Baltimore's street numbering and boundary line demarcation throughout the first part of the nineteenth century suffered from a lack of foresight and organization.

 

Residents made their own decisions regarding street addressing. Duplicate street addresses were created and allowed to persist for many years. An address such as  "the corner of South and Market streets"  might be the most concise reference ever recorded for that particular house, non-withstanding the fact that three other houses may be targeted by that description. It was presumed common knowledge could produce further needed distinctions once it had been established that the subject house was on that particular corner.  

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With the explosive growth of the City houses were frequently built between other existing houses and so fractional addresses were assigned to these new houses. The response to eliminating fractional addresses was to renumber houses, assigning each a new whole number. Addresses incremented east to west from the Jones Falls prior to 1887, so that, for example, in the 1850 address renumbering  a particular address far from the Jones Falls could be shifted east ward over an entire block. To add to the inconsistency odd house numbers were on the left side of the street north of Baltimore Street and vice versa south of Baltimore Street.  
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Mapping attempted to give definition to Baltimore City's layout, but could not import the precision it appeared to. Warner and Hanna's 1801 Plan of Baltimore prevailed as an authoritative source even as Baltimore City boundaries had not been defined--and the cartographer added distorted scaling into the equation through the use of ineffective cartographic methods.It was not until Poppleton created a new map for Baltimore in 1822 that a reliable map existed where City boundaries could be described without ambiguity.

 

Poppleton's map is of burnt Orange color  as featured this gazetteer, and The Warner and Hanna Plan of Baltimore is pale green  in color.
​Each location in this gazetteer was geolocated using methods  customized for that location.