In the early 1800s, the notorious Cannon/Johnson Kidnapping Gang operated near this site, specializing in the criminal abduction of free African-Americans for sale into slavery after the legal importation of African slaves was outlawed in 1808. As demand for slave labor grew in the expanding Deep South, the gang used a secret network reaching as far as Alabama and Mississippi and is believed to have kidnapped hundreds of persons of color and sold them into slavery. By establishing headquarters in three different counties along the Delaware and Maryland boundary, the gang avoided arrest by local officials for years. Substantial action came only after authorities found evidence of the murder of a white slave trader and the bodies of several others, including a young child and a baby. Most of the gang fled to the Deep South, but Patty Cannon was captured and jailed in Sussex County, where she is believed to have committed suicide in May 1829 while awaiting trial for murder.