Goucher College to memorialize enslaved persons, indigenous tribes who lived where campus now stands

Goucher College unveiled plans Friday to honor the enslaved peoples and displaced tribes who once inhabited the land where the college now resides.

In 2018, the college started examining its history in East Towson, an effort that became the Hallowed Ground Project. Goucher students and faculty, archivists, and descendants of enslaved families and members of indigenous tribes who lived on the land met Friday at Goucher’s Descendant Engagement Symposium to share research updates.

“It was very exciting to bring folks together who are doing similar work in other places to share what we’re working on and consult on the complexities,” said Elaine Meyer-Lee, Goucher’s provost and senior vice president of academic affairs, the department that oversees the project.

The initiative seeks “to honor all the histories, all the different people who have lived on the landscape that have not been fully understood and honored in the past,” Meyer-Lee said.

Goucher purchased land in 1921 that was once part of the former Maryland Gov. Charles Carnan Ridgely’s sprawling Epsom Plantation in Hampton, where at least 340 people were enslaved and worked on the farm and in ironworks.

In his will, Ridgely gave a portion of his 25,000-acre land to his daughter Harriet and her husband, Henry B. Chew, along with 18 enslaved people. The plantation was the second-largest in the state. The Chews owned it from 1829 until 1867, three years after Maryland outlawed slavery.

Descendants of the Chew family sold 421 acres to Goucher to move the school’s campus from Baltimore to Baltimore County, Meyer-Lee said. The National Park Service preserved Ridgely’s mansion and slave quarters as a National Historic Site.

Ridgely, who died in 1829, also freed some of the people he enslaved as part of his will. Those freed individuals created a historic free Black community in East Towson where descendants still live.

Research students and faculty are working with the Hampton National Historic Site and the Northeast Towson Improvement Association to identify more enslaved persons and tell their life stories. They also aim to connect with their descendants.

“While we have identified most of their first names, it is much more difficult to identify surnames and specific descendants,” Meyer-Lee said.

The project’s next goal is to create a multi-stage memorial for the lives of enslaved people and indigenous tribes who lived on the land. Project members, led by Goucher archivist Debbie Harner, are collecting feedback from descendants and the college community.

They plan to post historical signs on campus and design an exhibit providing the latest research updates. The exhibit is scheduled to open this fall.

Last year, Goucher opened a library exhibit highlighting how it developed a land acknowledgment statement in 2022 that honors the Susquehannock Tribe, who lived on the land that became its campus before colonists displaced them.

The college is one of several Maryland higher education institutions that joined Univeristies Studying Slavery, an international consortium of more than 100 institutions reckoning with their connections to slavery.