c. 1897 image of a tenant farmer woman outside the Quarters of the Enslaved.
NPS
TRACING LIVES IN SLAVERY:
RECLAIMING FAMILIES IN FREEDOM
AN ETHNOGRAPHIC SOLUTION TO A HISTORICAL PROBLEM
Ethnographic Overview and Assessment Report
Hampton National Historic Site
Towson, MD (2020)
For more than 70 years that Hampton has been a National Historic Site, the lives, families, and labors of the people who were enslaved there had not been thoroughly researched. Finally, in 2017, the National Park Service funded a multi-year “Ethnographic Overview and Assessment,” a study which focused on the personal stories of enslaved individuals emancipated from Hampton. This work discovered their livelihoods in freedom and identified their family members and generations of descendants, including hundreds of people living today in communities across multiple states.
This project originally focused on tracing the legacy of the enslaved people who were either immediately or gradually manumitted, or set free, by the terms of the 1829 will of Charles Carnan Ridgely. The 15th governor of the state of Maryland, Ridgley was the proprietor of the 25,000-acre Hampton Plantation where hundreds of people were enslaved. The project’s principal investigator sought approval to include a broader discussion of chattel slavery and forced labor at Hampton. The expanded narrative includes information about people enslaved by Governor Ridgely’s son John who actively sought their freedom and or were freed by Maryland’s general emancipation in 1864. Additional studies examined the key neighborhoods providing refuge and new beginnings in the Baltimore area and beyond.
This study is a collection of eight essays resulting from the multi-year Ethnographic Overview and Assessment that was researched and written by the multidisciplinary team headed by anthropologist and author Dr. Cheryl LaRoche of the University of Maryland.
The report also emphasizes the intricacies and hurdles of the research process, which relied mainly on genealogical, ethnographic, and cartographic methods. Principal Investigator Dr. LaRoche and the EOA team built on the primary source records and data from those records compiled by historian Dr. R. Kent Lancaster in the 1990s and contextualized by the Hampton NHS Historic Resource Study, On the Border of Freedom and Slavery: The Hampton Plantation, the Northampton Ironworks, and the Transformation of Labor (2014) by Robert Chase and Elizabeth Comer. Through an expansion of previous research protocols, the team explored a variety of documentary resources, family sources, oral histories, and research methods to uncover crucial information. The knowledge gained from this study is being incorporated into enhanced interpretation, programming, and exhibits for the public at Hampton National Historic Site.
