BGuthrie Photos: MD -- Oxon Hill Farm Park

MD -- Oxon Hill Farm Park:

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. OXON_121223_076.JPG: A Voice Unheard: From the late 1600s to the early 1800s, tobacco, wheat, and other crops helped bring prosperity to slaveholders on this farm -- at the price of bondage, hard labor, and broken families for enslaved African Americans. No information about the lives of enslaved people here survives in their own words. The wills, letters, and records of slaveholders tell part of the story, but only from the slaveholders' point of view. In the early 1800s, at least half of the population of Prince George's County was enslaved African Americans. African American named George, Edward, Hamilton, Minta, Patsy, and Matilda, among others, lived in bondage on this land. Most able-bodied enslaved people -- men, women, and older children -- worked in the fields. One or two enslaved women on this farm probably worked as cooks or servants in the main house. Enslaved African Americans were considered property by law, and were by far the most valuable property after the land itself. A few enslaved people who lived here were freed by slaveholders, usually after years of forced service. Along with their labor, African Americans -- free and enslaved -- brought their languages, skills, food, music, stories, and history to this farm, Maryland, and the nation. When John Henry DeButts died in 1831, he left a will describing how to divide his property. This inventory of his possessions helped fulfill the terms of his will. The value of his personal property was $3,224.08. His sixteen enslaved workers accounted for $2,512.50 -- more than three quarters of the total. Freeing an enslaved person is called manumission. Records of the manumissions in Prince George's County show that a brother and sister, John and Nelly Garner, were born a year apart at Mount Welby. They were sold to Thomas S. Moore, who lived nearby, and freed by him on August 28, 1830.
2. OXON_121223_088.JPG: A Farm for St. Elizabeths, 1891-1959: St. Elizabeth's Hospital should be "the grandest institution of its kind in the world." -- Charles H,. Nichols, first medical superintendent of St. Elizabeths. For nearly 70 years, the land around you was a hospital farm. St. Elizabeths Hospital bought the property in 1891 to produce food for its ever-growing number of patients. The hospital was founded in 1855 to care for mentally ill people from Washington, DC, and the US military. St. Elizabeths was a bold project for its time. It was originally designed to hold 250 patients in the world's most modern hospital for the mentally ill. But before the first building was even completed, the outbreak of the Civil War forced the government to use much of the new hospital for wounded soldiers. By the end of the war, 600 patients were crammed into the hospital. The number reached 718 by 1875. In the 1940s, the hospital complex covered more than 300 acres and housed some 7,000 patients. Much of the farm machinery around Oxon Hill Farm dates from the St. Elizabeths era.
3. OXON_121223_123.JPG: Two Centuries of Farm Buildings: The buildings on this property are clues to the lives of the people who lived here over the past two centuries. Sixteen buildings stand on the main part of the property. They all say something about who lived here, the crops they grew, and the animals they raised. Mount Welby Era: 1800-1840s: The three oldest buildings at Oxon Cove Park date from the early 1800s. Dr. Samuel DeButts, Mary Welby DeButts, and their children lived on the farm and called their home Mount Welby, in honor of Mary's family. St. Elizabeths Era: 1890s-1960s: Five buildings survive from the days when St. Elizabeths Hospital owned and ran the farm. They are the hexagonal outbuilding, horse, and pony barn, hay barn, feed building, and dairy barn and silo. National Park Service Buildings: The rest of the buildings in the main part of the park were constructed after the National Park Service began operating a children's farm here in 1967. They are the grain exhibit building, chicken coop, farm museum, rabbit shed, windmill, tool shed, sorghum syrup shed, and Visitor Barn/ At the Visitor Bar, you can find crafts, toys, books, exhibits, computer farm games, brochures, and a park ranger or volunteer to help you with your visit. Restrooms are across the main road from the Visitor Barn. Farmhouse; Built between 1800 and 1811, the farmhouse is the oldest building on the property. Root Cellar: Down the hill from the farmhouse, a one-story root cellar with a gable roof was constructed about 1830. Brick Stable: The brick stable, down the lane from the farmhouse and the root cellar, was also built about 1830. Most barns and stables in Maryland were made of wood in the mid-1800s.
4. OXON_121223_154.JPG: Hay: Hay is a term for any kind of tall grass that is mowed and drives for feeding to farm animals. Hay is green, and is put into bales for easy handling. Straw: Straw is the stalks of wheat or other grains after the grain (seed) is removed. Straw is used as bedding for stalls and pens. It is yellow, and is *not* eaten by the animals.
