1655

Tucked deep into the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis, the oldest original documents of the state are stored in a controlled environment for safekeeping, preserving them for posterity. This page, drawn from court records dating to Maryland’s early colonial period, details a land transaction between the proprietary government and Joseph Wickes, one of Kent County’s first white settlers. Strikingly, it contains the first known recorded reference to people of African descent being brought into the county.

Most likely compiled in the last years of the 1650s, the entry into the court records documents the fifteen servants that Joseph Wickes transported into the colony between 1650 and 1657. In the year 1655, Wickes paid for the passage of “Ann Gold & A Negro” to his plantation on Kent Island. Maryland “headright” laws at the time granted planters a certain amount of acreage for each servant they transported to the colonies, and in compensation, Joseph Wickes was granted land “to be taken upon the Eastern necke against the upper part of Kent.”

At the time of Joseph Wickes’ death in 1692, his plantation on Eastern Neck Island was worked by nine enslaved people. Settlement of Kent County expanded quickly as lucrative tobacco agriculture proliferated. The Augustine Hermann map of Maryland, drawn little more than a decade after Joseph Wickes first landed on Eastern Neck, shows the explosion of plantations across virtually all of the county’s navigable waterways. With the economic benefits of indentured servitude beginning to give way, and the official legalization of racialized slavery by the colonial government in 1664, we can be sure that many of those farms were worked by men, women, and children of African descent held in bondage. Though most of their names have been lost and lives obscured in the following centuries, these first enslaved people and their descendants lived, and continue to live, in a land shaped by their toil for more than three and a half centuries.

-Jack Dodsworth

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