The Lost Black Communities of Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C.

Part of the National Park Service series "The Sarah Whitby Site and African American History."

Archeology at the Whitby and Dickson home sites in Rock Creek Park shows that African American settlement along Broad Branch was lasting, not temporary. But those sites are only part of a larger story. In the 1800s, Black migrants who set out to own land and live in self-sustaining communities changed the landscape of Washington, D.C. Here are four of their communities.

Battery Kemble

Oral tradition says formerly enslaved people lived on and farmed the hillside below Battery Kemble, a fortification guarding a Potomac River crossing. Maps back it up: the area gained permanent residents after the Civil War began. G.M. Hopkins's 1878 Atlas of 15 Miles Around Washington shows about 15 dwellings east of William Murdock's former estate that weren't there in 1861, with names including Williams Peters, John Sephes, Daniel Cusberd and Jacob Hayes. The 1880 census lists these residents, aged 27 to 55, as "Black" or "mulatto" — likely freedpeople who had come to Washington in the previous two decades.

Rock Creek Ford: the Hepburn tract

An enclave of 11 Black families on Milkhouse Ford Road (later Rock Creek Ford Road, now gone) grew from the land of John and Thomas Hepburn.

Part of A. Boschke's 1861 map, with the tract labeled "J & T Hepburn." Credit: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

Most of the men likely still worked for white landowners, but they controlled their own labor and tenancy. Names on the census changed from decade to decade — people moved often — but some stayed as long as they could. Sarah Whitby, who had rented a mile or so south for 20–30 years, rented one of the Hepburn parcels in the early 1900s.

A 1920s postcard of a ford in Rock Creek Park. Credit: National Park Service.

Broad Branch Road

Around the corner, at least five Black households owned their land outright, free of mortgages: John and Anna Hyson, Joseph and Matilda Johnson, Robert and Laura Dorsey, Mary and Armisted Morton, and Joseph Harries. Some appear on Hopkins's atlases of 1879 and 1887. Their parcels traced back to George Milburn, a free Black man.

Reno

Reno was a working-class neighborhood around the Civil War's Fort Reno, where Black Americans began renting and buying land in the late 1800s. It was tied to the Rock Creek Ford and Broad Branch enclaves: they shared a school, the Rock Creek Baptist Church (founded in 1872) and the Moses Order benevolent association, and former residents recalled intermarriage and movement between the communities. In the early 1900s, Black owners from the former Hepburn parcels moved to Reno.

The 3900 block of Davenport Street NW in Reno, early 1900s. Credit: National Park Service.

As wealthier white neighborhoods grew around Reno, so did their discomfort with it. White-run citizens associations pressed the federal government to buy Reno for parkland and schools for white children. Residents fought back, but by 1951 every Black resident had been forced out, losing much of what they had invested in their homes. In one case, the descendants of Ruth Ann Davis could not prove her ownership, and lawyers dismissed the Davis buildings as "unimproved" — language echoing the Park Commission's earlier dismissal of Broad Branch tenancies as "poor."

Dispossessed

Neighbors, park and suburban developers, and government officials together erased many Black families — the Whitbys, the Hepburns and others still unnamed — from the land they had lived on and worked in northwest Washington. Archeology and historical research are now filling in what the modern Rock Creek Park landscape leaves out, restoring the memory of the people who made it home.

Sources

Based on "Other Black Communities in Rock Creek Park," Rock Creek Park, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The article draws on the Sarah Whitby, Jane Dickson and Charles Dickson Site National Register nominations (2022) and "Bold, Rocky, and Picturesque": Archeological Identification and Evaluation Study of Rock Creek Park (2008), prepared for the National Park Service.