5. OXON_121223_176.JPG: Why a Brick Stable? A 175-year-old brick stable is rare in this region. Most stables and barns built in Maryland in the 1800s were made of wood and had one story, not two. Brick buildings were more expensive to build, but lasted longer. When this stable went up, perhaps the DeButts family felt wealthy enough to build for the future. Brick stables were common in England and Ireland at the time, so a building like this might have seemed natural to them. This stable also has a few special details in the brickwork. If you look high up on the ends of the barn, called the gables, you'll see holes in the bricks in the shape of a diamond. The holes help ventilate the building and appear in different patterns on old barns across northern Maryland and parts of Pennsylvania. Some of the stable's features were added long after it was built, such as the wide door on the south wall and the concrete floor. But the stable also has a few ghosts – traces of windows and doors that no longer exist.
6. OXON_121223_300.JPG: Corn Sheller: This corn sheller was patented in March 1881. Its job is to separate the cob from the kernels. Then the kernels are processed through cleaning machines before grinding. Corn is then used as animal food and food for people. The cobs can be used for corncob pipes, mulch, or toys. Husks are used for corn husk dolls or wreaths. Can you think of other uses?
7. OXON_121223_310.JPG: Seed Sower: During the 1850s, numerous companies began developing seed sowers of various kinds. This machine is a small hand powered device that released a few seeds at a time along a row and even included a guide marker for even row placement. As with many of the very early companies, its history is virtually lost to time.
8. OXON_121223_315.JPG: Hand Corn Planter: Hand corn planters were, of course, developed prior to the larger models. Even after the advent of the corn planter during the late 1800s, the hand planters were often used for garden and used to "plug" corn where it was missing in the row. Farmers would walk the field as the corn was emerging, looking for issuing plants of their new crop. Pushing and squeezing the levels together dropped three or four kernels of seed into the ground. The kernels dropped from the planting box through a planting tube into the ground opened by the blades. As the farmer walked away, they packed the soil with their heel.
9. OXON_121223_327.JPG: Winnowing Machine: This machine is used to separate the chaff, dirt, etc from the grain by throwing it into the air and allowing the wind or a current of air to blow away the impurities. The grain is placed on wooden or basket tray, tossed gently in the air, and caught again on the tray. The process continued until the grain was clean. Or the grain could be dropped from one tray to another with the chaff blowing off until gone. A gentle breeze aided the process. Otherwise workers used wicker fans or baskets to fan the chaff. Sometimes paddle fans, called fanning mills and powered by horses on treadmills, were used.
10. OXON_121223_334.JPG: Most Americans lived on farms in 1837; nearly 90 percent of an estimated 15-million population. These 13 million-plus farmers produced the necessities of life not only for themselves, but for the remaining 10 percent of the population that lived in cities, towns or villages. Farm production was limited by the plodding speed of the oxen and the physical endurance of the farm family. Planting, cultivation, harvesting and threshing were mainly hand operations with crude tools. Life was not easy, and happy was the family that could satisfy its own needs and produce a small surplus for the marketplace.
11. OXON_121223_340.JPG: Feed Grinder: By the 1860s, farmers were aware of the benefits derived from grinding the grain fed to their livestock. It was more palatable and nutritious. We use this hand powered grinding mill at Oxon Hill Farm for grinding corn to be used as chicken feed. This type of small mill can be mounted on a bench or table.
12. OXON_121223_355.JPG: The Root Cellar: This root cellar may not look much like a refrigerator. But in the 1830s, it was probably the closest thing the DeButts family had. A good root cellar is damp, well ventilate, and very cool but never freezing. Like this one, most root cellars are built partly or entirely underground to keep them cool. You can see the ventilation chimneys on the north and south sides. Root cellars get their names from their contents -- they are used mainly to store root crops such as beets, carrots, potatoes, and turnips. Root crops had many advantages for farmers such as the DeButts family. Some are ready to eat early in spring; others can wait for harvesting after the first frost. And they are edible before they fully mature, so if you need a carrot you can dig up a young one. Corn and wheat don't work that way. Properly stored, some root crops last for months without spoiling. Many other vegetables, such as squash, cabbages, onions, and melons will also keep better in a root cellar. This building let the DeButts family store vegetables well into the winter.
