These ghost rivers still cascade from their sources, the many natural springs around the city. In the late 19th and early 20th century, as Baltimore’s street grid sprawled outward from the harbor, houses and factories crowded against verdant waterways. New brick and concrete river beds were built. These carefully engineered tunnels made the ancient, rocky ravines seem as old-fashioned as hoop skirts and petticoats. The creeks rushed through these new sewers, as quickly and efficiently as the automobiles that had only just begun to appear on city streets.

Real estate developers finished the burial process. The tree-lined valley of Sumwalt Run was filled and flattened to create the buildable ground on which you now stand. In Remington, parts of this deep ravine became a dump, packed with dirt, and according to local lore, debris from the Great Baltimore Fire of 1905. On new roads above the streambed, electric trolleys soon carried tired workers home to carbon-copy blocks of brick rowhomes that had sprung up like terracotta mushrooms, seemingly overnight, from the woods and pastoral estates surrounding Baltimore. Sumwalt Run and the other ghost streams of Baltimore now run below our neighborhoods, hidden and mostly forgotten.