Since 2021, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, through the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, has worked in collaboration with National Park Service Chesapeake Bay, the Chesapeake Conservation Partnership, and the states of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland to identify and map landscapes and structures significant to Black history as part of the Chesapeake Mapping Initiative (CMI). The history of this region is one of enslavement, civil war, and activism and is where generations of Black Americans have made their living from the waters of the Bay while also looking to the watershed as a place of gathering and recreation.

However, like many resources connected to historically excluded communities, these sites have often been undocumented, something the CMI looked to rectify.

Over the course of two years, two local historians—Michael Kent and Ruth Shoge—reviewed the existing entries in the Maryland Inventory of Historic Properties (MIHP) for Kent, Somerset, and Calvert Counties looking to identify the sites specifically associated with Black history. Unlike the Pennsylvania and Virginia examples which were able to identify new sites in the state, the work of Kent and Shoge focused on understanding what was already in the database to identify areas for future survey work. To aid in those future efforts, in addition to reviewing the survey data provided from the Maryland Historical Trust, both historians provided an extensive literature review for the next phase of CMI in Maryland.

In reviewing all three counties, they concluded that the MIHP needed to expand their survey to identify and include sites related to the Underground Railroad, cemeteries, Black-owned farms, maritime industries, slave auctions, Civil Rights, early plantations, and along the Chitlin Circuit. They underscored the importance of community outreach in a potential second phase as well as conducting a comprehensive oral history with the different Black communities in the area to identify resources and provide information on additional sites.

To give you more detail on what Kent and Shoge found, we’ve pulled some of the data for Kent, Somerset, and Calvert Counties below.

• 46 were related to the history of enslavement.
• 21 were Black churches.
• 8 schools for Black children were included. Located in Black communities, these sites were typically one room and the records included a varied amount of detail, from brief summaries to a single photograph with dates and location.
• 2 were freetowns and communities. Generally, within each community was a church, schools, and local shops.
• Only 4 businesses are identified: William Perkins’s Rising Sun Restaurant; the community store in the Village of Morgnec, which was Black owned and operated for a number of years; a property at 106 Church Alley that was allegedly occupied by several Black shopkeepers; and, reference to Skipjack Bernice owned by Melvin Christy of Crisfield and sold to Echo Hill School in Kent County.
• 2 buildings which were specifically identified as lodge houses.
• There were 6 references to properties (homes and/or businesses) of prominent African Americans in the community.

Somerset County

As part of her research on sites in Somerset County, Ruth Shoge searched the MIHP database for sites of enslavement, religion, education, freetowns and communities, community groups/institutions, prominent persons, and cemeteries. Below is a short list of the sites that she identified as part of her work. For Somerset County, she reviewed 581 MIHP Properties focusing on the 563 properties in the MIHP with attached architectural survey files. Of those 563 properties only 109 made explicit references to African Americans. Of the 109 properties identified in the MIHP:

• 31 were related to the history of enslavement, however this list is not definitive as many of the plantation sites did not include information related to the enslaved people who lived on the site.
• 21 were Black churches. 2 of these churches were predominantly white with designated seating for Black congregants.
• Only 5 were educational institutions were included –three of the buildings located on the campus of the University of Maryland Eastern Shore.
• 6 freetowns and communities (which contained 50 individual resources)
• 44 were individual homes owned by African Americans.
• Only 2 places of businesses were included.

Calvert County, Maryland:

There are 1,371 properties in the MIHP in Calvert County

• Of those 1,371 properties, only148 have existing documentation of African American heritage.
• 115 of those properties are related to the Jim Crow era
• 41 are related to the history of enslavement.

In his final report Kent concludes that “in order to encourage more preservation, we must generate more interest.” He provides two examples of how that might occur. The first being Taney Place (CT-39) which shares the story of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Roger Taney who was born in Calvert County in 1777. He is best known for writing the Dred Scott opinion in 1836 which, in short, argued that because African Americans were not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, they did not have rights under the Constitution.

What is not included in the register is the equally important narrative around Thurgood Marshall (who was critical to the passage of Brown v. Board of Education) whose ties to Calvert County are through Harriet Elizabeth Brown, a teacher, in Calvert County who learned in 1937 that Black teachers were being paid less that white teachers with equivalent experience. As Kent wrote, she reached out to the NAACP who sent a young Thurgood Marshall to handle her case. The eventual result after success at the county level was the passage in 1941 of Maryland’s Pay Equalization Law.