Crowdsourcing Black History Along the Chesapeake Bay
Exploring public engagement strategies in Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware.
Through the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, the National Trust for Historic Preservation is undertaking the Chesapeake Mapping Initiative, documenting sites and landscapes significant to Black Americans. Launched in 2020, this effort is a collaboration between the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Park Service Chesapeake Gateways, the states of Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Chesapeake Conservation Partnership.
Now in its second phase, the Initiative aims to identify and map African American Historic Places within the Chesapeake Region. Achieving this objective requires a bottom-up approach that foregrounds the understanding that Black Americans have been excluded from past work to acquire information on historic sites by local, state and federal preservation agencies, which are executed by professionally trained historians and preservationists.
photo by: Preservation Futures
Participants share information on historic sites during a Chesapeake Mapping Initiative public engagement event at the Museum of Historic Annapolis.
Over the course of the second phase of the project, Preservation Futures piloted different public engagement and crowdsourcing approaches across three areas, including Virginia’s Alexandria and Arlington Counties, Anne Arundel County in Maryland, and Delaware statewide. These approaches included both passive and active engagement with an emphasis on different and creative ways that the project could reach audiences. These different approaches included:
- A tabling activity at an event held by the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority in Delaware
- A two-day in-person engagement activity in partnership with the Museum of Historic Annapolis
- A virtual webinar on Zoom for Virginia’s Alexandria and Arlington Counties
Passive engagement included a user-friendly Wikimap accessed by a project-specific webpage, as well as ways to share information about historic sites via voicemail message, text, or email.
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The historic sites gathered through crowdsourced public engagement across the project timeline conveyed a broad and diverse range of historic places significant to African Americans in the Chesapeake Region, including:
- Descendent communities
- Historically African American businesses
- Historically African American Schools, including those created under the Rosenwald school building program
- Places of protest and activism during the Civil Rights Era
- Places associated with beachside recreation during the Jim Crow Era
Historic sites included those that were well-known culturally and popularly, and those that were lesser-known. Sites listed on the National Register of Historic Places or designated as National Historic Landmarks were identified, as well as sites that had received no previous recognition, and did not appear on State Historic Preservation Office GIS systems or databases.
Sites included places with buildings and architecture that expressed the history a participant was seeking to share; places with buildings that had experienced physical changes over time; and places with no buildings or structures at all.
Highlights of the historic sites captured include:
Carr’s Beach
Annapolis, Maryland
A beloved beachside resort and entertainment venue that operated from the early 20th century until the 1970s that hosted acts on the Chitlin’ Circuit. While the performance venues and attractions are no longer extant–the memories remain—and have encouraged the City of Annapolis, along with partners like Blacks of the Chesapeake and the Chesapeake Conservancy, to acquire land for the Elktonia-Carr’s Beach Heritage Park.
Crownsville State Hospital
Crownsville, Maryland
A psychiatric hospital that served African American patients from 1911 to 2004. Representing a difficult and painful past, the site was acquired by Anne Arundel County in 2022 and is poised to become a campus for community based non-profit organizations to deliver assistance that promote the social determinants of good health, such as food assistance, behavioral health services, and job training.
The Former Cherrydale Drug Fair
Arlington, Virginia
The Former Cherrydale Drug Fair is the location of a groundbreaking lunch counter sit-in that occurred on June 9th and 10th, 1960. Facing intimidation and harassment from the American Nazi Party, six protesters, Charles Cobb, Ethelene Crockett, Dion Diamond, David Hartsough, Lawrence Henry and Joan Trumpeter participated in a non-violent protest that lasted over the course of two days. The Cherrydale Drug Fair sit-in, as well as other demonstrations occurring during the month of June 1960, made Arlington the first county in Virginia to desegregate its lunch counters and the first county in the entire south to serve Black customers. The Cherrydale Citizens Association placed a plaque at the site in 2018.
Whitehall Plantation/Whitehall Manor
Annapolis, Maryland
A 18th century agrarian plantation in Annapolis, Maryland that was built, maintained and farmed by enslaved African Americans. The site was listed as a National Historic Landmark in 1960– with no mention of its history of enslavement. In 2022, Whitehall plantation was nominated as one of the components of the proposed Chesapeake National Recreation Area. In 2024, Vincent Leggett, founder of Blacks of the Chesapeake, hosted a party at Whitehall Plantation for the area’s descendent community.
Current Home of The Monday Club
Wilmington, Delaware
A historically African American men’s social club established in Delaware in 1876, the Monday Club’s original location in Wilmington is noted within the Delaware State Historic Preservation Office’s GIS database and celebrated with a historical marker–yet the Club’s current location in New Castle–where the legacy of the nearly 150 year old club has continued for nearly twenty years–is not noted in the database.
At the conclusion of the project, Preservation Futures created Historic Resources Forms for a selection of the historic sites and shared them with the Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia State Historic Preservation Offices.
To view all the sites provided by the community as part of the Chesapeake Mapping Project explore the map below. If you see any incorrect information to email cmi@savingplaces.org
Elizabeth Blasius and Jonathan Solomon are partners in the firm Preservation Futures, a preservation firm guiding future landmarks through research, action and design. Based in Chicago, Preservation Futures works on projects at the forefront of the preservation movement.
