Harford Legacy Farm Commemorative Book

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Seeds, Soil, and Toil: The African American Agricultural Legacy in Harford County and Maryland

Sharon Stowers, Ph.D, RDN, Harford Community College Iris Leigh Barnes, Ph.D.

African Americans were essential to the agricultural development of Maryland and Harford County. Approximately 100,000 enslaved Africans arrived in Maryland prior to the Revolutionary War, and many possessed significant agricultural expertise. Historian Jennifer Jensen Wallach was unequivocal about the impact of these agricultural skills: “European colonists relied on concrete skill sets derived from African agricultural traditions,” which included, shifting cultivation and terraced, mixed, and rotational farming. These are farming techniques used by Harford County farmers today to preserve our soil and protect the Chesapeake Bay.

In colonial America through the antebellum years, in addition to planting and harvesting, African Americans demonstrated great skill at making and repairing tools, tending and slaughtering livestock, and much more. Some African Americans became innovators in farming; Henry Blair, a Montgomery County farmer, was even awarded a US patent on a corn seed planter, a precursor to our modern day planters.

Henry Blair’s 1834 Patent Drawing for Seed Planter The transformation of northern Maryland, including Harford County, to a mixed economy based on cereal farming and manufacturing resulted in the use of much freed Black wage labor. who worked to make northern Maryland a center of food production and commerce. Some free Blacks owned farmland, although marginally. Slaveholding families lobbied to prevent Black land ownership, either by state legislation, local ordinances, adverse possession, or community mores. Unlike some legacy farmers, African Americans were not the beneficiaries of land patents in which hundreds, or even thousands, of acres of land, were given to colonists, free of charge.

Tenaciously, a few African Americans became landowners. The formerly enslaved Cupid Paca, for example, purchased 50 acres in Darlington in 1822. This meager parcel of land did not compare to the