Tobytown (near Travilah), Maryland

Tobytown is an African American community located not far from the Potomac River and Lockhouse 22 along the C&O Canal, about ten miles northwest of the Washington, DC Beltway. Oral history maintains that Tobytown was founded by three emancipated African Americans – William Davis, Elsie Martin, and Emory Genies (or Genus) – and named for Tobias Martin, the name of Elsie Martin’s husband, son, and grandson. However, the details are not clear. The first land purchase by any of these families was in March 1875, when William Davis bought 4 acres of land for $80 from John and Susan Rowzee, absentee white landowners. But the 1870 US census suggests that Tobytown, as a distinctly Black community, is at least a bit older. The census shows a concentration of seven African American households near the Brighton post office in the Rockville District, including those of William Davis, Tobias Martin, and Emory Genies. Presumably, these early Tobytown residents already lived on land that they bought in the mid-1870s.

An 1879 map of Darnestown District, MD. Circled are the plots of the three Reconstruction Era African American family surnames--Genies, Davis, and Martin--that are believed to have founded Tobytown.

Library of Congress

Finding Success

By the 1890s, Tobytown had its own school and church. In 1884, the Martin family dedicated a parcel of land for a meeting house. The building erected that year was one of a few houses of worship in this part of Montgomery County for African American Baptists. After 1887, the church doubled as a schoolhouse. The nineteenth-century building was destroyed by a fire and rebuilt in 1917, at which time it was called the Refugee Church of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Tobytowners prospered through the early twentieth century. William Davis, one of the early founders of the community, expanded his land holdings from his original 4-acre parcel to 93 acres by the 1900s. Because Tobytown was an agricultural community, most of the inhabitants worked as farmers or farmhands. Tobytown residents tended their own fields, orchards, and truck gardens and worked seasonally for white neighbors. George Pennyfield operated a general store in the C&O Canal lockhouse at Lock 22 that supported the nearby Tobytown residents with goods they couldn’t raise themselves. Tobytown was a kinship community in which members of a few families passed down land from generation to generation.

Typical Tobytown House, ca. 1965. These houses were eventually torn down when the community was sentenced to redevelopment after the local press made Tobytown out to be impoverished and unsanitary.

Used with Permission. Courtesy Montgomery History

Urban Renewal Stamps Out Tobytown

Starting in the 1940s, suburbanization in Montgomery County encroached on farmland in the Darnestown area, and the demand for agricultural labor decreased. Rural Black communities like Tobytown suffered from lack of public investment and services and increasing isolation. Tobytown received nationwide attention in the late 1960s and early 1970s, during the height of the Civil Rights movement. In that period government officials favored what they called “urban renewal,” which often involved tearing down old buildings for redevelopment. Starting in January 1965, journalists, a film crew, and Montgomery County public officials descended on Tobytown, which was declared a pocket of poverty in an otherwise affluent county. Tobytown was painted as unsanitary when the Montgomery County Health Department issued a citation to the community members, setting deadlines for Tobytowners to provide 16 new privies, sink three wells, and remove accumulated trash. Tobytown’s housing (which lacked central heating, electricity, and indoor plumbing) was deemed substandard. Unlike other post-emancipation Black communities in the region, Tobytown’s nineteenth-century houses were small, one-story buildings with one to three bedrooms; of the 15 houses extant in Tobytown by 1960, only one had two stories. This condemnation of Tobytown in the press set the stage for legal condemnation and urban renewal, which obliterated the historic buildings during redevelopment of the community between 1967 and 1972. Only the historical cemetery remains.

Tobytowners received new and improved housing, but they no longer owned their own homes or the land on which the houses were built. The county owned both. It took a decade for the first Tobytown resident to pay enough equity to receive the title to his townhouse unit. Tobytown can be considered a model example of how rural African Americans were severed from their historical land ownership. Tobytown emerged in the Reconstruction era as a self-sufficient, rural enclave that positively signaled African Americans’ recently won freedoms and ability to own land and accumulate wealth. But as the nineteenth century progressed and the freedoms and rights won by African Americans during the Reconstruction era were gradually eroded, isolation became imposed from the outside. This isolation and lack of services continued to disadvantage African Americans through the twentieth century.

Information in this article comes from the National Park Service Historic Resource Study: African American Communities Along the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, by Heather McMahon. Produced by the National Park Service and WSP USA Inc., 2022.

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Sources

1. American University Museum, Project Space. “Plans to Prosper You: Reflections of Black Resistance and Resilience in Montgomery County’s Potomac River Valley” [exhibition catalog]. Washington, DC: American University Museum, 2019.
2. Clare Lise Cavicchi, “Tobytown Cemetery,” Montgomery County, Maryland, Maryland Historical Trust Inventory Form for State Historic Sites Survey (Annapolis: Maryland Historical Trust, 1994, accessed 9 November 2021, https://mht.maryland.gov/secure/medusa/PDF/Montgomery/M;%2025-14.pdf).
3. Griffith Morgan Hopkins, Jr. Atlas of fifteen miles around Washington, including the county of Montgomery, Maryland. Philadelphia: G.M. Hopkins, 1879. Map. Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/87675339/.
4. Jesse W. Lewis, Jr., “Toby Town: Hope is Long Gone, and Talk Dulls Its Memory, in a Pocket of Misery Festering in Suburbia’s Affluence,” The Washington Post, 21 March 1965.
5. Clare Lise Kelly, Places from the Past: The Tradition of Gardez Bien in Montgomery County, Maryland, 10th Anniversary Edition. Silver Spring, MD: Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, 2011.