Sugarland

    The first tobacco planters in the Washington DC area lived in what is now Prince George's County, Maryland. They later moved west, but since they needed to be close to a river if they were to send the tobacco to England and since the last port for that with access to the sea was Georgetown, they never got much farther west than the Sugarland area of Montgomery County.  It supposedly got its name from the sugar maple trees, and, lying between the Seneca and Monocacy Rivers, it had a rich soil.  Yet the tobacco wore out the soil, and so slavery, which was largely the product of a tobacco economy, began to wane.  The result was a series of small black communities that were dropped along the Potomac River. They trace the westward movement, and failure, of tobacco.  Today was Heritage Day in Montgomery County, and I went to the historic church at Sugarland that was built by one such black community.  Gwendora Reese took a leading role in preserving the community's history.  In this picture, Gwen is holding my book, and I didn't even pay her.  The church was built by freed slaves and is no longer used as a church.  Instead, it serves as a kind of historical marker of what Montgomery County once was and a wonderful venue for events. Gwen and others have done a great job in cataloging the founding black families in Sugarland, including the Johnsons and Hebrons.  Those families aren't mentioned in my book but two of the old families are: the Dorseys and the Weedons.