Montgomery County in the early 1860s
- Neile Whitney
- May 7
- 8 min read
Updated: May 9
Naming and mapping the enslavers and enslaved, and learning about our historic Black communities
Many of us have driven around Montgomery County for years, wondering what history we are missing.
We look at the farms of the Agricultural Reserve and wonder about the history of slavery in the county. We look at Brookfield Gardens and NIH and wonder about the former plantations they occupy and who worked there.
We see small, old, beautiful churches and big, beautiful homes, and wonder whose hands built them.
In early 2024, to learn more about this history, MoCoLMP organized three committees to research:
1) The names and locations of enslavers in Montgomery County in the early 1860s;
2) The names of the enslaved in the county at the time; and
3) The early years of our historic Black communities.
Our goals are: to make connections between the enslavers, enslaved, and the communities they created after Emancipation; to tell their stories; and to provide this information to assist other researchers.
When we started this project, we didn’t know that there were more than 100 historic Black communities in the county. We didn’t know that hundreds—probably thousands—of descendants still live in the area.
Most of our researchers hadn’t done this type of work before, and have since learned about research rabbit holes, stone walls, and late nights reading “Just one more!” page of a census. We’ve visited the Sween Library in Rockville, the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis, and toured local historic Black communities. What we’ve found makes, for us, a county that’s more interesting and more complex, than we knew.
MoCoLMP visits the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis to research county history.
Less than a year before the beginning of the Civil War, the 1860s U.S. Census counted over 11,000 white persons living in Montgomery County, of which 760 were enslavers (U.S. Census Bureau). About one-quarter of the enslavers were women.
As a border state, the enslaved in Maryland had not been emancipated by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863. In 1864, Maryland’s governor held a constitutional convention followed by a statewide referendum on slavery. Of the three delegates from Montgomery County, two were from the largest slaveholding families in the county—the Duvalls and the Peters. The third, Thomas Landsdale, was an extremely wealthy mill owner from near Sunshine, MD, who would be elected to the Maryland Senate in 1865 (Maryland Archives).
Union soldiers still stationed in the state voted overwhelmingly for freeing the enslaved (Meyer), tipping the vote to emancipation. In November, almost two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, plantation owners and small households reluctantly freed more than 5,400 enslaved persons, ranging from those recently born to persons who had been enslaved for 60, 70, or 80 years. Many of these formerly enslaved persons helped form communities of their own in the county, based around church, schools, and remarkable cooperative communities of families.
MoCoLMP Naming the Enslaved and Enslavers Committee members Janet Saros, Jennifer Avellino, Neile Whitney, and several other volunteers have participated in this research. Montgomery College student Daniel Piotrowski helped draft interactive maps for us so that we could see how our research might look when we’re finished.
Naming the Enslavers and the Enslaved
Below is the Martenet & Bond's map of the county from 1865, after the war had ended. (Here is the map at the Library of Congress website, if you want to zoom in.) We can see that the borders of the county are quite recognizable to us, although the county was divided into districts that are not familiar to us today. The names on it are property owners who were willing to pay a fee to be included on the map. There are some Black property owners, schools and churches to be found, as well as the property or properties of many white persons.
This 1865 Martenet and Bonds map of Montgomery County shows the five districts, with the Potomac River running along the bottom of the map. You can orient yourself as you look at the map—it doesn't exactly have a north south orientation. The districts were: Cracklin (now Laytonsville), Clarksburg, Medley (the Poolesville area), Rockville and Berry (Colesville area).
Our research began with the 1860 Slave Schedule and the 1867 Slave Census. The 1860 Slave Schedule was part of the 1860 U.S. Census, with information submitted by enslavers or their representatives. The 1867 Slave Census was for former enslavers to record the numbers of their enslaved people in the year 1864, when emancipation occurred in Maryland. The numbers are never going to be completely accurate, as it was wartime and there were many births and deaths. Enslavers certainly may not have provided accurate records, either from lapses in memory or willfully, in hopes of reimbursement for what they considered to be their property. (The federal government did not ultimately reimburse Maryland enslavers.)
Numbers of enslaver names and enslaved names and/or numbers recorded as of April 2025. We are still looking for locations for a number of these historic properties.
We’ve recorded 6,226 persons enslaved in the county in the early 1860s. The Maryland Archives Legacy of Slavery website states there were 5,421 enslaved persons in 1860. Our numbers include persons born and counted between 1860 and 1864. We will keep refining names and numbers as we continue our work.
We were able to add to the records recently in several different ways. As just one example, our researchers looked into the details of approximately 130 homes in a book of historic properties in Montgomery County that was published in the early 1950s (Farquhar). Tracing the history of these homes, we discovered a number of enslavers who were not in our records, and were able to confirm their names on the Maryland Archives Legacy of Slavery website and add them to our list.
Through our research, we're constantly discovering and verifying new names of enslaved people and enslavers in Montgomery County in the early 1860s.
Our Historic Black Communities
To our surprise, we have found about 110 named historic Black communities in the county—some formed as early as 1793 by free Black persons, such as Davis Corner in Sandy Spring. The majority were founded 10-15 years post-emancipation.
Most of these communities were founded by people who had been enslaved in nearby plantations and small households, but families also included formerly enslaved people fleeing states such as Virginia, or Black soldiers from the Civil War who decided to stay in Maryland.