13. OXON_121223_370.JPG: Wheat and Tobacco: In spring and summer, wheat and tobacco grow in this garden. These two plants alone tell an important part of the history of this farm. Tobacco was the most valuable crop in the American colonies in the 1600s and 1700s. Planters such as John Addison, an early owner of the farm, made fortunes selling tobacco to the European market. Tobacco also exhausted the soil in just a few years and demanded months of hard, pain-staking labor from farm workers. To prosper as tobacco planters in Maryland, a family needed to amass large holdings and exploit the labor of enslaved people. In the 1800s, tobacco was on the decline in Maryland. Samuel DeButts and many other Maryland farmers had switched to mixed farming which often included wheat. But wheat demanded less labor than tobacco, and reduced the need for slaves. Slaveholders often found that the best way to profit form their slaves was to sell them south. Some enslaved people who once tilled the soil here were likely separated from their families and sold south to pick cotton in the fields of Alabama and Mississippi.
14. OXON_121223_385.JPG: The DeButts Family Comes to Maryland Samuel DeButts was born in Ireland in 1756. He began a career as a doctor in England and there met and married his wife, Mary Welby, in 1785. Samuel's medical practice was difficult, unprofitable, and kept the couple apart for weeks at a time. Like hundreds of thousands of other European families, Samuel and Mary DeButts decided to immigrate to the United States. They arrived with their two children, Richard and Mary Ann, in 1791. They lived in Baltimore, then Washington County [which is where Harper's Ferry is], and for a time with Samuel's brother, John, in St Mary's County. Mary gave birth to their third child, John Henry, in the United States. Samuel and Mary had inherited some wealth and land from their families. In the early 1800's, Samuel decided to add to his income by farming on this land while practicing medicine in Washington DC. With this comfortable house and productive farm overlooking the Potomac River, the DeButts family established itself in the society of well-to-do families in the Chesapeake.
15. OXON_121223_389.JPG: Mount Welby Dr Samuel DeButts, his wife, Mary Welby DeButts, and their three children lived here in the early 1800's. The house and the property were both known as Mount Welby then, in honor of her family. The basic design of the house is the same as it was nearly 200 years ago, but many of the details have changed. The drawing at the right shows how the house likely looked in the Debutts' time. The grounds still have a few features that might have survived from the time of the DeButts family. Some of the boxwoods that surround the hexagonal building behind you could be 200 years old. Pieces of the history of Mount Welby and the DeButts family remain to be discovered. One document mentions a family graveyard somewhere on the farm. The grave site is unknown. If you look closely at the house, you can see that the bricks in the wall show two different patterns. On the north, south, and west walls, bricks in the lower sections are laid in a Flemish bond pattern. [Bricks in this pattern have alternating long and short bricks.] Most likely, these are the oldest parts of the house. The entire east wall and the upper sections of the other three are laid in a pattern called common bond. [Bricks in this pattern are all the same size.] No one knows for certain why the walls were rebuilt, but a fire is one possibility.
16. OXON_121223_417.JPG: War Comes To Mount Welby "I should not be surprised if Government persists in their determinations to quarrel with England that we should experience all the horrors of civil discord." -- Letter of Mary Welby DeButts to her brother Richard Earl Welby, April 2, 1812 In the letter above, Mary DeButts was right to worry. The quarrel between the United States and Great Britain erupted into the War of 1812 only two months after she wrote her brother. This international power struggle had very personal consequences for Samuel and Mary DeButts. One of the war's most important battles was fought within a few miles of Mount Welby. [Where Oxon Hill Farm Park is.] For part of the war, they fled their home. And down on the Potomac, they got a close look at the might of the British Navy. The causes of the war were complicated and reached from the American frontier across the Atlantic Ocean. Causes of the War of 1812: In the North, some Americans hoped to invade British Canada as part of a war and perhaps annex Canadian provinces as new states of the Union. Settlers believed British agents were encouraging American Indians to attack forts and settlements. In a war with Britain, westerners saw a chance to drive British troops off the frontier and conquer Indian lands. Locked in a war with France, Great Britain stopped American merchant ships and sometimes confiscated their cargoes. The British Navy also searched ships for British deserters. By 1810, the British were forcing about 1,000 seamen a year off US ships and onto British vessels. The treatment of American ships and sailors outraged the people and leaders of the new nation. The territories of Florida and Texas belongs to Britain's ally, Spain. Southerners reasoned that these lands might be opened to expansion if Britain lost a war with the United States.
