Exploring the Chesapeake Bay’s Unsung Black History
Nestled to the side of a sharp Annapolis point, jutting into the Chesapeake Bay, lies five acres of waterfront land called Elktonia-Carr's Beach Heritage Park. Today the beach looks like another quiet, unassuming place to spend a summer weekend, and it is, but it has also cemented its place in history as a longtime safe haven for Black American families—though its significance is still being written.
“There isn’t a formal history of the site,” Carolyn Mitchell, a landscape architect who worked as a consultant for the Blacks of the Chesapeake Foundation, told me. “No one has published it. It really still resides in the realm of oral history.”
The land was purchased by a formerly enslaved veteran named Fred Carr as part of an 180-acre property. This broader stretch of land would soon be converted to two popular resorts called Carr’s and Sparrow’s Beach, overseen by Fred’s daughters Elizabeth Carr and Florence Carr Sparrow.
“The Beaches,” as they’d come to be known, consisted of cabins, small motels, ball fields, a carnival, a pavilion, and food stands scattered throughout. All of them catered exclusively to middle-class Black Americans as segregation plagued the country. They quickly became popular vacation spots resorts listed in the “Negro Motorist Green Book”—a famous guide that helped Black travelers safely navigate Jim Crow America—and major entertainment hubs for Black music throughout the 20th century.
The Beaches quickly became a stop on the "Chitlin’ Circuit" along the East Coast, providing Black performers with a safe place to stay and a stage to perform on.
photo by: WANN Radio Station Records, courtesy of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History
Four women visiting Carr's Beach.
“That was the time of Jim Crow, when musicians would encounter what they called the ‘Route 40 problem,’” Mitchell said. “As you were traveling from New York to Philly on Route 40, the Pulaski Highway, there were no restaurants or hotels where you were welcome as a Black entertainer. And so the Elktonian cottages answered that and made Carr’s Beach a feasible, workable, attractive stopping point for traveling musicians doing the Chitlin’s Circuit.”
They hosted iconic musicians between the 1930s and 1970s as a result, including Chuck Berry, Cab Calloway, The Temptations, Ike and Tina Turner, The Shirelles, Little Richard and Billie Holiday.
“Everybody who was making impactful music in the late ‘40s, ‘50s and early ‘60s was playing Carr’s Beach,” Carolyn Mitchell explained.
Many of the events put on in the Beaches were captured through photography currently held in the Maryland State Archives. To Philip J. Mitchell, founder of the Black heritage consulting firm Nanny Jack & Co, LLC, these pieces of visual mementos are a crucial part of the work of historical preservation.
“Mainstream society for generations showed stereotypical racist buffoonery images of us on postcards and magazines and minstrelsy,” Phillip J. Mitchell said. “So this counters all of that, because you see us doing everyday activities in nice clothing, enjoying ourselves in spite of Jim Crow, in spite of redlining, in spite of lack of access to capital, in spite of segregation and so forth. We still found a way to enjoy ourselves, and it’s important to see us in a positive light, because of the mainstream negativity that was constantly being put in front of us.”
But most of the Beaches were sold off soon after 1974 to make way for residential housing and a wastewater treatment plant. Elktonia’s five acres are all that’s left.
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Historian Vince Leggett, the late founder of the Blacks of the Chesapeake Foundation (BOCF), set his sights on preserving Elktonia Beach in 2006, when he heard that a developer was looking to bulldoze the remaining land. Leggett had devoted most of his life to promoting Black maritime history in and around the Chesapeake Bay—he was even deemed the “Champion of the Chesapeake” in 2022—and Elktonia Beach was a critical part of that history.
“Vince had a vision that was so clear about telling history, and about the role of African Americans in the Chesapeake region,” Phillip J. Mitchell said, “and he promoted that as a sort of indefatigable proponent of elevating Black voices.”
Over the next twenty years, these efforts blossomed into a collaborative preservation project between BOCF, the Chesapeake Conservancy, the city of Annapolis and the state of Maryland, in which they lobbied their combined resources towards acquiring Elktonia Beach. They succeeded in 2022, reaching an agreement with The Conservation Fund to gain ownership of the property and transform it into a city park in Annapolis. The following year, the Beaches were awarded a grant from the African American Cultural Heritage Fund at the National Trust for Historic Preservation to aid the ongoing preservation efforts.
Leggett sadly passed away on November 23, 2024, drawing a thousand mourners to his memorial service, all friends he’d made through a lifetime of conservation efforts. But his legacy lives on, in and around the Chesapeake Bay, as a new generation is inspired to save Black history by the acre.
"Vince was an incredible leader and thought partner in our collaborative work to uncover and preserve the history of Black Americans in the Chesapeake,” said Brent Leggs, executive director at the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund and a senior vice president at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “He was a giant in the field, and his legacy will live on to inspire the next generation of preservationists not only in Maryland, but across the country."
Carr’s Beach is included in the Action Fund’s Chesapeake Mapping Initiative, a multi-phased collaboration between the National Trust, the National Park Service Chesapeake Gateways; the states of Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia; and the Chesapeake Conservation Partnership, all seeking to catalog Black history in and around the Chesapeake Bay.
photo by: Darius Johnson
(Left to Right) Darius Johnson, Bilal Bahar, Brent Leggs, and Vince Leggett.
“A community member once told our researchers ‘For so many of these places, you are already 5-10 years too late to save them,” said Lawana Holland-Moore, director of grantee impact and engagement for the Action Fund. “That is why it is so important to do this work to identify and recognize these sites—from packing houses to blacksmith shops—before they are lost.”
As part of its second phase, the project joined forces with Preservation Futures, a Chicago-based firm that highlights landmarks in the making, to crowdsource historic places throughout the region.
“It’s critical that we can come together and find ways to not only save land,” Merrill said, “but save legacy, save buildings, save stories and save artifacts.”
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