These communities were and are all linked to each other. A community or communities would grow up around an anchor building like a church and a one or two-room schoolhouse. Some of them are as small as Owensville in Beallsville, which consists of three Owens families living next to each other on Rt. 109. Another, the Scotland community in Potomac, grew from the original 36 acres purchased by William Dove and property bought by other early founders, to 500 acres and fifty families at one point.
We are still searching for the exact location of some communities, as a number of them have disappeared as descendants moved away, or developments and urban planning erased homes, and woodlands or concrete hid historic cemeteries.
At MoCoLMP, we are trying to expand on the stories already told, to discover lost memories through research into censuses, land records, wills, and hearing oral histories, and to create a map that links the founders of these communities to their former enslavers. We are fortunate to be learning from historic records, but also from historic Black community descendants still living in the area.
We'd like to show you a closer look at one of those properties—one home and one individual.
One Man’s Story: Phillip Johnson, 1846/7–1938
The home you see in the image below is Annington, known in the 1860s as Concord. It still stands today on Whites Ferry Road in Dickerson, MD. It was built around 1813 by Daniel Trundle. At his death in 1831, Dr. Steven Newton Chiswell White inherited the home through his wife, Anne Trundle, who was Daniel's eldest daughter. She died in 1835 and White married a cousin, Elizabeth Chiswell, in 1837.
Dr. White was one of the largest enslavers in Montgomery County in the mid-1800s. One of the persons he enslaved was Philip Johnson (photo above), who was born on that property in December 1846. MoCoLMP is fortunate to have a very well documented life of Mr. Johnson, thanks to Suzanne Johnson and the Sugarland Ethno-History Project (Sugarland Ethno-History Project).
As a child, Philip was taken off the Concord plantation by Dr. White’s wife, Elizabeth, and moved five miles away into the town of Poolesville to the home of Dr. White, where the doctor had his medical practice and an in-town home.
At the time, Poolesville was the second biggest city in Montgomery County. In 1900, the town of Poolesville consisted of 236 persons, so it may have been even smaller in the 1850s (U.S. Census Bureau, p. 6). Elizabeth White believed the overseer on Concord was being cruel to Philip as a child. So Philip worked in the Whites’ home and garden in Poolesville until Maryland Emancipation in November of 1864.
After he was freed, Philip moved to Washington, DC, and lived with his father, Sam, and his stepmother, Margaret, and several siblings until sometime after 1870. Philip and his brother Nathan were educated in Washington, DC. He returned to Poolesville in the 1870s and married a woman from the historic Black community in Seneca in 1877. In 1880, he purchased three acres of land in the historic Black community of Sugarland.
Johnson became a well-respected member of the Sugarland community and served as a Methodist minister for four decades. In April 1902, Maryland sent four delegates to a national convention in Washington, DC to lobby Congress for government pensions for the formerly enslaved. Unfortunately, this proposal didn't get very far, but Johnson was one of those four delegates. In fact, three of the four Maryland delegates were from the Sugarland community.
In 1937, Johnson was the only formerly enslaved person from Montgomery County to be interviewed by the Federal Writers Project (Federal Writers' Project, Slave Narratives: Maryland Narratives, p. 41). He died in 1938 and is buried in the cemetery behind the St. Paul Community Church in Sugarland.
In 1941, Mr. Johnson’s grandson, Philip Samuel Johnson Jr., enlisted in the United States Army, served in Belgium, France, and Germany, and achieved the rank of sergeant. In just three generations, the Johnson family rose from enslavement to serving with honor in World War II.
This family story represents thousands that we do not yet know in the history of enslavement in Montgomery County.
Interactive Map of Enslavers, Enslaved and Historic Black Communities in Montgomery County, 1860-65
Daniel Piotrowski, a student in GIS computing and Cartography at Montgomery College, has been working with the research team to locate places where enslavers and enslaved lived, and to map out where the historic Black communities were located and how they were connected with local plantations and other enslavers.
Using the latitude and longitude positions provided by the researchers, Daniel mapped out some of the enslaver plantations whose locations have been found in historical records.
When completed, we hope to have an interactive map that will include four layers, three with clickable icons:
The outline of Montgomery County
The names and locations of known enslavers in early 1860s MoCo
The names and locations of our historic Black communities
The locations of known slave trafficking locations and of the historic lynching memorial markers in Poolesville and Rockville.
The goal is to provide information on the enslaved and enslavers in the county, and to show the connections between local enslavers and historic Black communities. Each icon will have a pop-up that will give information on the names, addresses, and a link or links to more information.
Works Cited
Farquhar, Robert Brookes. Historic Montgomery County, Maryland, old homes and history. 1 ed., Silver Spring, Monumental Printing Company, 1952. HathiTrust, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015051117664&seq=6 . Accessed 07 May 2025.
Maryland State Archives. "Archives of Maryland Historical List Constitutional Convention, 1864." https://msa.maryland.gov, https://msa.maryland.gov/msa/speccol/sc2600/sc2685/html/conv1864.html. Accessed May 2025.
Meyer, Eugene L. “Maryland Emancipation Day: 375 absentee ballots ended slavery in 1864.” The Washington Post, 31 October 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/10/31/emancipation-maryland-slavery-absentee-ballots/ . Accessed 7 May 2025.
U.S. Census Bureau. "1860 Census Slave Schedule." Familysearch.org, https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/collection/3161105. Accessed 2025.