This is a dispatch from deep within the enforced social distancing imposed by the 2020 coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

In 2006, a Montgomery County, Maryland, homeowner placed a chain across an unnamed and unsurfaced road to restrict access to her subdivision. Known locally as “Farm Road,” the narrow corridor provided access to a small African American community settled during Reconstruction. The Farm Road case became the latest example in the suburban Washington, D.C., county of more than a million people where whites have closed off roads leading to Black homes.

Though Farm Road has received a lot of attention since 2006, the other cases of exclusionary enclosure in Montgomery County are less well known. This post explores a few other examples that antedate Farm Road.

The Hyson homestead in the Burnt Mills part of Silver Spring and the Jackson family driveway fence are two known precedents that likely represent a much larger sample of episodes where white folks erected barriers to Black spaces. I learned about these two examples during interviews about African American hamlets that I conducted between 2016 and 2018. This post is derived from those interviews and from the limited documentary evidence that survives.

Hyson homestead, Burnt Mills (Silver Spring)

In April 1920, Charles “Charley” S. Hyson (1884-1968) bought a little over three acres of farmland overlooking the Northwest Branch near Burnt Mills. Hyson was born in the Wheaton Lane community, a Reconstruction-era African American hamlet east of Wheaton. His family had been in the Washington, D.C., area since the Civil War. In the 1870s, family members bought land in the District of Columbia’s Broad Branch Road area; Wheaton Lane; and, an area along today’s Grubb Road straddling the D.C. and Montgomery County line.

Charles Hyson’s Burnt Mills land had been owned since 1917 by Robert L. and Sue H.Waters, residents of the District of Columbia. One year before Hyson bought his parcel, the Waters’s sold another African American, Matthew W. Kelly, 3 1/4 acres. The Hysons and Kellys had been neighbors in Wheaton Lane. The deeds to both the Hyson and Kelly parcels included a “right of way to the Washington, Colesville and Ashton Turnpike” (now U.S. 29/Columbia Pike.

In the late 1920s, after the creation of the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning commission (M-NPPC), the new agency began acquiring land to create a new park using the Northwest Branch of the Anacostia River as its spine. The Northwest Branch Park connected with an existing park in neighboring Washington, D.C.

The Maryland legislature passed a law in 1954 authorizing the expansion of Northwest Branch Park through the purchase of additional parcels. The agency began buying properties to expand the park northwards. Among the parcels purchased in 1956 were 10.4 acres acquired from Martha Wheeler and Matthew W. Kelly’s property.

One of Charles Hyson’s relatives recalled growing up there. Dorothy [I am only using her first name to protect her privacy] was born in 1927 and she said there were no streets when she was young and that they simply called the area “Burnt Mills.” Though there was a larger African American community a little farther up U.S. Route 29, only two Black families lived in Burnt Mills after 1920.

“There used to be a store there called Gittings. And we had property running back behind that, all the way around. People, because white people lived where we lived,” Dorothy explained in 2018. “There was only two black families living back in there. There was the Hysons and the Kellys.”

Before the Hysons and Kellys moved to Burnt Mills, there were several families living in the hills near the Northwest branch. Though no comprehensive history of African American communities in this area exists, newspaper articles published in the years bracketing the turn of the twentieth century describe the residents. And, about 1.25 mile to the north, Montgomery County had established the Burnt Mills Colored School (187-1937). After the Burnt Mills school closed, Dorothy remembers attending the Smithville School, about 3.5 miles to the north.

Dorothy explained that her family was able to escape much of the racism that permeated Montgomery County during the Jim Crow era because of their isolation. “We had no problems at Burnt Mills,” she said. In fact her family’s home was so isolated that it appears that census takers in 1940 didn’t go up in the hills to count them and the Kelly family.

The 1950s expansion of the Northwest Branch Park stands out in Dorothy’s mind. Though there’s nothing left of the homestead, family members continue to drive through Burnt Mills on U.S. 29. “You can ride through there now, you would never know it,” Dorothy said. A relative, also interviewed that day in 2018, added, “I know. Every time I go past there, like my mom used to say —.”

Nineteen fifty-six was a difficult year for the Hysons:

When Park and Planning came in and they bought property from Mr. Wheeler, that’s a white man that had all that farm over there. And when they did that, they closed my grandfather’s property where he was using that road coming to his place.

