Working freedom: Black farmers building industrious landscapes in Maryland, 1814-1880

Abstract

This article studies the industrious strategies that Black farmers in Maryland’s Piedmont pursued before and after the Civil War and the resultant landscapes they created. An examination of antebellum landholdings, demographic patterns, and agricultural production trends demonstrate how free Black farmers leveraged ‘next to nothing’ to provide the foundations of the county’s Black industrious landscapes. In the years immediately following emancipation, additional Black land acquisitions had an importance that was out of scale to their relative paucity: an individual farm could help establish a new settlement. Analysis of agricultural census data, along with investigations of small-scale landscape features such as outbuildings, gardens, and orchards, shows how expanded household production remained a key strategy in the 1870s and 1880s. Black industriousness shaped homesteads, farms, and villages, and Black farming families created distinctive landscapes that endured well into the twentieth century. By embracing the industrious revolution, Black farmers established places of sanctuary and opportunity, in the midst of white hostility. Though these vital places have nearly disappeared from modern maps, Maryland’s Black industrious landscapes matter because they reveal Black farmers were responsible for extending the industrious revolution as it began to fade in other places and for other groups.

Keywords:

• Black farmers
• Black farms
• industrious revolution
• Maryland
• outbuildings

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Frederick Douglass, Address Delivered by Hon. Frederick Douglass, at the Third Annual Fair of the Tennessee Colored Agricultural and Mechanical Association (Washington, D.C.: New National Era and Citizen Print, 1873), 2, 9-10, 17 19. Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, accessed June 26, 2019, https://www.loc.gov/item/mfd.22023/.

2. My assumptions about the Awkard’s work patterns are drawn from the farm’s agricultural production data collected in the agricultural census. U.S. Census of Agriculture, 1860. Maryland, Montgomery County, Medley District; U.S. Census of Agriculture, 1880. Maryland, Montgomery County, Medley District.

3. I borrow Monica White’s expansive definition of farmers: “all those who worked the land, regardless of their landownership status.” But I add to that group any household members whose work took place in and around the domestic core, processing the products grown and raised on the land. Monica M. White, Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 4.

4. Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 10. The scholarship on the era of industriousness in rural North American is extensive. Collected essays can be found in Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude, eds., The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformations: Essays in the Social History of Rural America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Ronald Hoffman, John J. McCusker, Russell R. Menard, and Peter J. Alberts, eds. The Economy of Early America: The Revolutionary Period, 1763-1790 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988); Stephen Innes, ed., Work and Labor in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

5. For example, Gavin Wright centers British colonists, New Englanders, American farm owners and later European immigrants in his overview of the industrious revolution in America. Free Black farm owners would not necessarily be excluded from his “American farm owner” group, but Wright does not address how race shaped this category of industrious revolution participants. He does argue that slavery, along with high mobility and farm ownership, was a key feature altering the timing and spread of the industrious revolution in North America. That phenomenon can certainly be seen in central Maryland’s mix of farms operated with and without enslaved labor. Gavin Wright, “The Industrious Revolution in America,” in The Birth of Modern Europe: Culture and Economy, 1400-1800: Essays in Honor of Jan De Vries, eds. Laura Cruz and Joel Mokyr (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 215-248.

6. Studies of agriculture and rural life in Maryland’s Piedmont counties include Carol Lee, Legacy of the Land: Two Hundred Fifty Years of Agriculture in Carroll County, Maryland (Historical Society of Carroll County,1982); John McGrain, An Agricultural History of Baltimore County, Maryland (Towson, MD: published by the author, 1990); Paula S. Reed, Tillers of the Soil: A History of Agriculture in Mid-Maryland (Frederick, MD: Catoctin Center for Regional Studies, 2011); and Max Grivno, Gleanings of Freedom: Free and Slave Labor along the Mason-Dixon Line, 1790-1860 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011). The cultural landscape history of central Maryland has received slightly more attention than its agricultural history. Several excellent county-level architectural studies exist including Pamela James Blumgart, et al., At the Head of the Bay: A Cultural and Architectural History of Cecil County, Maryland (Elkton: Cecil County Historical Trust, and Crownsville: Maryland Historical Trust, 1996); Joe Getty, Carroll’s Heritage: Essays on the Architecture of a Piedmont Maryland County (Westminster, Md.: Carroll County Commissioners and Historical Society of Carroll County, 1987); Christopher Weeks, An Architectural History of Harford County, Maryland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Lisa Mroszczyk, “Barns of Mid-Maryland,” HABS No. MD-1275, report prepared for the United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Historic American Buildings Survey, 2007; Maryland Department of Planning, Maryland Historical Trust, Maryland Inventory of Historic Properties (Crownsville, Maryland). Despite its age, Barbara Jeanne Fields’s Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (Yale University, 1985) remains the key text for understanding the geographic importance of Maryland as it relates to the history of slavery, emancipation and Reconstruction.

