Harford Legacy Farm Commemorative Book

Harford Legacy Farm | 6

hundreds of acres owned by white enslavers, who passed their land down to their descendants and built generational wealth.

The aftermath of the Civil War brought hope for African Americans, and also more racist laws, further limiting their access to land ownership and independent farming. Blacks’ lack of capital and the new Jim Crow laws forced freedmen into oppressive labor contracts, creating conditions that instituted an oppressive apprenticeship, sharecropper, and tenant farming system in which they were often cheated of fair compensation for their labor and crops. Overcoming many obstacles, some freedmen purchased small tracts of farmland and began anew. In 1880, Albert Berry Sr., a former slave, for example, obtained farmland and built a house for his father, also a former slave, in what became known as the Berry Farm Complex. His son, Albert Berry Jr., was born on the property in 1892 and farmed it until he was at least 87. Berry Jr., The Aegis reported in 1979, was also an expert in crafting highly prized tool handles. But this example of multi-generational land holding was exceptional. According to the US Census Bureau, by 1900 throughout the US, around 75% of Black farm operators were tenant farmers and sharecroppers. In comparison, only 30% of white farm operators were tenant farmers and sharecroppers. The upward trend in Black independent farming was short-lived. Because of the economic crisis of the Great Depression and a poorly conceived New Deal agricultural program that discriminated against tenant farmers, agricultural producers (both Black and White) lost their farms and livelihood at an alarming rate, from some seven million farms in 1935 to just two million in 2019, according to the USDA Agriculture Research Service. African Americans were and continue to be especially vulnerable to this pattern of land and farm loss because of the systemic racism in government institutions (such as the USDA) and banks, which put African Americans at an exceptional disadvantage. The experience of Black farmers in Harford County mirrored the general US trends, but with one, significant local twist. After the U.S. entered World War I, in Harford County, African American and white tenant farmers lost out: they were ordered off the most fertile farmland in the Aberdeen area to make way for the construction of the US Military facility, the Aberdeen Proving Ground (APG). This huge track of eastern, bayside land was the location of many of the corn and vegetable fields that supplied Harford County’s booming canning industry. Moreover, local discriminatory laws prevented