From Slavery to Freedom

From 1840 to 1864, more than 50 enslaved African American men, women, and children raised tobacco and wheat for Dr. John Mackall Brome on his 1,800 acre plantation, where they endured family separations, the threat of severe punishment, and a system of surveillance, while relying on their community to survive and resist bondage. During the Civil War, a few enslaved men escaped and enlisted in the Union Army, others fled with Union troops, and for most this was the place where they first experienced freedom. After the war, many left the plantation, but some remained in the former slave quarters as sharecroppers or hired laborers as the plantation gradually shrank and work declined for black laborers. By the 1890s, only a duplex and a neighboring single quarter remained of the seven original houses, and after slavery both surviving houses were made more comfortable with additions such as glass windows and wooden floors. From the 1920s, the duplex was home to Solomon Milburn, caretaker of the Brome property, and it survived in large part because the Milburn family lived there until the 1960s, leaving one of the few preserved former slave quarters in Maryland. Archaeology showed that the quarters once stood in a row along Key Swamp, enabling both Dr. Brome's regular surveillance and the black community's interaction, and also found that one quarter had been built atop a vanished 17th-century structure associated with Maryland's first printer, William Nuthead; an 1870 census suggests that this quarter was home to Ralph and Eliza Butler and their children, a family once enslaved by Dr. Brome.

Maryland · United States