Two Sparrows Point yacht clubs — one historically Black and one white — that found themselves in the crosshairs of a major dredging project likely will be spared, thanks to budget language added before the Maryland General Assembly adjourned Monday.

Until then, both Pleasant Yacht Club and the North Point Yacht Club faced certain closure due to dredging plans by their landlord, Tradepoint Atlantic, the sprawling waterfront logistics center that replaced the old Sparrows Point steel mill.

Tradepoint wanted to take Pleasant Yacht Club’s site on Jones Creek and donate it to the county for a boat ramp, and to place wetlands and open water for dredged materials at the North Point Yacht Club location next door.

Now, Tradepoint is reevaluating its plans for the material it needs to dredge to develop a new port terminal there.

Sens. Carl Jackson and Charles Sydnor pushed to insert an amendment in the Maryland Port Administration’s operations budget requiring the state agency to provide a report by Oct. 1 detailing how Tradepoint’s planned dredging operations “will be adjusted to preserve” the two yacht clubs. If Tradepoint can’t adjust the operations, the amendment requires the company to develop a plan for compensating the two yacht clubs.

“I just felt that there was history that should not be erased,” Jackson said. “Particularly at Pleasant, knowing they had to have a great sense of ingenuity to build these things themselves, with their bare hands, and after working all day at the mill, I might add. ... It was so inspiring to me, and it’s the story of Black communities all over the country. You had to do it for yourself because no one was going to do it for you.”

Both yacht clubs date to the 1950s, when Bethlehem Steel built North Point for its white employees. Originally built for executives, North Point became a working man’s boat club after Bethlehem Steel moved its management members to the Sparrows Point Yacht Club.

When six Black steelworkers asked to join, Bethlehem Steel management told them no. However, they agreed to provide some materials and about 4 acres of land next to North Point where the Black workers could build their own club, Pleasant.

Descendants of those original steelworkers — and one of the original six, 97-year-old retired ironworker Johnnie Mathis — have been frequenting Pleasant Yacht Club ever since.

“What they really wanted to do was keep us separated,” Mathis said of steel company management.

That meant separating white from Black, and management from labor, he said.

Pleasant Yacht Club, like Shiloh Baptist Church, has become a magnet for Sparrows Point’s tight-knit Black community. Sometimes, the 35 members meet after church for picnics; occasionally, they sail as a group to the Inner Harbor. Many captains take senior citizens out on the water. The club includes a bungalow with a kitchen that Bethlehem Steel had discarded; there’s a hand-built pier, boat lift and a social hall for community crab feasts and fish fry.

Over the decades, the racial divide faded, and the two clubs became close, members of both say. North Point is three times as large, with 150 members, and has about twice the acreage.

Jackson was appointed to his seat this year after longtime Sen. Kathy Klausmeier left the legislature to become Baltimore county executive. He worked with Sydnor, who represents Catonsville, to protect the clubs. Neither represents Sparrows Point — Sen. Johnny Ray Salling, a Republican, does — but Jackson said they felt compelled to step in partly because Salling said he was confident Tradepoint would be a good corporate partner. Jackson said he wanted concrete assurances.

Tradepoint Atlantic, which took over the 3,300-acre Bethlehem Steel property in 2014, initially planned to eliminate both yacht clubs as part of its $1 billion container terminal project, which the company says is expected to create 1,100 union jobs connected to the operation and 7,000 more connected to the Baltimore port.

Plans called for North Point to become a wetlands and open water storage site, meeting a federal requirement to replace any open water that dredging subtracts from the ecosystem. Pleasant was to become a Baltimore County parking lot, and the pier the Black steelworkers built by hand a public boat ramp.

Two months ago. Capt. Lafon Porter and Commodore Derrick Jones of Pleasant Yacht Club and Commodore Andrew West of North Point learned of the plan and contacted their representatives in Annapolis. The delegation heard a presentation from the clubs and Tradepoint Executive Vice President Aaron Tomarchio.

Jackson said Tradepoint planned to eliminate the clubs, and only informed them after the fact.

Tomarchio described the pushback as frustrating. For the past decade, Tradepoint has leased the land to the clubs for $1 a year. And, Tomarchio said, he’s told both clubs for years that the future is uncertain.

“We’re not tone-deaf to this. We’re cognizant of the history we inherited. We’re just trying to meet a need,” he said. “We’re trying to rework a plan that can be satisfactory.”

The idea for a public boat ramp and adjacent parking came from community feedback for the county’s $25 million Sparrows Point Park next door, which opened last month. The county never asked for it, but Tomarchio thought the donation was evidence of Tradepoint being a good corporate citizen. Now, he said, a ramp is likely off the table.

A solution for North Point is less obvious. Tradepoint will have to find another location to create open water or ask for a waiver.

West questions why Tradepoint can’t do it with the nearly 1,500 acres there that Bethlehem Steel built with slag, a waste byproduct of steel.

“I just couldn’t believe that, out of all of the land that they have, they would pick virgin land to do this,” West said.

Now members of both clubs have hope.

“There is no place like Pleasant Yacht Club in Baltimore County, and I would wager there may not be anything like it in the entire country,” said Porter, whose uncle, Columbus, was one of its earliest members. “These were blue-collar guys, rural guys, who started as sharecroppers and became steelworkers and built this place through blood, sweat and tears.”

When Porter told his aunt, Burdetta Porter Ellis, that the future was looking up, she said she wasn’t going to stop praying yet.

At 91, she still enjoys going out on her nephew’s boat with her grandchildren, surrounded by extended family. As a young girl, being on the water, with the Key Bridge ahead and wind on her face, made her forget — albeit briefly — of the indignities of segregation on the land.

“Losing this would be like a death to our heritage, our community” Ellis said. “And God is not going to let that happen to us.”