17. OXON_121223_445.JPG: Rockets on the Hill "We found three rockets on our hill evidently pointed at our house but fortunately did not reach it." -- Mary DeButts, writing to her sister Millicent on March 18, 1815 Samuel and Mary DeButts were lucky not to be home when three Congreve rockets landed on their farm. By all accounts, the rockets were terrifying. They spewed flames and sparks in flight, changed direction unpredictably, roared as they flew by, and often exploded overhead, showering down hot fragments and powder. The rockets were named for their inventor, William Congreve of Great Britain. They were light, had a range of more than a mile, and did not recoil like a cannon, which made them easy to fire from the deck of a ship. Although they petrified soldiers and citizens who had never seen them before, and sometimes caused fired where they landed, they usually did less damage than a cannonball. Despite Mary DeButts's worries, the rockets probably were not aimed at her house. They might have been a signal to other British ships anchored some twenty miles away in the Patuxent River. Congreve rockets have a special place in American history. They supplied the "red glare" that Francis Scott Key remembered as he wrote the poem "The Star-Spangled Banner."
18. OXON_121223_466.JPG: Oxon Cove, the Potomac, and the Chesapeake -- [Oxon Cove Park] -- The history of Oxon Cove Park is a small part of the larger story of the Potomac River, which is one chapter in the long tale of the Chesapeake Bay. But the three stories overlap in many details and eras. For thousands of years, the abundance of fish, shellfish, game, and rich soil drew people to the land around you. These same natural riches attracted people to the rest of the Chesapeake region. As people settled the Chesapeake, they changed it. Tobacco farming exhausted the soil in parts of the region by the early 1700s. As fields lay fallow to recover their fertility, erosion washed soil into Oxon Creek, the Potomac, and the Chesapeake. Sediment began to block the channels and harbors of the Potomac at least 300 years ago. Today, the millions of people in the Chesapeake watershed change the rivers and the bay in different ways. Farming, fishing, industry, cities, and suburbs are all part of the area's modern ecosystem.
19. OXON_121223_486.JPG: The Capture of Alexandria "It was indeed a day and night of horrors, the fleet... lay directly before our house." -- Mary DeButts, writing to her sister Millicent on March 18, 1815 From the farm, Mary DeButts saw a small fleet on the Potomac River on August 29, 1814. On that day during the War of 1812, the British Navy Capt James Gordon accepted the surrender of Alexandria--without firing a shot. From here, you can see the Alexandria wharves and even some of the same buildings. About two weeks earlier, the British commander had started his seven ships up the Potomac to distract American soldiers and militia from the land attack on Washington. The British chased the American defenders from Fort Washington on the Maryland shore. Then nothing stood between Gordon's ships and Alexandria, the busiest port city on the Potomac. Gordon anchored his ships off the Alexandria wharf and promised to spare the city as long as no one fired on his sailors and marines. Over the next five days, the British took roughly 16,000 barrels of flour, 1,000 hogsheads of tobacco, 150 bales of cotton, several ships, and much else. Fearing a counterattack, Gordon gave orders to heave anchor and sail back down the river on September 3.
20. OXON_121223_504.JPG: The Potomac Highway Oxon Cove Park Two hundred and fifty years ago, the Potomac River was a highway. Roads were bumpy, narrow, winding routes, littered with stumps and fallen trees. They led from tobacco barns and small villages down to the real thoroughfare – the Potomac. When people and goods had to travel, they took to the water. Many of the first roads on dry land were called "rolling roads." Farmers, slaves, or teams of oxen used them to roll huge barrels of tobacco, called hogsheads, down the water's edge. There the tobacco was loaded on ships, often for the long journey to England. People used the Potomac River for local travel, too. More than sixty ferries connected points in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., along the Potomac by the mid-1800s. At the mouth of Oxon Creek, a ferry to the King Street wharf in Alexandria, Virginia, started in 1740 and ran for nearly 200 years. This image shows the bustling waterfront of Alexandria in the 1860s, directly across the river from where you stand now.
