Water Bound

Over the years, Black watermen interviewed about their long careers have often said there was no color at sea. While segregation prevailed on the land, things were more equal on the water. Anyone would help anyone else in trouble. 

That notion—that working the water historically has offered Maryland’s Black population a measure of economic and personal opportunity, if not equality—is at least partly true. On the one hand, watermen living near the Chesapeake Bay were close to tributaries rich in oysters, crabs, and fish, and they didn’t need to spend a lot to access the resource. 

Many watermen built their own boats, even selling basic skiffs to others, regardless of color. Harvesting shellfish and crabs from these small skiffs or from the shoreline was inexpensive and doable. And anyone could throw a line in the water and fish, whether to put food on the table or to sell the catch. The water seemed to be one of the few integrated workplaces in the segregated south, which included Maryland.

But laws and codes put in place throughout the 1800s to regulate the movement and lives of free African Americans complicates this narrative. As the demographics shifted over the century, with the numbers of enslaved people dwindling in Maryland and the numbers of free Black people steadily growing, white-dominated society and lawmakers began to impose restrictions to control a population that they saw as a threat.

As Maryland’s rural economy shifted from tobacco planting to grain and cereal crops, landowners needed less enslaved labor and began to either free those they enslaved or sell them south to cotton plantations. Shortly before the Civil War, Baltimore had the largest population of free Black citizens in the country. The Eastern Shore was following suit; between 1790 and 1860, the population grew exponentially. In Kent County alone, 58 percent of Black residents were free by 1860 compared to only 11 percent in 1790, according to Pat Nugent, deputy director of the Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.

“Across Maryland, white lawmakers began to pass laws to control and intimidate this growing number of free African Americans—to prevent rebellion and derail the Underground Railroad, but also to control and outcompete free Black entrepreneurs, including those who made their living on the water,” Nugent said.

Among the most wide-reaching of these were the State of Maryland’s Acts of 1831, Section 323. The Justices’ Practice Under the Laws of Maryland published in 1841 lays these out in a kind of legal handbook for local and regional officials. In most cases, the only legal way for a free Black person to conduct certain business in their daily lives was to have written permission from a “reputable” white person.

Free Black people could not meet for spiritual purposes unless the congregation was led by “a white licensed or ordained preacher, or some reputable white person or persons of the neighborhood,” according to the justices' book. They could not sell corn, wheat, or tobacco without a certificate, signed by a justice of the peace, averring that they were “peaceable and orderly…and of good character.” They could not sell bacon, pork, beef, or mutton without a similar certificate stating that the seller “came honestly and bona fide, into possession of any such article so offered for sale.”

Free Black people were forbidden from leaving the state and then returning without written consent of a white person in a position of authority “or at least three respectable white persons, known to be such by the justices” of the local court. These provisions did not extend “to any free black or mulatto, that may be engaged in navigating any ship, vessel or boat under a white commander.” 

If Black people returned within six months without such a document, they could be fined and jailed. If they couldn’t pay their charges within 20 days, a sheriff and two justices of the peace could “sell such person to serve for a period of time, not exceeding six calendar months.” Money earned would pay for commitment charges with any remainder reverting to the court.

Despite this web of restrictions in Maryland, Black entrepreneurs found a way to adapt and overcome, often by working the water or running a business associated with it.

Samuel Perkins’ son, William, was one of Kent County’s most affluent and successful Black entrepreneurs as owner of The Rising Sun Oyster Saloon in Chestertown, which operated from 1856 until the 1890s. An 1863 ad in the Kent County News noted that Perkins served “Oysters and Terrapins, & C. in all their various ways and in his usual excellent style, which he flatters himself, after thirty years’ experience, cannot be surpassed by any Caterer on the Shore.”

A leader in the local Black community, Perkins “became the first African-American Maryland delegate to a National Republican Convention and the Eastern Shore’s first African-American Federal grand juror,” wrote Davy McCall in  The Key to Old Kent, A Journal of Historical Society of Kent County  . “According to the census of 1870, he had a net worth of $10,000, making him one of the Eastern Shore’s wealthiest African Americans.”