So they closed him off, Park and Planning did, so we couldn’t get in.

Dorothy added,

To my grandfather’s place. So then my grandfather went and told them, he said you can’t block me off without getting in. So then nobody didn’t give him no answer so then the people I worked for was a lawyer so they went to Rockville and they got it all straight for me.

So they didn’t charge us nothing and they went up there and got it found out how come — then they made us in, then Park and Planning came in and another way down by Ella’s house, went on around side that place, because see they had bought that too. So they had my grandfather blocked in because see they had bought the end where the roadway used to come in and then they went and bought the Kellys property so therefore he had no way to be getting in and out. So they came and made it in another way. So they did, they made another way for him to come in.

Ella Redfield, also present during the 2018 interview had grown up in Wheaton Lane. Rev. Redfield had introduced me to Dorothy and her kin during my research in African American hamlets in lower Montgomery County. After Dorothy described the case involving the Parks Department blocking her family’s access, Redfield chimed in: “This sounds similar to the situation up here in Sandy Spring area,” the Farm Road case.

Despite the encroachment by a new subdivision to the east and the park on all the other sides, the Hysons remained in their home until 1972. Charles Hyson had died in 1968 and his heirs inherited the property, which they sold to Montgomery County December 6, 1972.

Jackson Family Driveway, Lyttonsville (Silver Spring)

In 1967 racial tensions in Lyttonsville came to a head when a family identified in newspapers as the “Jacksons” tore down a fence with a locked gate that had been placed across a driveway the family used to access their home from Brookville Road, a public right-of-way.

The driveway traversed property owned by Rebecca Keys Pearson and her husband, Stanley. Rebecca had inherited the land from her father, Enos C. Keys, a fuel and building supplies entrepreneur. The Jacksons asserted their rights to use the driveway as a prescriptive easement —use rights created by longterm use by a non-owner.

According to a November 1967 newspaper article, “When the fence went up, a key was presented to the Jacksons.” The Jacksons’ attorney advised them to not accept the key because doing so would invalidate their rights under laws governing prescriptive easements.

The Pearsons claimed that the driveway made developing or selling the property impossible. They offered the Jacksons $1 per square foot, yet a reporter for the Montgomery Sentinel wrote that the land, which was zoned industrial, was going for $2.24 to $3.00 per square foot.

There were several Jacksons who lived in Lyttonsville; they don’t appear to have been landowners, though. No first names were used in the 1967 article documenting the fence episode, yet a “Russell Jackson” is named in a 1970s community history. Ancestry.com has a scan of Russell Maxwell Jackson’s World War II draft card. According to the document he was born in 1909 and was employed by E.C. Keys.

The 1967 fence episode was fresh in Lyttonsville resident Charlotte Coffield’s memory in a 2017 interview. While she was describing items in her clipping file, she came to a photocopy with a pair of women standing in front of a frame vernacular home and a high-rise apartment building (Claridge House) in the background.

“Now this one here is at the corner of Kansas Avenue behind Friendly Gardens, the road went back down through there and that was the area called ‘Down in the Woods’,” Coffield said. She added,

E.C. Keys’ daughter did that and put a padlock on it so that the people could not drive down to their homes. So they’d come home with groceries in the car, how were they going to get them — you’d bring things in your car and you can’t get to your house.

So the attorney that they finally got said, told them, said, “Tear down the fence and throw away the damn key.”

Neither the Washington Evening Star nor the Washington Post reported on the contested fence. The surviving newspaper clippings in Coffield’s collection and in the files of the Montgomery County Historical Society do not detail what happened after the initial November 1967 episode. Rebecca Pierson Keys died in 1971 and property was sold in **.

The Bigger Picture

Collectively, these cases are a lens through which anti-Black racism may be viewed. James Loewen has written eloquently about these structures in his 2005 book, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. In his 2005 book, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, historian Kevin Kruse described barriers in Atlanta, Georgia, that were erected during the civil rights era. In neighboring Decatur, a city that abuts Atlanta’s eastern boundary, brick walls were built to separate historically white space from historically Black space.

Structures like these are a stark reminder of segregation and the effort to maintain physical and social distance at the intersection of Black and white space. They appear throughout the United States, in the Deep South, the Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest. In the age of the coronavirus — 2020 — these efforts to enforce social distancing to save lives stand in contrast to earlier social distancing initiatives meant to destroy lives.

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

 

 

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