The Patuxent River is the longest river flowing entirely within the borders of Maryland. It winds 110 miles from its source at Parr's Ridge in Carroll County, down past the fall line where it turns salty and tidal, broadening to three miles. At Drum Point in Calvert County, the Patuxent empties into the Chesapeake Bay.

Inhabited for thousands of years by Native Americans, from whose language the river's name derives, the Patuxent (Algonquian for "rapids") was one of the earliest waterways to be occupied by European and African immigrants in Maryland. While the history of whites on the river has been well documented, the lives of blacks are a story not so well known. One purpose of this guide to African-American heritage sites on the Lower Patuxent is to tell the story of how blacks maintained their culture and made notable achievements despite slavery and the other forms of repression they experienced. The other purpose is to encourage the adventurous to visit these sites as part of the Lower Patuxent River Water Trail.

Although blacks were beaten and suffered from different forms of cruel and unusual punishments, they maintained their identity during slavery. At one of the sites, an early colonial cemetery at Patuxent Point, the skeleton of a teenage African was discovered buried with a tobacco pipe in his hand, a carry-over from an African tradition of burying people with items important to them in life.

At Sotterley Plantation, a surviving slave cabin attests to the ability of African-Americans to maintain their African culture within the privacy of their abodes by cooking traditional foods, recounting stories about their ancestors, and generally keeping a sense of who they were, even though they were treated as property by whites, a practice that denied Africans their humanity.

Having sustained their dignity and identity during a slavery, African-Americans along the Patuxent accelerated their accomplishments after emancipation. For example, at Ben's Creek a group of former slaves built their own settlement from the ground up. They cleared the land of trees for their fields and home sites, and used the timber to build their houses. The Truman Slave Cabin at Patuxent River Park was built about 1880 by a former slave who was able to own his own property. While farm laboring was the most common occupation of Patuxent blacks, work in the river and in the oyster shucking house also provided a livelihood.

Though considered tedious work, oyster shucking along the Patuxent produced two black world-class champion oyster shuckers, who participated in international shucking contests in Ireland where international champions were usually white. These people took pride in the monotonous work they performed and did not set boundaries to what they were capable of doing.

At Camp Stanton, near the river town of Benedict, four regiments of U.S. Colored Troops were raised and trained for combat during the Civil War. Each unit went on to establish enviable service records in the later campaigns of the war, which liberated their brothers and sisters still in slavery. It was at Camp Stanton that African-American soldiers of the Union Army composed the black war anthem "They Look Like Men of War."

African-Americans' ability to maintain their identity helped them to persevere after facing discrimination. Blacks who were not welcomed at certain beaches due to segregation laws, just built their own community of summer homes at Eagle Harbor, a resort community especially for blacks. Also, Columbia Air Center, an airfield near the Patuxent River, was the first black-owned and operated airport in America. It started as a result of blacks that faced racism at other airports and therefore decided to start their own. White people living in Queen Anne's Town, also on the Patuxent, would not let African Americans live in their community. William Watkins, who has a black mother and a white father, moved into the community anyway. Eventually, Queen Anne's Town became a predominantly black community.

These sites along the Patuxent River show how blacks defined themselves against broader background discrimination by whites and maintained their dignity as human beings. Instead of submitting to the sense of inferiority whites wished to impose upon them, African Americans remained confident in their abilities to accomplish much for themselves. Each site along the Patuxent River Water Trail shows in its unique way how blacks persevered in the face of adversity.

• View a map of the Historic Sites.
  This map is an aerial view of the Patuxent River and is not meant to be used for navigation.
• Bibliography of research
• African American Slave Songs

Intern Deitrich Curry served as a research consultant for this project for the State Forest and Park Service during the summers of 2001 and 2002. A senior at Morgan State University majoring in English and Journalism, she write's for the university's newspaper and hopes to obtain a master's degree in Journalism after she graduates in May 2003.