Riversdale Plantation

Riversdale was a plantation of about 1500 acres founded in 1801 by the Stiers, an aristocratic Belgian family who had escaped the terror of the French Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic wars. Rosalie Stier married George Calvert, a member of Maryland's founding family, and the couple received the plantation from her father Henri after his return to Europe following Napoleon's defeat. George and Rosalie Calvert finished construction of the mansion and grounds by 1807. Their son Charles Benedict Calvert, a slave-holder, U.S. Congressman, and a founder of the University of Maryland at College Park, introduced scientific agriculture to the plantation, adopting ideas from journals and newspapers, exhibiting at county and state fairs, and developing innovations of his own, made possible by the labor of many enslaved people, numbering as many as 55 in 1850. One enslaved man, Adam Francis Plummer, worked at Riversdale from age 10 in 1819 until emancipation in November 1864 and kept a diary from 1841 until his death in 1905. Charles Calvert died six months before Maryland's new constitution emancipated all slaves in the state, and his will divided the estate among his children. Charles Baltimore Calvert and his wife, Eleanor Mackubin, built their farm, MacAlpine, on their share of the estate, on the same land.

Riverdale Park, Maryland · United States