National Park Service Funds Will Support Historical and Archaeological Study of Rural Community in Calvert County
From Our Partners
The Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum (JPPM) and the Maryland Historical Trust (MHT), both divisions of the Maryland Department of Planning (Planning), announced last month receiving a $49,000 grant from the Department of Interior’s National Park Service Civil Rights grant program. The grant will support a historical and archaeological study of Calvert County’s Wallville community.
Following the Civil War, newly emancipated Black Marylanders found themselves negotiating a new world, one filled with both opportunities and constraints in southern Maryland, where freed families formed nearly half the population and yet struggled against efforts to perpetuate systems of labor.
JPPM’s “Witnesses of Wallville: Documenting a Rural Southern Maryland Community” project will, with the help of descendants, articulate the history through a focus on Wallville, exploring how the community’s residents crafted new lives as they confronted racism and bigotry into the mid-twentieth century.
Maryland Planning Blog 