7. Key elements of industrious landscapes were the structures associated with food processing and preservation, which architectural historians clump together under the term “domestic outbuildings,” including kitchens, springhouses, dairies, smokehouses, butcher houses, breweries, bake ovens, root cellars, icehouses, dry houses and other small buildings found in the vicinity of the main farmhouse. Yoking the term domestic with these outbuildings and related landscape features is problematic because our present-day understanding of the word evokes a realm that is isolated from, and often inconsequential to, the world at large. Equating the work that took place in these landscapes with “subsistence” is also often untenable because of the great fluidity between production for home use and production for the market that characterized this period of farming in Maryland. Along with outbuildings, fields, gardens, orchards and woodlots became essential to industriousness. Melissa Blair, “Landscapes of Work: The Domestic Outbuildings of Central Maryland, 1760-1929” (Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 2014).

8. Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, The Geography of Resistance: Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2014).

9. White, Freedom Farmers, 6-11; Sharon Ann Holt argues that in North Carolina “small-scale productivity based in the household” was a key factor in the establishment of Black communities. Sharon Ann Holt, Making Freedom Pay: North Carolina Freedpeople Working for Themselves, 1865-1900 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2000), xv-xvi.

10. Sally McMurry, Pennsylvania Farming: A History in Landscapes (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), xi-xiii.

11. Gaps and variances in public records make assessing the precise real estate holdings of free Black people statewide impossible. Yet, Maryland, along with Delaware, Virginia, and North Carolina, was one Upper South state that experienced a significant expansion during the antebellum period in terms of both the total number of Black farm owners and the overall value of their real estate holdings. James M. Wright, The Free Negro in Maryland, 1634-1860 (1921; reprint, New York: Octagon Books, 1971), 194-195; Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 72-74. For challenges to Black land ownership see Jessica Millward, Finding Charity’s Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2015), 61.

12. In 1860, the Medley District No. 3, in some places referred to as Medley’s District, was one of six election districts in Montgomery County. Enumerators of the 1860 federal population census divided up the county and tallied households by election districts. 1860 United States Federal Census, Montgomery County, Maryland, database online at ancestry.com (Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com Operations) hereafter cited as U.S. Census of Population, identified by year, county, and district.

13. U.S. Census Slave Schedule, 1860. Maryland, Montgomery County, Medley District.

14. U.S. Census of Population, 1860. Maryland, Montgomery County, Medley District. The census category “free colored” included the subcategories Black, which enumerators listed as “B,” and Mulatto, which they listed as “M.” Montgomery County total population in 1860: white 11 349 (62%), slave 5,421 (30%) and free colored 1,552 (8%). Medley District population in 1860: white 1,693 (50%), slave 1,600 (48%), free colored 67 (2%). Corroborating land records research with census data makes it clear that the census did not capture every free Black real estate holding, but the limited numbers of Black-owned properties that were recorded still give us an accurate sense of scarcity.

15. Montgomery County Land Records, Deed R/217.

16. George McDaniel, “Awkard Family Cemetery,” Inventory Form for State Historic Sites Survey: M: 12-42-1, Crownsville, MD: Maryland Historic Trust, 1979; George McDaniel, “The Spencer Family Cemetery,” Inventory Form for State Historic Sites Survey: M: 12-42-34, Crownsville, MD: Maryland Historic Trust, 1979; U.S. Census of Agriculture, 1860. Maryland, Montgomery County, Medley District. SCM 5167-1, SCM 3020, Maryland State Archives, Annapolis, MD.

17. George McDaniel, Black Historical Resources in Upper Western Montgomery County (Sugarloaf Regional Trails, 1979), 53-54.

18. Simon J. Martenet, Martenet & Bond, and Schmidt & Trowe, Martenet and Bond’s map of Montgomery County, Maryland (Baltimore: Simon J. Martenet, 1865) Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, accessed September 14, 2021, https://www.loc.gov/item/2002620533/.

19. The first few agricultural censuses provide a less comprehensive view of farms than later ones. The census of 1850 was the first to collect agricultural statistics in a special schedule. That year farm owners were asked 46 questions. There was little variation in the agricultural schedules of 1860 and 1870, but in 1880 a new and more elaborate schedule with 100 questions was adopted. By 1890 the number of questions rose to 256: in 1900, the number of questions was 306. Farming had not become that much more complicated over these decades, but measuring it certainly had. U.S. Census, Agricultural Schedules: 1850 to 1900, 743.

