Sparrows Point is an industrial area in unincorporated Baltimore County, Maryland, United States, adjacent to Edgemere. Named after Thomas Sparrow, landowner, it was the site of a very large industrial complex owned by Bethlehem Steel, known for steelmaking and shipbuilding. In its heyday in the mid-20th century, it was the largest steel mill in the world. The site of the former Bethlehem Sparrows Point Shipyard and steel mill is now renamed Tradepoint Atlantic in a revitalization program to clean up the environment and make it one of the largest ports on the East Coast of the United States. Today Sparrows Point is home to many distribution centers, fulfillment centers, training lots, storage lots, and the like, including those operated by Under Armour, Amazon, Home Depot, Volkswagen, and McCormick & Company.

Sparrows Point was originally marshland home to Native American tribes until being granted to one Thomas Sparrow Jr. (1620 - 1674) by Cecilius Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, around 1652. His son Solomon Sparrow made a home there, calling it "Sparrow's Nest". In the 1700s the area became home to other families, who farmed and raised crops, building homes and hunting lodges. Among the many wealthy residents of Baltimore who owned property there was Major General George H. Steuart, who hosted the social reformer Dorothea Dix at Sparrows Point. By the 1860s much of the land, about 385 acres (156 ha), was owned by the Fitzell family.

Sparrows Point remained largely rural until 1887, when an engineer named Frederick Wood realized that the marshy inlet would make an excellent deep-water port for the Pennsylvania Steel Company. The Fitzells were reluctant to part with their peach orchards but were eventually persuaded to sell.

Following World War II, many rural economic migrants settled in Sparrows Point, coming from Southern and Appalachian states. These migrants came to work at the Bethlehem Steel plant. Many of these workers were from rural areas and mining towns of West Virginia and Central Pennsylvania.

Steel was first made at Sparrows Point in 1889 by the Maryland Steel Company, a subsidiary of the Pennsylvania Steel Company.

In 1916, Bethlehem Steel Corporation of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, purchased the mill. The mill's steel was used as girders in the Golden Gate Bridge and in cables for the George Washington Bridge, and was a vital part of war production during World War I and World War II. The mill was served by four railroads: the Western Maryland, Pennsylvania, Baltimore & Ohio, and the local Patapsco & Back River Railroad, which was responsible for yard work.

In the mid-1950s, the plant operated 10 blast furnaces and had a rated capacity of 8,200,000 short tons (7,321,000 long tons; 7,439,000 t) of ingot steel per year, making the Sparrows Point waterfront plant the largest steel mill in the world at the time, stretching 4 miles (6.4 km) from end to end and employing 30,000 workers. Most of the iron ore consumed at the plant came via ship, imported from mines in South America and Labrador. Limestone and coal was brought in from Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and West Virginia via rail. Steel was produced in 35 open hearth furnaces and cast into ingots, which were then reheated in soaking pits to be rolled into blooms or slabs via a large reversing rolling mill. Blooms were then rolled into long products like welded pipe, rebar, wire products, and nails. Slabs were rolled into sheets in a continuous rolling mill and plate in a reversing mill. The facility also featured a 66" cold rolling mill, a galvanizing line, and a tinplating line for sheet products. Additionally, the plant's coke ovens were also set up to capture certain coke byproducts like tar and toluene for resale.

Changes in the steel industry over the following decades, including a rise in imports and a move toward the use of simpler oxygen furnaces and the recycling of scrap, along with the intrinsically time and labor-intensive process of open-hearth steelmaking, led to a decline in the use of the Sparrows Point complex during the 1970s and 1980s.