he had his own experiences with white supremacist violence in the areas surrounding the Catoctin Mountain Park and felt uneasy even joining us on site at the oral history collection. Braving the intergenerational aversion to the ironworking village, he joined us in the surprisingly spacious log cabin to share his dreams for the legacy project. 

“I think at the very least that an effort has to be made to contact the families of the deceased. And once that has been done and exhausted, I think that the next thing to do is to have a memorial service…they would have to have to have to be given some kind of reverence and something respectful of our traditions,” says Mwariama.

“I would like to see that they are honored and that they preserve it to truly who they are…” Mrs. Donna echoes. “I wanna see something going on like the Kunta Kinte Festival in Annapolis here— let us have more African [descendants].” 

Critics like Michael Blakey, a professor and thought leader who also led the New York African Burial Ground Memorial Project in Manhattan in the 1990s, warn that genetic analysis can reflect racist biological determinism and masquerade subjective results as objective truth. While this concern is shared by Catoctin descendent group members who feel the uncertain data may leave them behind as this legacy project moves forward, Stinson assures me that other forms of memory keeping will be honored too. 

“We’re also welcoming folks who have that substantiated family, oral history of saying like, hey, you know, my grandmother said we’re from here, you know… we’re also recognizing people who do other means of connection and lineage tracing too of not genetics…bibles, any kind of paperwork that folks have or any kind of story that folks have, we are honoring that as well.”

Just a month after visiting Catoctin, I traveled south to the quiet riverside town my grandmother grew up in before migrating to the Bronx in the 60s. I met cousins I had never seen before, people who were just as passionate about our family legacy as I am, who had been gathering their own research for years. One cousin, Ruben, took me to Berry Hill Resort, the former plantation that my ancestors lived and worked on, substantiated by both my family tree and a book about the plantation sold at the local tourism office. I begged Ruben to take me to the cemetery where our ancestors still rested, at the end of an overgrown trail a mile into the forest. He insisted it was too hot, too far, too unkempt to make the journey that day. Another time, he promised. It was, in fact, 102 degrees that day, but the heat rising in my cheeks told me that I would have braved any temperature to connect with my ancestors in that way. My frustration was not with him, but with a discipline that would preserve an ostentatious granite mansion built through slave labor as a profitable resort while carelessly letting the cabins and fields my ancestors made into homes and sacred burial sites waste away.

Even if it is the unnatural impulse to preserve that sets up the problematic dynamic, my criticism doesn’t absolve me of the feeling. We all live shaped by the brutal legacy of slavery and colonialism, whether or not DNA testing affirms our connection to those buried at these sites of economic production. Maryland isn’t the only unquiet place. We must bear the burden and privilege of remembering or of forgetting.

The Catoctin story is unique and yet familiar, a case study of why Black and queer historians are uniquely equipped to contend with the discipline of history itself. Our positionality gives us the gift of imagination – the will and skill to speculate new ways of conducting the process of preservation. History as we know it is a field of study shaped by white supremacy, colonialism and biological determinism. For centuries, historians have used documentation (and the lack thereof) to form the intellectual basis for the theft and accumulation of resources that has led us to a planet nearly laid barren by consumption, war and pollution. Now, contrary to the wise words of TLC, we must chase waterfalls. How will practices of preserving our culture, our stories, our and our memories continue without relying on the “rivers and lakes that we’re used to”? In other words, what does legacy look like beyond Confederate statues, forgotten graves and individualist narratives of heroism? How do we remember beyond the archive? What is most valuable to us now? In this pivotal cultural moment, new methods are being born of necessity, ones which integrate forms of study from Western traditions and attention to relationality and ecology from Indigenous research methodologies. Ones which reach back to go forward. Yes, there will be some histories that we don’t keep. What remains then is a bone-deep sense of truth — that our legacy will always be the living. 

“won’t you celebrate with me 

what I have shaped into a kind of life? 

I had no model 

born in Babylon 

both nonwhite and woman 

what dd I see to be except myself? I made it up 

here on this bridge between starshine and clay, 

my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate 

with me that everyday 

something has tried to kill me 

and has failed” 

— Lucille Clifton, 1993 

Do you have ancestors buried at Catoctin Furnace? Connect with the other descendants and join the movement to resurface the legacy of Black ironworkers in Frederick County, MD on Facebook and reach out to info@catoctinfurnace.org with any inquiries.

The post Our legacy is the living — Preserving the history of the Catoctin ironworkers appeared first on Baltimore Beat.