Oxford was a documented Middle Passage port on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. During the colonial period, as a major maritime tobacco seaport, four transatlantic ships and twenty-five intra-American voyages delivered captive Africans to Oxford and local plantations. The Two Sisters was the first Middle Passage ship to arrive in Oxford on August 29, 1763; Talbot County’s Jeremiah Banning captained the ship and left a diary of his journey to Senegal, where he met the King and transported his court to the island of Gorée. The last known documented Middle Passage ship docked on August 11, 1772, and the last intra-American ship, The Experiment, whose owners were from the Eastern Shore and among America’s founding families, arrived on July 4, 1772. Over the centuries, these enslaved Africans and their descendants made possible the region’s agricultural and maritime commercial development, especially in the oyster and ship-building industries. Oxford remained a shipping and seafood center predominated by black watermen until the 20th century. Ancestors of many of Maryland’s founding black families first touched the North American mainland here. Born in Oxford in 1910, Morgan State University Professor Water Edward Turpin, a person of color with deep roots on the Eastern Shore, drew on oral histories in his final novel, The Rootless, published in 1957, to share vivid images of Middle Passage disembarkations.