Tobytown, Maryland: A Black Community Founded After Emancipation, Erased by Urban Renewal

Tobytown is an African American community near the Potomac River and Lockhouse 22 on the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, about ten miles northwest of the Washington, DC, Beltway in Montgomery County, Maryland.

Founding

Local oral history says three emancipated African Americans — William Davis, Elsie Martin and Emory Genies (or Genus) — founded it, and that it was named for Tobias Martin, the name of Elsie Martin's husband, son and grandson. The details are uncertain.

• The first recorded land purchase by these families came in March 1875, when William Davis paid $80 for 4 acres bought from John and Susan Rowzee, white landowners who lived elsewhere.
• But the 1870 census suggests the community is a little older: it shows seven African American households clustered near the Brighton post office in the Rockville District, including those of William Davis, Tobias Martin and Emory Genies — probably already living on the land they would buy in the mid-1870s.

An 1879 map of Darnestown District, Maryland, with the plots of the Genies, Davis and Martin families — believed to have founded Tobytown — circled. Library of Congress

Prosperity

• In 1884 the Martin family gave land for a meeting house, one of the few places of worship for African American Baptists in this part of the county. From 1887 it also served as a school. After a fire it was rebuilt in 1917 as the Refugee Church of the Lord Jesus Christ.
• By the 1890s Tobytown had its own school and church.
• William Davis grew his holding from 4 acres to 93 by the 1900s.
• Most residents farmed — their own fields, orchards and truck gardens — and did seasonal work for white neighbors. George Pennyfield's general store in the Lock 22 lockhouse supplied what they could not grow.
• It was a kinship community: a few families passed their land down generation to generation.

Urban renewal

From the 1940s, suburbs spread over the farmland around Darnestown, and farm jobs dwindled. Rural Black communities like Tobytown suffered from little public investment, few services and growing isolation.

Then, from January 1965, journalists, a film crew and county officials arrived, and Tobytown was labelled a pocket of poverty in a wealthy county. The county health department ordered residents to build 16 new privies, sink three wells and clear accumulated trash. The houses — without central heating, electricity or indoor plumbing — were declared substandard. Unlike other post-emancipation Black communities nearby, Tobytown's nineteenth-century homes were small, one-story buildings of one to three bedrooms; of the 15 houses standing in 1960, just one had a second story.

That condemnation in the press led to legal condemnation and "urban renewal": between 1967 and 1972 the historic buildings were demolished and the community rebuilt. Only the historic cemetery remains.

Losing the land

Residents got new, better housing — but they no longer owned their homes or the land under them; the county did. It took a decade for the first resident to build up enough equity to get title to his townhouse.

Tobytown is a model example of how rural African Americans were cut off from the land they owned. It began in the Reconstruction era as a self-sufficient rural enclave — a sign of newly won freedom and the right to own land and build wealth. As those rights eroded over the following decades, isolation was imposed from outside, and the lack of services kept disadvantaging Black residents through the twentieth century.

Sources

Based on "Tobytown (near Travilah), Maryland," part of the series African American Communities Along the C&O Canal, National Park Service, drawn from the Park Service's Historic Resource Study: African American Communities Along the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal by Heather McMahon (National Park Service and WSP USA Inc., 2022), which cites the Maryland Historical Trust, Clare Lise Kelly, The Washington Post (1965) and the 1879 Hopkins atlas; a work of the United States government in the public domain, rewritten in hubnx's own words.