However, another local seafood entrepreneur, Levi Rodgers, shows how the laws could quickly destroy a successful Black businessman. An enslaved man whose mother bought his freedom, Rodgers co-founded the Bethel A.M.E. Church with Cuff and others, and he bought property on Cannon Street from Cuff. From the 1840s until 1859, he owned the popular Cape May Oyster Saloon at the corner of Cannon and Front streets and was skipper of several schooners.

But in 1859, he was charged with illegally returning to Maryland without the requisite white, written permission after sailing a shipment of lumber to Philadelphia. He was convicted and ended up losing his business; ultimately, he moved to Delaware. 

Rodgers’ story was unearthed in Kent County Courthouse records by faculty and students at Washington College as part of Chesapeake Heartland: An African American Humanities Project—a partnership with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History seeking to gather and digitize untold stories of the Black experience in the Chesapeake Bay.

Nugent, who is helping lead Chesapeake Heartland, noted that the historical record doesn’t necessarily clarify why Rodgers would have been arrested and tried after many years of success.

“That’s exactly what made the Black codes so powerful and so malicious,” he said. “They allowed for free African Americans to operate a business as long as it served white interests, but the second a white competitor felt threatened by a Black entrepreneur, he or she could pull that lever with catastrophic consequences.”

In her  Key to Old Kent  article “ ‘A Liberal Share of Public Patronage’: Chestertown’s Antebellum Black Businesses,” Lucy Maddox cited Mark Kurlanky’s The Big Oyster noting that “In the first half of the nineteenth century, it was widely accepted in New York that oyster cellars, like dance halls and many taverns, were run by blacks.” The same was true in Chestertown, Maddox said: “Before mid-century, in Chestertown, as in such oyster-eating cities as New York, the selling of oysters had become almost entirely a black enterprise.”

That business was booming for seafood entrepreneurs like Perkins and Rodgers didn’t sit well with their white competitors. An April 1866 letter in the Chestertown Transcript notes that, “Oyster Saloons are usually kept by ‘colored citizens,’ whom the destructives and political abolitionists have attempted to place on a footing with the white man…under these circumstances, should not the white race endeavor to encourage their own, and especially in a matter which is so palpably proper, and almost essential, to the continuance of good Hotels?”

The letter reveals, Maddox said, “how well-established African American saloon keepers had become in Chestertown by the 1860s and how well they had succeeded in catering to a clientele of blacks and whites, visitors and local people.”

Oysters and restrictive laws in Maryland also played roles in the wholesale migration of a group of Black families from the Snow Hill area in Worcester County to a new community called Sandy Ground on Staten Island. Founded in 1828, a year after New York abolished slavery, Sandy Ground is known to be the oldest continuously inhabited free Black settlement in the United States. In 1982 it was added to the National Register of Historic Places, and in 2011 the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated several of its remaining buildings, including the Rossville A.M.E. Zion Church, as New York City landmarks.

Creston Long, director of Salisbury University’s Nabb Research Center for Delmarva History and Culture, analyzed census data for this story along with his research assistant, T. Aaron Horner, and they have uncovered new, more detailed information about the Snow Hill exodus.

“Many members of these families appear to have worked as general laborers, likely in agriculture, while they lived in Maryland,” Long said, “but after settling in Staten Island, many turned to the waters surrounding Staten Island as oystermen or in other maritime pursuits.”

For instance, Edward Hinman moved to Sandy Ground in his late 20s and worked as a laborer, but by his 40s he was an oysterman. His son, George Hinman, born in the early 1850s, worked with his father. Charles Bishop emigrated with his family and began as a laborer, but soon also became an oysterman. Reverend Minny Purnell moved north in the 1850s and turned to oystering in middle age. Minny likely worked the water alongside his son, William. By the late 1870s, George and Horace Purnell were also living on Staten Island and oystering. 

