The Colonization Movement

I recently did a Zoom presentation for the Montgomery County, Maryland, History Society about the Maryland Colonization Society. As I say in the presentation, my interest in the subject began when my research on Yarrow Mamout suggested that members of the American Colonization Society were progressively minded on racial issues and helped Yarrow's son in his move to Washington County, Maryland. In addition, I had come across another painting by James Alexander Simpson, someone who painted Yarrow, of a mixed-race woman who moved to Africa in the colonization movement. That launched me into more extensive research on the subject.  The recorded presentation is here on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4iAiUuiSjA

More on Black History of Georgetown

      The Montgomery County History Society put online an article that Kate Whitmore and I wrote, Maryland's Gift to the Nation: A Capital City, about Maryland's session of parts of Montgomery and Prince George's Counties to the federal government for the capital, the District of Columbia. The article has a lot about the early history of Georgetown and what happened to it as a result of cession. We also devote considerable attention to the effect on Black Georgetowners. 

 https://montgomeryhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/ur_issue-03_johnston-whitmore_2026.pdf

PBS progam on Yarrow Mamout

     PBS has developed a series of programs on Muslims in America, produced by Graham Judd. One of those is about Yarrow Mamout and is based on From Slave Ship to Harvard. It may be found here. The program is designed for schools, but is available online to the public. 

The book has become a best seller

 Twelve years after publication, From Slave Ship to Harvard was listed on Amazon today as a "best seller." I don't exactly know how Amazon reached that conclusion, but I'll take it.

Prospective readers, here is the introduction to the book

     Fordham University Press has the introduction to the book online here if you want a fuller account of what the book is about.

More on Polly's grave

      When I was working on my book, a man who lived around Yarrowsburg told me that when he was a boy, he was shown two plain stones that stood upright in a field near Yarrowsburg Road. One was Polly's grave; the other was her son's grave according to what he remembered.  So one Saturday, he and I went to look for them. He showed up in big boots and heavy denim jeans with two shovels.  I wore shorts. We spent two hours whacking at the thorny vines along the road with the shovels.  All I had to show for it were some badly scarred legs.  

      I've marked the location on this view from Google Earth.  I've also marked where I was told Polly's house was.  Just north of the abandoned school house.  It's gone now of course.  If she was buried on her property, as The Blue Hills of Maryland said, an unreliable source, then her grave could not have been where we searched.  

      Highway 67 runs up the right side of the image.  This is Pleasant Valley.  Elk Ridge is on the left.  Harpers Ferry is off the image at the bottom left.  The Kennedy Farm, where John Brown and his men stayed for months before the October 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry is marked. In the 19th century, a road went from Yarrowsburg over Elk Ridge and down past the Kennedy Farm.

Yarrow's neighborhood

     Related to the two, somewhat morbid posts about graves, I want to mention my research about Yarrow's neighborhood. As said in earlier posts, it was in the Beatty and Hawkins Addition, which was platted in 1760. The image below is taken from that plat.

     Beatty and Hawkins included in the addition three double lots for churches. Just as any good real estate developer would have done in those days, they thought the lots would sell better if buyers knew a church was nearby. Beatty and Hawkins weren't going to build those churches, but they did provide for them. The three were the Lutherans, the Church of England (Episcopal), and Calvinists (Presbyterians).  Bear in mind that Georgetown proper was south and east of the Beatty and Hawkins Addition.  The Addition was outside the city limits of Georgetown proper.

     The Church of England lot (in yellow on Fifth/Q Street) lay vacant until 1876 when the first houses were built there. The Episcopal congregation built St. John's on O Street instead.  When a schism developed about 1817, part of the congregation broke away to form today's Christ Church on the east side of High Street/Wisconsin.  The Lutheran double lot, not shown on the map, was where the Lutheran Church is today on Wisconsin.

      The Presbyterian Church and graveyard was on Bridge/M Street and Market/32nd Street.  But around 1800, the Presbyterians bought land in the Beatty and Hawkins Addition adjacent to where the plat set aside a double lot for them (in yellow).  They then converted most of that block into what has been called the Old Presbyterian Burying Ground (in yellow).  That became the principal cemetery in Georgetown until Oak Hill was developed around 1850. However, towards the end of the 19th century as the Beatty and Hawkins Addition was finally being filled in with houses, the city of Washington supposedly moved all the bodies to other places. Even before then, many families had moved their ancestors remains elsewhere.

     But in addition, bodies have been found along the north side of Q Street including in the Church of England lot. A newspaper reported the first set of human remains being found there in 1867.  Since then, an estimated 40 sets of remains have been found, some as recently as 2020.  There is no record that this was a recognized cemetery, but obviously people were being buried there.

     Legally, human remains in the Church of England lot would seem protected by an 1828 ruling of the United States Supreme Court. In that case, the Lutheran congregation sued to prevent Beatty's heirs from reclaiming the lot set aside for them.  The Court noted the the Lutherans had built a crude church on the lot and that both Lutherans and others had buried people on the land. Once these things had been done, the lot became dedicated to religious purposes. This precedent suggests that any human remains found on the Church of England lot may enjoy some kind of protection. And conceivably, Yarrow Mamout's remains lie there if they have not already been removed or disintegrated.