21. OXON_121223_573.JPG: The Burning of Washington DC "I cannot express to you the distress it has occasioned at the Battle of Bladensburg. We heard every fire... Our house was shook repeatedly by the firing upon forts and bridges, and illuminated by the fires in our Capital." -- Mary DeButts, writing to her sister Millicent on March 18, 1815 During the War of 1812, British troops fought a battle with American soldiers and militia near Bladensburg, Maryland. The battleground was about ten miles from here, just east of the current boundaries of Washington DC. The British routed the American defenders and marched into the city on August 24, 1814. By 9pm, the US Capitol was ablaze. Two hours later, British soldiers reached the White House and set it afire, along with the Treasury Building next door. Even closer, the Navy Yard in southwest Washington was put to the torch about 8pm to keep ships, ammunition, sails, rope, and other supplies from the British. President James Madison, First Lady Dolley Madison, and many Washingtonians had fled the city only a few hours before. The DeButts family could see the city in flames from this bluff. You will be looking in the same direction if you can see the top of the Washington Monument through the trees. (The DeButts family didn't see the monument, because it was not completed until 1884.)
22. OXON_121223_580.JPG: Way in the distance, you can see the Washington Monument
23. OXON_121223_615.JPG: Sweet Sorghum: This antique machine is a sorghum mill. With a mill like this, a horse, plenty of sorghum stalks, and evaporating pan, and years of experience, you can make sweet sorghum syrup. In the early 1900s, farm families used sorghum syrup like molasses -- in baking, on biscuits, and to make candy, gingerbread, and pudding. Sorghum syrup was often called sorghum molasses (thought it comes from the sorghum plant and molasses comes from sugarcane or sugar beets). Sorghum mills were usually made of two or three upright rollers fitted close together. A long wooden pole called a sweep was attached to the top of the mill and horse was harnessed to the sweep. As the horse walked around the mill in a circle, the rollers turned. Stalks of the sorghum plant were fed into the mill by hand and crushed by the rollers. The bright green sorghum juice dripped out into a barrel. When enough juice was gathered, it was strained and poured into a large evaporating pan. The sorghum maker had to keep a slow fire burning under the pan, stir the juice constantly, and skim off impurities that rose to the top. The right temperature was crucial for keeping the syrup hot for three or four hours boiling or scorching. As the juice cooked, it turned dark green, thickened, and finally reached a dark, clear amber. A sorghum plant looks something like a cornstalk without the ears. A large cluster of tiny seeds sits at the top. Today, varieties of sorghum grown anywhere from about four to fifteen feet tall. Farmers usually plant sorghum in May or June and harvest near the first frost. The leaves and seeds usually fatten up livestock. But some seeds also end up as bird food, and around the world people grind sorghum seeds into flour for cooking. The juice for sorghum syrup comes only from the stalks. Sorghum originated in African and came to the United States during the slave trade.
24. OXON_121223_737.JPG: A Park with a Past: Standing here and looking out toward the river or through the woods, what you see would depend on when you looked. The Chesapeake watershed began to take its present form some 15,000 years ago as glaciers that covered much of North America slowly retreated. The first people to set food in Maryland -- nomadic American Indians on the hunt -- probably passed near here about 12,000 years ago. People and the Chesapeake Bay have been interacting ever since. You might have seen a spruce forest and open grasslands then. The climate was colder and wetter. Shorelines were hundreds of feet below today's levels. The Chesapeake Bay was a narrow river, and the Potomac River may have been a babbling brook. Herds of elk, musk ox, and bison, and even woolly mammoths, roamed here. Two or three thousand years ago, the spruce forest and grasslands were gone, replaced by hemlocks, pines, oaks, and other trees. The large land mammals had moved north or vanished entirely. The climate had grown warmer and drier, and the Potomac was a wide river, filled with water once frozen in glaciers. A village of American Indians probably stood nearby -- if not within the boundaries of the park then somewhere close along the banks of the Potomac or Anacostia rivers. Oysters, clams, crabs, and fish made up a crucial part of the Indians' diet. They also gathered walnuts, acorns, fruit, and berries and hunted deer, bear, turkeys, rabbits, ducks, and geese. If you were among the first European and African settlers in Maryland in the 1600s, you would have found fields of corn, beans, pumpkins, tobacco, and other crops cultivated by local Indians. They would have spoken in Eastern Algonquian, a language shared by many Indian peoples of Maryland. Any you met would most likely have been Nacotchtanks. They might have offered you food and goods to trade and warned you about enemies to the north, the Susquehannocks.
Wikipedia Description: Oxon Cove Park and Oxon Hill Farm
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Oxon Cove Park and Oxon Hill Farm is a unit of the National Park Service in Maryland.

The park provides an excellent resource for environmental studies, wildlife observing, fishing, and other recreational activities made possible by easy access to the Potomac River.
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