20. U.S. Census of Agriculture, 1860. Maryland, Montgomery County, Medley District.

21. U.S. Census, Agricultural Schedules: 1850 to 1900, 744, 746.

22. U.S. Census of Agriculture, 1860. Maryland, Montgomery County, Medley District; Montgomery County land records indicate that in 1852 Jeffrey Robinson bought fifty acres of land from Elias and Ellen Spalding. Montgomery County Land Records, Deed JGH/4/60; Martenet and Bond’s map of Montgomery County, Maryland, 1865.

23. We know from Montgomery County land records that Nathan and Ann Naylor, Elijah Awkard and others owned substantial acreage in 1870, but there is no indication of this ownership in the 1870 census. Spending significant time in census records for the Medley District has led this researcher to the conclusion that white enumerators were frequently inaccurate and/or biased in their tabulations and that Black families may have been covert about their holdings on occasion.

24. McMurry, Pennsylvania Farming, 42; Blair, “Landscapes of Work,” 98.

25. Blair, “Landscapes of Work,” 183-189.

26. Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground, 28-38; Adrienne Petty calls for an agricultural history that does not segregate the experience of Black farmers from the larger whole and argues that we need to look at how poor whites were constrained as well to fully understand the political, economic, and social conditions on which the racism occurred. She also advocates that we not view landowning as the only measure of success. Adrienne Petty, “The Jim Crow Section of Agricultural History,” in Forty Acres and a Mule: African American Landowning Families since Reconstruction ed. Debra A. Reid and Evan P. Bennett (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2012), 21-35.

27. Charles T. Jacobs, Civil War Guide to Montgomery County (Montgomery County Civil War Round Table, 1983).

28. Margaret Law Callcott, The Negro in Maryland Politics, 1870-1912 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), 12.

29. Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground, 131-138.

30. U.S. Census — Slave Schedule, 1860. Maryland, Montgomery County, Medley District; “Slave Census 1867-1868, Montgomery County, Maryland,” Transcribed by Jane C. Sween. Photocopy in the Warren Historic Site files, Warren Historic Site Committee, Poolesville, Maryland.

31. Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground, 175-181.

32. George McDaniel, Hearth & Home: Preserving a People’s Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 187-189; McDaniel, Black Historical Resources in Upper Western Montgomery County, 13, 19-20.

33. McDaniel, Black Historical Resources in Upper Western Montgomery County, 19; Census takers listed only five Black men owning real estate in 1870, their properties ranging in value from $100 to $4,000. But again, as stated above, the census was not a precise measurement of Black landholdings. U.S. Census of Population, 1870. Montgomery County, Medley District.

34. Debra A. Reid, “Introduction,” in Forty Acres and a Mule: African American Landowning Families since Reconstruction ed. Debra A. Reid and Evan P. Bennett (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2012), 4.

35. Montgomery County Land Records, Deed EBP/2/649; McDaniel, Black Historical Resources in Upper Western Montgomery County, 12, 119; “Slave Census 1867-1868, Montgomery County, Maryland,” 58. A native Marylander, Nathan A. Naylor, served in Company B, Fourth Regiment, U.S.C.T and died of wounds received at Petersburg, but given his age of 18 in 1863 (when Nathan Naylor of Martinsburg would have been about age 51) this may have been a son or relative of Nathan and Ann, or an unrelated individual. Compiled Military Service Records of Volunteer Union Soldiers Who Served with the United States Colored Troops, 2nd through 7th Colored Infantry including 3d Tennessee Volunteers (African Descent), 6th Louisiana Infantry (African Descent), and 7th Louisiana Infantry (African Descent), Microfilm Serial: M1820; Microfilm Roll: 42, The National Archives at Washington, D.C.; Washington, D.C., database online at Ancestry.com (Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com Operations Inc., 2007), accessed October 15, 2021.

36. Blair, ‘Landscapes of Work’, 248. See Table 16.

37. Montgomery County Land Records, Deeds EBP/2/649, EBP/2/406, EBP/6/234 and EBP/16/2.

38. Scott E. Casper, “Black Landowners in George Washington’s Neighborhood, 1870-1930,” in Forty Acres and a Mule: African American Landowning Families since Reconstruction ed. Debra A. Reid and Evan P. Bennett (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2012), 44.

39. U.S. Census of Population, 1870. Montgomery County, Medley District.

40. U.S. Census of Agriculture, 1870. Montgomery County, Medley District, SCM 5169-1, SCM 3022-2, Maryland State Archives, Annapolis, MD.

