Sugarland: A Historic Black Community in Montgomery County, MD
- Neile Whitney
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
A Place of Excellence
"It was a community born out of slavery," Reese says. "The church was one of the first community buildings they built. By them being in slavery, they learned trades. Some were blacksmiths. My great-grandfather made bricks. They took the skills they learned in slavery and helped each other building log cabins."
~ Gwen Reese (2015), Sugarland elder & historian
As the Civil War ended, both white and Black county residents in the Poolesville area would have had to create a new life in a landscape scarred by war. Union occupation and Confederate raids left the land decimated, with woodlands and fences used for firewood, fields trampled, and livestock appropriated for food. Area residents would have mourned the loss of friends and family, and struggled to reconcile living near neighbors with whom they had so recently been at war.
Thousands of soldiers not required for occupation of Southern cities, or injured and discharged, traveled across the fords at Edward’s Ferry and White’s Ford near Poolesville on their way home. (The Crossroads of War and Freedom, Wallace, 2024)
Black families had to decide whether to join other newly emancipated Black travelers from Southern states who were passing through the area on their way to find freedom and opportunity. Should they walk miles to unknown places in search of employment and shelter, or should they stay in the community they knew, surrounded by extended family, friends, and potential employers, and to create a new life there?
White families who had used enslaved labor to create profit for themselves before emancipation now had to try to create a new labor force to keep their farms, mills, and other businesses afloat. To add to these challenges, some of Montgomery County’s white property owners lived outside the area, such as some of the landowners who sold property that formed Sugarland. (The Sugarland Ethnohistory Project and Sypeck 2020, p,24)
Possibly inspired in part by the thriving pre-war Black communities of Big Woods and Ephraim, some future Sugarland landowners remained in the area after Maryland Emancipation in November 1865, quietly working and saving money. Even before buying land for new homes, future Sugarland residents lived nearby, and land had been purchased for the future church.
In 1871, Patrick Hebron, Rezin Lynch and others bought land from local landowner, Jane Pleasants and her family. These 14 acres were the beginning of what would become a thriving community on 200 acres, with 40 Black families totalling about 100 residents – a large community for its time, already half the size of the neighboring town of Poolesville. The sale of fertile and well-drained land was unusual for land sales to Black buyers in Montgomery County, who usually were only offered rocky or poorly-drained land.
Early residents of Sugarland included former enslaved persons of white Poolesville families – the Allnutts, Pooles, and Brewers – but also included a Civil War veteran from Kentucky. (The Sugarland Ethnohistory Project and Sypeck 2020, p. 34) Both men and women were sold land, which was rare at a time when few women were able to purchase land.
The new residents -- the Johnsons, Diggs, Beckwiths, Adams, Garnetts, Jacksons, Hebrons, Dorseys and others -- quickly built two-room homes with sandstone foundations and log walls, sometimes living in the meantime with neighbors. Once shelter was created for multigenerational families, they would add a chicken coop, smokehouse, hog pen, fruit trees, and tilled land for corn, tomatoes, greens, and other vegetables. The families of Sugarland grew, hunted, fished, slaughtered, cooked, baked, canned, and smoked their own food. Trips to Poolesville were avoided, unless flour, sugar or animal feed were needed. Some residents also rented nearby farmland to raise crops for sale. (The Sugarland Ethnohistory Project and Sypeck 2020, p. 29)
Besides the work needed to build homes, outbuildings and food sources, young people and adults in the community worked as farm laborers at nearby farms. Some were servants of local households, or were stone cutters at the Seneca Quarry. The ruins of the old quarry are now 1-½ hours away by foot, but to save time laborers may have taken local trails on land now developed or overgrown, or possibly horse and cart.
In early years, most of the women stayed home to do the intensive work of keeping the house, such as handwashing laundry for large households, cooking, baking, cleaning, supervising babies and young children, sewing and mending, and tending large gardens, orchards, and flocks of chickens.
