Chesapeake Heartland Highlights - Fall Semester 2025

Chesapeake Heartland Highlights - Fall Semester 2025

by Melissa Prunty Kemp

COLLECTIONS ACQUISITIONS

A bounty of artifacts, multimedia and ephemera was provided by our donors for digitization and inclusion in the Digital Archives. The digitization team worked to process two sizable documents and scrapbook collections.  The former will preserve the establishment documents and restoration plans of Sumner Hall. The latter will increase our knowledge of local histories of Easton and Talbot County.  The Heartland Archives have also received a collection from the Bellevue Museum that has produced early documentation of the 1950s NAACP in Easton.

More than two thousand pages of documents and blueprints that document the establishment of the Sumner Hall, one of only two African American Grand Army of the Republic Halls left standing in the United States. The Starr Center was provided with an exceptional collection of blueprints and over 300 images of the building’s renovation. 

The significance of Sumner Hall building and organization is evidenced by their recent designation to National Park Service’s Reconstruction Era National Historic Network and their receipt of Preservation Maryland’s 2025 Stewardship Award. Our team is simultaneously conducting oral histories and preserving documents to ensure that people near and far can learn about the resilience, triumph, and excellence that led to Sumner Hall’s restoration; as well as the history that has shaped the national treasure for over a century

An Image of Sumner Hall on Queens Street in its overgrown state prior to its renovation.

The Perry and Clara Anderson Collection continues to grow with the addition of a portrait of the couple, likely outside their home, perhaps on a Sunday or on one of their many trips to visit friends and relatives between Still Pond, MD, and Philadelphia, PA.  New artifacts that will be added the the Digital Archives are several photos and news clippings, the church register of the Mt. Zion Methodist Church in Still Pond, MD, and the minutes of The Methodist Men, a religious collaborative among area pastors and methodists men in and around Still Pond. Our donor, Ms. Karen Somerville, who has richly contributed to our archives.  These donations strengthen the breadth and depth of the Heartland’s Kent County collections.

The Starr Center’s work to expand its mission into neighboring counties has brought extensive collections to our digitization team for processing.  We have been partnering with the Kennard African American Cultural Heritage Center to digitize their schoolroom collection of artifacts from the 1940s and their Black Watermen collection of scrapbooks, photographs, and the most precious of all  - Black Captains of the Chesapeake (2003), directed by Professor S. Toriano Berry and narrated by the late and last Admiral of the Chesapeake, Vincent Omar Leggett.  The Kennard collections solidify our collaboration with our friends in Queen Anne’s County to preserve its African American history.

Our Heartland directors and community curators, Carolyn Brooks and Airlee Ringgold Johnson, are tireless in their travels to share the Heartland message and create in-roads that are leading to African American Community collections from and Talbot counties.  Four photo albums and scrapbooks that contain images of St. Michaels, and three brochures - Pub (1958) that advertises entertainment venues and entertainers of the period; and two NAACP brochures of the chapter in for Easton, MD. Also among the artifacts of this collection is a valuable 1960s example of a Souvenir Folder of Montreal Canada.

The future Bellevue Museum collection is a compilation of ephemera nearly discarded were it not for the preservation efforts of former St. Michael’s police chief, Anthony Smith. Thanks to a conversation with our Heartland director Darius Johnson after a Heartland Team visit to the St. Michael’s Community Conservation on Race earlier this year, Chief Smith remembered he had rescued the documents from a house his son had purchased to renovate. Such precious contents will now become part of the monument to the area that will become the Bellevue Museum.

The Chesapeake Heartland team was present for and are making in-roads in Trappe.  Big Blue - the Humanities Truck and Starr Center ambassadors attended and displayed at the Nace’s Day Celebration in honor of Civil War veteran and formerly enslaved Nathaniel “Uncle Nace” Hopkins, who would founded the school and several area organizations.

PICTURED L. to R. : Kim Andrews, Airlee Ringgold Johnson, Jaelon Moaney, Niambi Brown Davis, Ellen McDonald.

Heartland directors and community curators attending the Mace’s Lane Alumni Association gathering at the Trappe Boy’s and Girl’s Club to introduce our mission and support their historical preservation plans. The future Bellevue Museum will include artifacts the tell the story of the historically Black maritime community across themes of labor, entrepreneurship, civic life, and military service. We’re working with them through a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources to preserve and make this history accessible to the public, as the community itself strives to endure against development pressures. The future Bellevue Museum contributions and our connections to the Mace’s Lane High School Alumni Association strengthen our engagement and collection efforts in Talbot County.

From left to right: Carolyn Brooks and Airlee Ringgold Johnson, Chesapeake Heartland Community Historians; Ty Farrow, Mace's Lane Community Center Project Manager; Rev. Kieth Cornish, Mace's Lane Community Center Board of Directors President; Mrs. Linda Henry, Mace's Lane Community Center Board of Directors Secretary or Mrs. Marion Fisher Mace's Lane Community Center Board of Directors Member (*awaiting confirmation); Mr. William Jarmon Mace's Lane Community Center Board of Directors Member and Harriet Tubman Museum and Educational Center Director, and Jaelon Moaney, Deputy Director, The Starr Center at Washington College

Now, with the influx of a bounty of artifacts from our collaborative partners, the digitization team and student interns will engage in the digitization process throughout the Spring 2026 semester. Heartland team appearances and the collections entrusted to us for digitization represent the Starr Center’s success in its mission of partnership with our neighboring counties to document the African American experience on the Eastern Shore.

BY THE NUMBERS

These data pictorial representations denote current statistics for activities from June through December 2025.

The digitization team has been presented with a bounty of artifacts to digitize and ingest into the Chesapeake Heartland Digital Archives. We have received at least five collections of images totaling more than 500 each.  The largest content has come from Sumner Hall with its establishment papers collection. 

The Kennard African American Cultural Heritage Center contributed the next largest collection of artifacts that included scrapbooks created in the 1930s and 1940s, examples of schoolwork from this period, and video, photographs and documents that records the life and times of Black watermen and Admirals of the Chesapeake. 

The team is working to digitize, convert and ingest these artifacts into the Digital Archives. They will populate the archives and be configured into exciting and focused exhibits, project entries, featured collections and blog posts that will add interpretation to the content we collect.