41. Much of what we know about Black towns in Montgomery County came as a result of an intensive survey conducted by the Sugarloaf Regional Trails, a non-profit historic preservation organization, in the late 1970s. Historian George W. McDaniel, working with a team of volunteers, carefully documented what he knew to be fragile and disappearing landscapes. And he knew he was only seeing a fraction of what once was. It would be nearly impossible to reconstruct what the Medley District’s historical black communities looked like without this study, which included photographs, field notes, town and homestead histories, mapping, and oral histories. This outstanding community survey demonstrates the critical need for fieldwork to document Black landscapes. It is a reminder that we ought to be out in force documenting historic landscapes in our own time. George McDaniel, Black Historical Resources in Upper Western Montgomery County, Maryland (Sugarloaf Regional Trails, 1979); The history of the Sugarland community is skillfully recounted in Sugarland Ethno-History Project, I Have Started for Canaan: The Story of the African American Town of Sugarland (Poolesville, MD: Sugarland Ethno-History Project, 2020).

42. Everett L. Fly, “American Cultural Landscapes: Black Roots and Treasures,” Fredrick Law Olmsted Lecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design, virtual, October 27, 2020; accessed October 22, 2021; available from https://gsd.harvard.edu/event/Everett-l-fly/.

43. USGS topographical map, Seneca quad, 1908; Montgomery County Land Records, Deed EBP/10/405.

44. Dylan Penningroth explains how bonds of kinship shaped community building across the South. Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk : African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 160.

45. For an example, see the map of Sugarland c. 1900-1925 that was drawn based on the memories of Tilghman Lee and Bill Lyles. McDaniel, Black Historical Resources in Upper Western Montgomery County, 163.

46. McDaniel, Hearth & Home, 192-198; McDaniel, Black Historical Resources in Upper Western Montgomery County, 163.

47. McDaniel, Black Historical Resources in Upper Western Montgomery County, 53-63.

48. George McDaniel, “Awkard Family Cemetery”, M-12-42-1, January 1979, State Historic Sites Inventory form, Maryland Historical Trust, Annapolis, Maryland.

49. McDaniel, Black Historical Resources in Upper Western Montgomery County, 57-58.

50. Ibid., 57.

51. Simon J. Martenet, Map of Montgomery County, 1865; G. M. Hopkins, Atlas of Montgomery County, 1879.

52. U.S. Census of Population, 1870, 1880.

53. U.S. Geological Survey, Seneca quadrangle, 1908; Elsie Thomas, personal communication with Melissa Blair, February 16, 2021, Warren Historic Site, Martinsburg, MD.

54. George McDaniel, “Hood-Herbert House,” M-16-12-9, June 1978, State Historic Sites Inventory form, Maryland Historical Trust, Annapolis, Maryland.

55. Unpublished document, Warren Historic Site files, Warren Historic Site Committee, Poolesville, Maryland.

56. George McDaniel, “Warren M.E. Church,” M-16-12-19, June 1978, State Historic Sites Inventory form, Maryland Historical Trust, Annapolis, Maryland; George McDaniel, “Martinsburg School,” M-16-12-12, June 1978, State Historic Sites Inventory form, Maryland Historical Trust, Annapolis, Maryland; George McDaniel, “Love & Charity Hall,” M-16-12-11, June 1978, State Historic Sites Inventory form, Maryland Historical Trust, Annapolis, Maryland. More information about the Warren Historic Site, including the opportunity to contribute to its ongoing preservation, can be found at warrenhistoricsite.org.

57. I am grateful to UMBC public history students over the past decade for their insights into Black landscapes in Montgomery County, especially to Camilla Sandoval for her observations about the meanings of the churches, schools, halls, and cemeteries that formed the nucleus of Black settlements.

58. U.S. Census of Agriculture, 1880. Montgomery County, Medley District. SCM 5174, SCM 3025, Maryland State Archives, Annapolis, MD.

59. The story of the town of Quince Orchard is recounted in the film Finding Fellowship, directed by Jason Green (Quince Orchard Project, 2022), https://www.pbs.org/video/finding-fellowship-3bz18O; U.S. Census of Population, 1860. Maryland, Montgomery County, District 4; U.S. Census of Population, 1870. Maryland, Montgomery County, District 4.

60. U.S. Census of Agriculture, 1880. Montgomery County, Medley District; McDaniel, Black Historical Resources in Upper Western Montgomery County, 53.

61. Andrea Roberts leads efforts to identity and preserve these places in the exemplary, multifaceted public history project, The Texas Freedom Colonies Project, accessed October 23, 2023, https://andrearobertsphd.com/the-texas-freedom-colonies-project/.

62. “The Story of George Peck, c. 1858-1880,” Montgomery History, accessed January 10, 2024, https://montgomeryhistory.org/lynchings-in-montgomery-county/lynchings-george-peck/

63. Elsie Thomas, interview with Sarah Rogers, interview July 29, 2020, Heritage Montgomery, Gaithersburg, MD.

64. Ashanté M. Reese, Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 2019).

65. I borrow the phrase “too precious to lose” from the trustees of the Pleasant View Historic Site in Quince Orchard, Maryland, who, for years, have patiently answered my questions and shared with me the deep meanings of Montgomery County’s surviving Black landscapes.