On a cold winter afternoon Robert Engelman and Bob Pickrell meet in Ken-Gar Palisades Park. Located west of Wheaton and north of Kensington, the local park was their playground, near where the two lived, went to school and learned to ride their bikes in the late 1950s and ’60s.
It’s here where they got lost for whole days.
“The woods were denser than they are now,” Engelman said, “and we’d get our feet wet running around the creeks following Joseph’s Mill Branch all the way down to where it meets Rock Creek,” he said.
As Engelman wandered, he wondered.
“I used to bicycle alone all over the place and try to figure out where things were, where things might have been in the past,” he said. He began to ask questions and collect local history books and documents. He filled files with old maps, pictures and other curiosities about the native American and African American history in Montgomery County. The collection became a hobby, growing with his thirst to know more.
Engelman, a retired journalist and former president of the World Watch Institute, an environmental think tank, said the murder of George Floyd in 2020 sparked a powerful urge to address racial injustice through the lens of slavery rooted in his own backyard.
“After [Floyd’s] murder I realized that I had grown up in an area where slavery was everywhere and that I had never really dealt with it,” he said. “I wanted to say their names, if I [could] possibly find the names of people who were enslaved [near] my home.”
The Newport Valleys
During COVID and beyond, the project accelerated into high gear as he drafted the video presentation “Slavery Where I Grew: An Exploration of Place and Past in Montgomery County Maryland,” available online. He turned to books, local historians, historical societies, and digital archives, which led him to property records, tax assessments, census data, decennials of the enslaved, bills of sale, newspaper articles, and ads that named runaways.
He also worked closely with research partner Don Kaiser, an old neighborhood friend. They strove to find slivers of their stories in the meticulously annotated work.
Engelman opens his narrative on July 8, 1845, detailing the escape of dozens of enslaved black men wielding pistols and knives along their route that traversed Veirs Mill Road, near what we know today as the Wheaton Triangle. They had hoped to reach freedom in Pennsylvania. Yet, according to a newspaper article published the next day, they were captured by [pro-slavery] volunteers, who were commended, [and] “deserve encouragement for the promptness with which they acted and the gallant spirit they manifested throughout.”
This was Engelman’s neighborhood and he sees the event as a local act of resistance.
Engelman gives his project area a new name, one he says better describes its history. He calls it the Newport Valleys, a reference to the mills and valleys where enslaved worked to grind wheat and corn into flour and to grow tobacco and other agricultural products.
Enslaved cleared the forests, built homes and carved out the network of roads. “[This was done] by people who were being whipped to continue working, to do the work that created, in many ways, the world that we live in, in luxury and privilege today,” Engelman said. “And we should [have] a sense of gratitude, and yes, a reasonable amount of sadness and shame that those who were here before us helped make our landscape that we can only enjoy through the unpaid sweat of their labor.”
Caroline Landick, Josiah Henson, Anna Maria Weems
As Engelman continues to explore that landscape, heroes like Caroline Landick, 23, begin to emerge. Shortly after Christmas 1830, she escaped from the farm where she was enslaved. The $50 reward offered for Landick’s return describes her as, “When spoken to, she speaks short, with a grim and down look.” She is also identified by “scars on her shoulders below the [upper] hem of her dress.” Engelman would later learn from property records that his boyhood home was built on or adjacent to where Landick was enslaved. In the book’s dedication Engelman writes, “To Caroline Landick, an enslaved neighbor across time, in hopes she reached safety and freedom.”
Also, we meet the 18-year-old enslaved Josiah Henson, who about 1807 was denied entrance to a prayer meeting in the stone house at Newport Mill, a site occupied today by Ken-Gar Palisades Park. Henson, who listened from a door, would go on to escape bondage to Canada and later write his autobiography. Curiously, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who met Henson, would fictionalize his story in the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
And, we learn about Anna Maria Weems, then 15, who was enslaved to birth children, a fate she narrowly escapes in a daring dash to freedom with help from the Underground Railroad. Engelman imagines she passed by the Newport Valleys into the District of Columbia where, he documents, “She eventually made her way to freedom in Philadelphia, New York and eventually Canada.”
History Matters
Matt Logan lives in the neighborhood of Engelman’s youth and walks the streets with a new sense of local history. Logan, executive director of Montgomery History, says the work opens a new chapter to educate a new generation of young people and their families.
“What [Engelman] is contributing is the necessary foundation to lead to better understanding and reconciliation, and then, quite honestly, a safer and more peaceful community.”
Engelman says, while painful, the study is a reminder of our shared humanity. “I think doing this kind of work, seeing the humanity of people who were not treated as human beings, and realizing they were, in fact, human beings with all the same ambitions and hopes and desires and sufferings that any human being can have in life, is helpful for seeing the humanity of all of us,” he said.
When Robert Engelman started his quest to name the enslaved in his childhood neighborhood, he believed he had no ancestral connection to slavery. His sister proved him wrong when she tracked down William Dodge, their sixth-great-grandfather on their mother’s side, who, in 1761 willed “the use of my Negro wench Jude” to his wife. While Dodge lived in New York, Engelman says, “I knew I grew up in slave country: Montgomery County.” His research records 13 individuals with full names and 102, only identified by their first names, who were enslaved on or had some close connection to the Newport Valleys.
Sabina with her young child is among the earliest named enslaved persons likely to have lived near where author Robert Engelman grew up north of Kensington. Mother and child accompanied a land sale in the late 1730s from Thomas Butler to Daniel Carroll, father of a United States Founding Father.
Nacey was the victim in 1746 of a “murder of a very barbarous Nature, without any provocation,” according to a court record of the trial. Since the killer was the white servant of Dr. Andrew Scott, who spent much of his life on a farm along Newport Mill Road, it’s likely Nacey was enslaved there. The servant was hanged for the murder.
Mark was separated from his family and forcibly moved to the north Kensington home of Erasmus Perry, an inheritance from Erasmus’ father Benjamin in 1771. Several decades later he was moved again to serve Erasmus’ 19-year-old son Elias, cutting off personal relationships with family.
A creative resistor named Bob absconded from captivity at the Newport Mills in the late spring of 1789. Advertising a $20 reward for his return in a local newspaper, Bob’s enslaver Thomas Johns called him “sensible,” as indeed he was. He managed to make off with several British crowns and U.S. dollars, plus a coat, overalls, britches — and his enslaver’s mare, on which he threw an English-made saddle before galloping off.
George Smith appears to have been enslaved as a young boy by Benjamin Duvall’s son Washington. After Maryland’s 1864 emancipation, Smith built a house on land Duvall provided him near Colesville. There he helped found a large and relatively prosperous Black community named Smithville. Still extant north of Randolph Road, the community built a “colored school” and had several successful business enterprises.
