Upton Beall, a wealthy landowner and clerk of the court, owned 25 slaves when he died in 1827. Although the family did not purchase additional slaves after his death, the three Beall sisters owned 52 individuals by 1860. The family did not sell the children of their slaves. Enslaved people worked in the house, on the farm, and at other family properties, and the Bealls also hired out slaves to families in Washington, D.C., where many of them lived. In 1862, an act of Congress ending slavery in the nation's capital freed 17 of the Beall sisters' slaves who were in Washington, D.C., and the sisters received $9,400 for them through a federal compensation program. The remaining slaves were freed when emancipation was granted in Maryland in 1864. The Bealls later sold land along Martin's Lane to their former slaves, where some had lived during enslavement, and those families had long formed part of a mixed free and enslaved African-American community called Haiti.
