In the eighteenth century, the Magruders worked this farm under the Maryland plan, alternating tobacco and corn each year and relying on enslaved laborers for the grueling work from winter through the fall tobacco harvest and curing for shipment to European markets. These crops depleted the soil, and by 1846 the Montgomery County Agricultural Society promoted fertilizers, especially guano, to restore productivity and support a wider range of crops, including wheat. Otho Magruder, a founding member of the Society who owned the farm from 1849 to 1856, shifted his 387 acres to wheat, called the property Waveland, and stored select grain in a granary for seeding with a hand-cranked fanning mill. The 1850 Slave Census recorded that he enslaved 27 people here, including men, women, and children from one month old to 64 years old. Maryland ended slavery in 1864, and afterward tenant farmers took up the farm’s labor, including Samuel Finneyfrock, who lived in a frame tenant house beside the bank barn under a lease or sharecropping arrangement. Around the turn of the century, the Bussard family concentrated on general farm crops for sale and home use, small-scale dairy farming, feeding beef cattle, raising hogs, market gardening, and fruit growing.