2020 Impacts

2020 was CEI's first full year as the stewards of our farm! We invited the community to help us name the property and received ~100 ideas this spring. To honor the important history of this land we chose the name Freetown Farm. Here is an overview of the history as we are coming to learn it. We are on the traditional land of multiple Native American tribes, especially the Piscataway Conoy Tribe, who lived and traveled in the Patuxent River watershed for millennia. In the 1600s European colonizers continued to encroach on tribal lands and a Piscataway reservation was established via treaty in 1666. This was followed by subsequent treaties, all of which would be broken in the coming years, resulting in the loss of native homelands. By the 1690s plantations were established here that used slave labor for growing and harvesting crops such as tobacco. Slave labor was used in mining to support railroads and in the building of much of the original infrastructure of Howard County. After more than 150 years of slavery, in 1845 a local landowner freed seventeen people he had enslaved and gave them 150 acres of land to use—an area that became known as Freetown. In 1860 more than one in five county residents was an enslaved person; another 10% were free black people—double the proportion of the rest of the state. Local historians believe that Freetown and the surrounding area was as an important part of the Underground Railroad, especially as people used the Patuxent and Patapsco rivers in their journey towards freedom. Come forward another hundred years and in 1948 a segregated high school was built for African American students - the Harriet Tubman School is just across the street from the farm. The county didn’t desegregate until 1965, 11 years after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling mandating racial integration of schools. It was also during the 1960s that much of the agricultural land in the area was quietly bought up by James Rouse for the purpose of building a unique planned community, Columbia, which opened in 1967. Rouse designed Columbia to be a “garden for growing people” and he championed integration across race, class, faith, with the city’s iconic People Tree statue embodying this vision of our inter-connectedness. For several generations, pre and post the creation of Columbia, the land that includes the farm was owned by the Kelly family, an African American family with deep roots in the county. In the early 1980s Mr. Shaw purchased a 6.4 acre parcel from the Kelly family and proceeded to farm it organically until 2019 when CEI purchased it and deed restricted it from housing development. CEI is committed to understanding and honoring the full history of the land we now steward and we are working to develop programming that tells this story.