Submit Your Place! Share with us the sites that hold significance in African American history in Virginia’s Alexandria and Arlington Counties, Maryland’s Anne Arundel County, and across Delaware. Learn more below.

Through the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, the National Trust for Historic Preservation is undertaking a multi-phased initiative, “Documenting Chesapeake Watershed Sites and Landscapes Important to African Americans,” or the Chesapeake Mapping Initiative. This effort is a collaboration between the National Trust; the National Park Service Chesapeake Gateways; the states of Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia; and the Chesapeake Conservation Partnership. All are working to identify and map sites and landscapes significant to African American history in the watershed.

The Chesapeake Mapping Initiative is intended to ensure that places important to African Americans are better represented in historic preservation and land conservation priorities in the Chesapeake Bay region, and ultimately that more of these places are recognized and protected. It is also laying the groundwork for future mapping efforts for African American historic places by assessing the effectiveness of different project approaches.

In its first phase of work (2020-2024), the Chesapeake Mapping Initiative undertook three unique pilot projects in watershed areas of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.

For phase 2, historic preservation consultants Preservation Futures, has been engaged to work on three new pilot projects for the Chesapeake Mapping Initiative in watershed across Delaware, Virginia’s Alexandria and Arlington Counties, and Maryland’s Anne Arundel County. Each pilot project includes outreach to local communities to share information and invite feedback.

Explore and Preserve the Rich History of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed

As home to some of America’s first colonies, the Chesapeake Bay watershed region has significant meaning to African American history. Many major tobacco plantations were located there, as were many stops on the Underground Railroad. It was the place where Harriet Tubman and both Frederick Douglass and his first wife were enslaved. It includes many battlegrounds of the Civil War, as well as places of notable activism in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Generations of Black Americans have made their living from the waters of the Bay and have also used special places along the Bay and throughout the region for recreation. But many of the places that hold the stories of African American life in the watershed are still under-recognized and undocumented by historic preservationists.

Submit Your Place

We invite you to be a part of preserving this legacy by helping us identify and celebrate these important places. Share with us the sites that hold significance in African American history in Virginia’s Alexandria and Arlington Counties, Maryland’s Anne Arundel County, and across Delaware. There are many ways to participate! Be sure to read the guidelines and photo permissions and rights granted before you do.

Submit a place using the online form.

Add a place to this map (a new window will open).

Call, text or email us a photograph and a short description of a place and its story.

Email CMI@savingplaces.org

Call or text (302) 257-2044