Over the years, some residents worked as preachers and midwives for their own community, or sat on the church committee that judged local disputes. Some worked as gardeners, laundresses, and cooks for local white families for cash income. Sugarland members may have used the Martinsburg community's blacksmith, and had a traveling dentist or barber.
As they worked to sustain their own families, they also made time to help each other. When they could, community members helped build each others’ homes, took care of each other’s children, picked and shared the apple harvest as a community, and shared food.
When I was a child coming up to visit my maternal roots, I just thought we were going to my grandfather’s house. I did not know that it was a whole town with a church and a school and a post office and a store – and all these people working together to promote their well-being and their families’ well-being.
~ Suzanne Johnson, President, the Sugarland Ethno-history Project
By 1900 Sugarland residents also built a church in 1872 – then after it was destroyed by fire, rebuilt in 1893 – a one-room schoolhouse in the late 1880s/early 1890s, and a community hall in the 1880s. The original schoolhouse was replaced in the late 1920s by the building shown in the photo below. The community also had a small store and a post office, both unusual for Black communities of the time. The original church burned in was replaced in 1893 by the current building.
Sugarland Community Hall and second school buiding.
Church was the center of community life. Families celebrated together at church services every Sunday and mourned together at homegoing (funeral) services. They sent their children to school at the church before the school building was erected, and held other community activities. As a Methodist church community, between the 1870s and 1960s Sugarland families would have attended camp meetings every August, which brought nearby church communities together for preaching, singing, good food and social time.
Today, although many descendants of Sugarland have moved away to Baltimore, D.C., or to other states, there remain many descendants of the original Sugarland founders in the area. Weddings and funerals are still held at St. Paul’s Community Church, and gospel songs ring across the fields nearby. Ancestors rest in the beautiful cemetery behind St. Paul Community Church, and are visited regularly by descendants honoring their lives and their passing. A dedicated board of directors cares for the church and grounds, and tours are given in spring through fall to educate people about the proud history of the community. And a homecoming every fall brings home descendants of Sugarland to celebrate their history with food, song, prayer, and community.
For more information, please see our interviews with Sugarland’s president, Suzanne Johnson on YouTube, and read their recently-published book about the historic community (links below).
YouTube, A History of a People: Sugarland, Food Self-Sufficiency: https://youtu.be/0N7yGY4F1mw
YouTube: MoCoLMP interviews Suzanne Johnson of the Sugarland historic Black community, Maryland https://youtu.be/r304wTx26lM
Photos by Neile Whitney.
References
Brown, DeNeen L. 2015. “Black Towns, Established By Freed Slaves, Are Dying Out.” Washington Post (Washington), April 04, 2015. https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/black-towns-established-by-freed-slaves-are-dying-out/
The Crossroads of War and Freedom and Edith B. Wallace. 2024. “Reconstructing the Region.” Crossroads of War. https://www.crossroadsofwar.org/discover-the-story/reconstructing-the-region#:~:text=Return%20of%20the%20Soldiers,the%20preservation%20of%20our%20liberties
Johnson, Suzanne. 2023. “MoCoLMP interviews Suzanne Johnson of Sugarland, Maryland.” Sugarland is a historic Black community in Montgomery County, MD. St. Paul Community Church, Poolesville, Maryland: Unpublished.
Johnson, Suzanne. 2023. “MoCoLMP interviews Suzanne Johnson of the Sugarland historic Black community, Maryland,” Full interview. In YouTube. At the unveiling of the historical marker for the 1880 lynching of Mr. George W. Peck, Poolesville, Maryland: Montgomery County Lynching Memorial Project. Video. https://youtu.be/r304wTx26lM
The Sugarland Ethnohistory Project and Jeff Sypeck. 2020. I Have Started for Canaan: The Story of the African-American Town of Sugarland. Maryland: The Sugarland Ethnohistory Project.
Sugarloaf Regional Trails. 1979. Black Historical Resources in Upper Western Montgomery County. Maryland: Sugarloaf Regional Trails.
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