The midcentury modern ranches and split-level homes lining Woolsey Drive are tidily landscaped, with house prices in the area starting at $1.5 million.
Yet buried below lie the bones of enslaved people who worked farmland and maintained households for white landowners in the mid-1800s in what’s now the Rollingwood area of Chevy Chase.
Now, two neighbors who peeked into the area’s bleak legacy are urging the community to acknowledge it. Chevy Chase residents Rachel Peric, 44, and Nadine Chapman, 55, hope to gain support for a statue to mark the site and to introduce local children to its history.
A couple of years ago, Peric says, she was looking into the Chevy Chase Historical Society archives out of curiosity about the neighborhood where she grew up. She discovered that enslaved Black people were buried only a few blocks from her home.
“That prompted me to start reaching out to the historical society to just try to learn more and see if this was a history that our neighborhood could learn more about and ultimately acknowledge and honor the lives of those buried there,” Peric says.
Renata Lisowski, director of the archive and research center at the historical society, estimates that at least five enslaved people were buried in the area. The most likely location of the burial site is east of Brookville Road at the intersection of Woolsey Drive and Rocton Avenue, according to Brian Crane of the Montgomery County Planning Department, who reached that conclusion earlier this year by studying land deeds from the time.
Peric shared her research with a neighborhood email list. Chapman added a 2021 MoCo360 story about the county’s long history of racism. The two bonded over wanting to highlight that history in their community.
“It just piqued my appetite to make sure that we’re not asleep, that we know what’s going on where we live, and we know our history—the good, the bad and the ugly, and the in-between—and we’re not afraid of it,” Chapman says. “My concern is that if we don’t know our history, we’ll repeat our history.”
Peric and Chapman held a webinar in May in conjunction with the historical society where they shared research findings and asked for help in learning more about the burial site. More than 100 residents, including author Mau VanDuren, participated in the webinar and decided to take part in the initiative to acknowledge the enslaved people.
“[Given] my own experience as a partly Jewish person growing up in a very strict Protestant environment in the Netherlands where I was also discriminated against, I just wanted to get involved,” VanDuren says. “If we can…maybe put up a plaque or a sign or something that says, ‘This is here and this is significant,’ I think that would be a worthy project.” VanDuren says his contributions to the initiative have included research into who was living on the farm and their conditions, an effort that proved difficult as there weren’t names, but only numbers of the people who were enslaved.
Fellow community residents Bonnie and Joe Oppenheimer also decided to join the initiative to uncover more about where they live. “This is a neighborhood thing which requires neighborhood work,” Joe says. “If we’re not going to do it, it won’t get done.”
According to Lisowski, enslaved people likely maintained the farm by taking care of animals, cleaning the house and tending to crops. Census records indicate that this farm had 32 enslaved people in 1860, she says.
The fact that the county recognized the site as a burial ground in 2019 is a positive step, Lisowski says, as similar burial grounds usually are faced with disputes over whether they exist. For one thing, she says, African burials—of both enslaved and free people—did not generally have grave markers as we tend to think of them, whether for cost reasons or because the community used other means to mark graves, such as boulders or dirt mounds. Another reason is that many people migrated elsewhere after the Emancipation Proclamation and weren’t around to speak up about where their ancestors were buried, she says. Finally, even known burial grounds can be destroyed for the sake of new construction, but that’s even easier for developers to do without historical societies standing in the way.
Peric and Chapman also recruited at-large county councilmember Will Jawando in their efforts to get recognition for the burial site. He kicked off the webinar and has been “connecting this work to larger efforts in the county focused on racial healing and repair,” Peric says.
“We can’t address the problems of today if we don’t address how we got here and the history of our community,” says Jawando, a Democrat who has worked as a civil rights lawyer.
Chapman and Peric say they are not looking to dig up the remains of the deceased; the most important aspect to them is educating younger members of the community. “In the next year, I would love to see that our local schools and just our community as a whole have access to this history and are using it,” Peric says. “Then our goal also is to identify a site where we can have some sort of space of remembrance and historical marker and information.” The women plan to contact Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School and Chevy Chase Elementary School to see if they can hold a seminar or some sort of discussion to teach students about the history of the area.
Although the acknowledgment may seem small, the two neighbors say there’s no better place to start to make a difference than in their neighborhood.
“We start here in our community,” Peric says, “and this is the piece we can do.”
This story appears in the November/December issue of Bethesda Magazine.