Working freedom: Black farmers building industrious landscapes in Maryland, 1814-1880

Abstract

This article studies the industrious strategies that Black farmers in Maryland’s Piedmont pursued before and after the Civil War and the resultant landscapes they created. An examination of antebellum landholdings, demographic patterns, and agricultural production trends demonstrate how free Black farmers leveraged ‘next to nothing’ to provide the foundations of the county’s Black industrious landscapes. In the years immediately following emancipation, additional Black land acquisitions had an importance that was out of scale to their relative paucity: an individual farm could help establish a new settlement. Analysis of agricultural census data, along with investigations of small-scale landscape features such as outbuildings, gardens, and orchards, shows how expanded household production remained a key strategy in the 1870s and 1880s. Black industriousness shaped homesteads, farms, and villages, and Black farming families created distinctive landscapes that endured well into the twentieth century. By embracing the industrious revolution, Black farmers established places of sanctuary and opportunity, in the midst of white hostility. Though these vital places have nearly disappeared from modern maps, Maryland’s Black industrious landscapes matter because they reveal Black farmers were responsible for extending the industrious revolution as it began to fade in other places and for other groups.