It was the largest fishery in the bay until around 1915, when pollution hastened its decline, MacKenzie noted. The fishery began relying on Chesapeake Bay seed oysters in 1825, taking oysters from fertile beds in the Chesapeake and planting them in Raritan Bay. (The bay’s natural oyster beds were depleted by the early 1800s, MacKenzie said, likely due to overfishing and becoming silted over with sediment runoff from the Colonial era’s widespread deforestation for agriculture.)

“A substantial number of schooners and some sloops” moved between the bays, according to MacKenzie. “A typical schooner carried about 3,000 bushels of [seed] oysters, which filled about 4 acres of bay bottom, i.e., 750 bushels an acre. The oysters were left to grow from spring to fall-winter and then marketed.” He noted that in the late 1800s and early 1900s, about 50 oystermen worked out of Lemon Creek in Prince’s Bay.

Yvonne Taylor, a descendant of one of the earliest Sandy Ground families, grew up living with her grandmother in the Coleman House, now the community’s oldest remaining home. A founding member and first president of the Sandy Ground Historical Society, she described in a 2015 oral history how her grandfather came to Sandy Ground “because of so many repressive laws enacted in Maryland at that time.” She keeps a picture of his identification card from when he was in the oyster industry. 

“Some of them could no longer engage in the trade they had been doing all their lives and they had to look for employment in other areas,” she said. “They used to occasionally come up the coast and they used to do the digging of the oysters in the beds in Prince’s Bay. So they were aware of the fact that the oyster industry in this area was really quite a thriving industry. So many of them decided that they were going to leave their homes and move north…this is what my grandfather did.” 

In 1943, the Staten Island Historian published a Sandy Ground history by Minna Wilkins, who held a doctorate in psychology from Columbia University and interviewed older residents as a longtime genealogy volunteer with the Staten Island Historical Society. She quoted The Free Negro in Maryland 1634–1860 by James M. Wright: “From Worcester County it was reported that Free Negro participation had become an injury to the oyster business…accordingly, in 1852 Negros engaged in the oyster industry were especially restricted.” 

Wilkins also described the routine arrival in Prince’s Bay of Chesapeake Bay schooners loaded with seed oysters. “Many of the sloops owned by white men of Maryland were captained and manned by Negroes, so that there is no doubt that [the] Free Negroes of Snow Hill were somewhat familiar with Staten Island.”

The influx of the Maryland families and the thriving oyster fishery solidified the fledgling community, which grew over time to a close-knit enclave of 180 families, two churches, and two schools. By the late 1800s, however, human pathogens and shoreside industry were polluting the bay. In the early 1900s, reports of Raritan Bay oysters making people sick damaged the industry. By 1925, MacKenzie wrote, bad press forced a permanent closure.

The oystermen had to find other work, said Sylvia D’Alessandro, a founding member and former president of the Sandy Ground Historical Society and a seventh-generation descendant of Moses Harris, a community founder. The community dissolved slowly and then suffered a severe blow in 1963, when an uncontrolled brushfire destroyed 100 homes on Staten Island, 25 of them in Sandy Ground. Since then, redevelopment of the entire area has changed it completely.

Only about 10 homes remain, and about eight families who descend from the earliest residents.

It’s also a testament to the resilience and ambition of the Snow Hill natives, as well as that of other free Black Marylanders who drew strength from the water despite the array of obstacles before them, said Nugent, whose forthcoming book, The Greenlining of Staten Island, will feature a chapter on Sandy Ground. 

“Like so much African American history across our nation, the story of Sandy Ground traces its roots back to the Eastern Shore,” Nugent said. “It’s a story of systemic oppression and undeniable resilience, of deep local knowledge and migration to new terrain. It’s a story that should make all of us look back on this place’s history with a deep pride for those who overcame great odds and a deep commitment to better understanding how race and racism was forged on these shores.”