Agriculture, Architecture, and the African American Cultural Experience in Kent County, Maryland 1870 – the Present
Agriculture, Architecture,
and the African American Cultural Experience
in Kent County, Maryland 1870 – the Present
An Exploration of Rural Black Life In Kent County, Maryland
By
Darius Johnson, Digital Justice Fellow and Community Curation Fellow - 2021
The Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience
The image shown is a picture of the old Ringgold home and a handwritten description. The house is small and old on a lot near a road. The description says "Second home of Joseph and Mary Stanley Ringgold in Big Woods, Maryland. The picture was taken after 1969 when Joseph C Ringgold, Sr. had died. The home originally had pig pens, a smoke house, chicken coops, an outhouse.
The Eastern Shore of Maryland is deeply rooted in farming culture. Whether produce, livestock, or Chesapeake Bay seafood, much of the area’s inhabitants have produced food commodities for generations. Yet, few scholars have focused a study on the relationships among agriculture, land acquisition, and wealth-building in the African American communities of Maryland’s prime farming region.
Darius Johnson, a descendant of the Jones and Johnson families who have farmed land, and constructed buildings and hardscapes across the Eastern Shore and Delmarva Peninsula for twenty shy of two hundred years, is devoting his professional career to identifying, studying, preserving, and enhancing the economic drivers for African Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries. While much American literature and some history depict the plight of rural African Americans as formerly enslaved and exploited labor and sharecroppers, Johnson’s research is demonstrating how Eastern Shore African American families empowered themselves to build wealth and strong communities through land acquisition and retention, and through building new structures or renovating existing buildings to meet community needs. Through his research of land records, family photos and oral histories in his “Farmhouse to Freedom” project, he has determined how property assets were passed from generation to generation in his family (Figures 1 and 2), and furthermore; how those assets have enabled his family to grow, sustain, and enjoy Eastern Shore living over time. By leveraging his family’s heritage as a case study, Johnson seeks to bring justice to rural Maryland communities that are losing their property and their living heritage due to gentrification of historically black settlements, migration of young families, and deterioration of significant black cultural heritage sites that have been overlooked or forgotten.
Darius has a deep affection and respect for the Eastern Shore’s countryside communities, such as Coleman and Big Woods in Kent County, Jonestown in Caroline County, and Bellevue in Talbot County. There has been an uprising of efforts to address housing and environmental issues in these communities, yet many initiatives have not taken care or time to understand the historical context of where those initiatives are meant to be implemented. The gentrification of more popular areas, like Chestertown in Kent County, is creeping into his ancestral communities that are still intact and sustained by black legacy families. He wants to raise awareness about the challenges of these communities, and raise the agency of black legacy families to advocate for the sustainability of their culture, their wealth, and their livelihood.
Darius is a graduate of Washington College, the third from the Johnson family (Joyell Johnson and Tamika Hall), with another cousin (Andraya Sudler–Tamika’s daughter) currently in her sophomore year. He studied Business Management as an undergraduate and now is a graduate student of historic preservation at Goucher College, where he is applying his business acumen and affinity for the built and natural environments, to explore how African Americans acquired land during Reconstruction and maintained or expanded their holdings during Jim Crow and into the present day. Both of these periods are frequently reduced to times when newly freed African Americans wandered aimlessly or remained fixed to their former plantation homes looking for work and sustenance. Johnson’s work shows an opposite experience - African Americans who share-cropped until they could purchase their own land and expand their commodities productions that enabled them to also acquire farmhouses and other buildings, These structures became central to rural African Americans communities as the sites of segregated schools, churches, and eventually businesses, and they enabled black families of the Eastern Shore’s countryside to enjoy their own version of rural prosperity.
Denise Gillis, Barry Johnson seated in the truck, and wife Deborah Jones Johnson, circa 1984 at the Jones Farm, Coleman, MD
Exposing hidden history like this has become Johnson’s principal mission and his current work as Digital Justice Fellow for Chesapeake Heartland: An African American Humanties Project, provides an empowering space, with an empowering team, to reconnect with his home and his heritage. His previous work as Executive Director of Kent Attainable Housing and Community Revitalization Project Manager/Communications Manager at Eastern Shore Land Conservancy brought about his recognition of a lack of historical context for the present day housing and land use issues in African American communities. His research into rural African American communities also began to expose an intricate web of multiple family connections, the originals of town names like Butlertown, Quaker Neck, Rock Hall, Big Woods, and Coleman, and cultural activities that made these areas vibrant. Thematic considerations of his work also revamps the typical coverage of rural communities. Far from lackluster forgotten areas, the Eastern Shore’s countryside communities illustrate positive experiences (Figure 3) of love, work, celebration, and recreation, reinforcing a positive narrative of black life outside treatment of the area as one of the earliest slave-holding states, with a black community that is assumed to disconnected from the natural landscape.
Darius Johnson's parents' marriage at the Jones Farmhouse in Coleman, MD. Circa 1983 Chesapeake Heartland Digital Archive.
Johnson’s work also seeks to expand the wider audience’s understanding of efforts to address contemporary housing, land use, and climate-based issues for African Americans communities. Just as current historical interpretations of the area tend to focus on slavery and famous persons like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Isaac Mason rather than those who remained here, Eastern Shore architectural history tends to focus on grand homes with easily identifiable styles rather than vernacular architecture that reflected and increased African American wealth and stability. A different view of African American populations depicts a transition from plantation-era farmhouses to Jim Walters (kit-homes), Sears prefabricated homes, and ranch-style houses built from the ground up by Johnson’s relatives (Roberts, Jones, Butlers, Dorseys, Thompsons, and Siscos) and other area residents, like the Freeman brothers of Butlertown who were the bricklayers primarily responsible for the brick-style ranchers that line Rt. 298, and the Livelys of Chesterville who were notable carpenters in the community.
Passed down through families, the new, vernacular homes represented economic mobility and accessibility and were a source of individual, family and community pride. Community members collectively built homes (Figures 4 and 5) using skills gained through farming and union labor (“up the line” in Delaware as many recall), reminiscent of barn-raising in other rural communities. These hard-won and proudly erected properties are now under threat due to struggling rural economies, tax delinquency, heirs’ property, and lack of interest in maintaining these properties by younger generations. Johnson hopes his work to amplify local black history and to preserve and enhance cultural heritage sites, will revive interest and agency that leads to sustainable black land holdings, and an increase in the participation of black families in preserving and celebrating their ancestral ties to the lands of the Eastern Shore.
(Left): Marvin Jones and a community member laying the brick facade for his new Jim Walter’s kit-home in Coleman, Maryland.
(Right): Community members and family helping Barry Johnson lay the brick facade for his new home in Big Woods, Maryland. Inspired by Jim Walters’ kit-homes and craftwork of the Freeman Brothers and Lively family.
Darius Johnson is the Digital Justice Fellow The Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. Additionally, Johnson is a Built Environment Scholar and Community Engagement Scholar at Goucher College, a Mildred Colodny Diversity Scholar with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and he is a Senior Fellow of the National Environmental Leadership Program. He is a champion of artifactual and history acquisition for the Chesapeake Heartland Digital Archives, a repository that explores the American experience in all its diversity and complexity, seeks creative approaches to illuminating the past, and inspires thoughtful conversation informed by history. Learn more about Darius here.