Nearly 190 years ago, a freed slave named Paul Edmonson purchased a 20-acre farm in the Norbeck area of Montgomery County—on the northern end of what today is the sprawling Leisure World retirement community.
Edmonson, who acquired 25 additional acres for the farm 12 years after his initial purchase, was commemorated Saturday during an event at a park named in his honor in 2021—located just to the right of the main gate to Leisure World off Georgia Avenue. A plaque was unveiled containing a timeline and narrative of Edmonson’s life—a project spearheaded by Leisure World resident Helen Mays-Patrick, a fourth-generation Edmonson descendant on her mother’s side.
As Mays-Patrick told the gathering of several dozen relatives, friends and fellow Leisure World residents: “The dedication of this historical marker shows the spirit of the family, of my ancestors and the struggle that they went through—the burden of the slavery—and [that they] freed themselves so that they could be early founders and activists in the civil rights movement in the 1840s.”
Indeed, the plaque—whose design and contents were in large measure the work of Mays-Patrick’s husband, Jack Patrick—underscores the role of Edmonson and his family in the pre-Civil War abolitionist movement, as their lives became intertwined with such well-known figures as Frederick Douglass, the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, and the latter’s sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Although Paul Edmonson was free—as were about 40% of Black residents of Maryland during the 1840s, according to available census data—his wife, Amelia, was enslaved when they married. Under the laws of the time, their children—14 of whom survived until adulthood—remained the property of Amelia’s enslavers, William and Rebecca Culver of Colesville, who profited by “hiring out” the children to businesses and families.
Paul Edmonson had successfully purchased his freedom in 1810 at the age of 25, nearly a quarter of a century prior to purchasing his farm, located slightly west of what is today Leisure World’s Norbeck Road gate. While his three oldest daughters had their freedom purchased by their husbands, the Edmonsons worked tirelessly to gain freedom for their younger children—six of whom were part of an ill-fated voyage down the Potomac River in 1848 that was the largest non-violent escape attempt in U.S. history by enslaved individuals.
In the early hours of April 16, 1848, 77 enslaved Black people quietly boarded the Pearl, a 54-ton sailing vessel moored at the city’s 7th Street wharf. Among the passengers were four of Paul and Amelia Edmonson’s sons, as well as two of their daughters: Mary, 15, and Emily, 13, both servants in the homes of elite Washington families.
The escape effort was conceived by the city’s free Black community with financial assistance from White abolitionists. The plan was for the Pearl to sail down the Potomac River, up the Chesapeake Bay, and then through the canal that connects the Chesapeake to the Delaware Bay—to reach the free state of New Jersey.
But the trip down the Potomac was slowed by a near-absence of wind, and a storm then forced the ship to anchor near Point Lookout in St. Mary’s County before attempting to enter the Chesapeake. Meanwhile, white residents of Washington—after realizing the escapees had used the quiet of a Sunday to get away —sent out a steamship with an armed posse. The steamship caught up with the Pearl and towed the vessel back to Washington.
Most of the captured escapees were “sold South,” including the six Edmonson siblings—all of whom were purchased for a total of $4,500 by the same slave trader, Joseph Bruin of Alexandria, Va., with the intent of sending them to New Orleans. Paul Edmonson was greatly concerned about his two daughters—both viewed as very attractive—ending up in the New Orleans market, and being sold as sex slaves.
Mary and Emily Edmonson were initially sent to New Orleans, but an outbreak of yellow fever prompted Bruin to have them sent back to Alexandria, to be held in a “slave pen” on Duke Street. (A life-size statue of the two Edmonson sisters is now located just down the street from where the pen once stood.)
When their father found out where Mary and Emily were being kept, he traveled to New York to enlist the aid of white abolitionists to purchase their freedom. Financier John Jacob Astor III offered $900, but it wasn’t enough to secure the two sisters’ liberation—for which Bruin was demanding a total of $2,250.
In October 1848, a young Congregationalist preacher who had just taken over a church in Brooklyn—Rev. Henry Ward Beecher— made a passionate plea to his congregation to come up with the money.
As author Mary Kay Ricks related in her account of that episode more than a century and a half later, in a 2002 Washington Post Magazine article, “An observer reported that the people in the pews were visibly shaken, and in response men emptied their pockets while women tore off jewelry to contribute to the cause.”
Added Ricks, “That day [Beecher] found a voice that would propel him to the forefront of the anti-slavery movement.”
Mary and Emily were emancipated a month later, and Beecher made another plea for funds—to finance their schooling. At that point, Beecher’s sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe—who in 1852 would publish “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” one of the most influential novels of the 19th century, as a plea against slavery—became involved with the Edmonsons.
A year after the publication of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Stowe followed up with a non-fiction account of slavery that included a chapter on the Edmonsons. Stowe had previously aided Mary and Emily as they enrolled in an interracial school in upstate New York, while also appearing at anti-slavery rallies throughout the state.
Through Stowe’s efforts and the financial proceeds from the sale of crops grown on the Edmonson farm in Norbeck, Amelia Edmonson and the remaining Edmonson children who were still enslaved were freed by 1853—a decade before President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
Around the same time as the last of the Edmonsons were emancipated, Stowe arranged for Mary and Emily to continue their education at a preparatory school on the campus of Oberlin College in Ohio—where Mary was struck by tuberculosis and died at the age of 20.
Stowe arranged for Emily to return to Washington to study at a school that had opened a couple of years earlier to train young Black women to be teachers. The school was not popular among a large segment of the city’s White population, and, to provide greater security for the institution, Paul Edmonson and his wife and younger children moved into a cabin on the school grounds.
Emily would later help Frederick Douglass settle Washington’s Anacostia section. According to Ricks’ account of the escape on the Pearl and its aftermath, one of Emily’s granddaughters years later wrote, “Grandma & Frederick Douglass were like sister and brother—great abolitionists.”
Paul Edmonson died in 1863, at the age of 78. Six years earlier, in 1857, he had sold his farm on the present-day site of Leisure World—one of the largest Black-owned farms in Montgomery County at the time—for a modest $800. In that era, the value of farmland was tied to the number and productivity of enslaved people who worked it.
Barely a mile to the south of where the farm was located, Mays-Patrick—Edmonson’s 82-year-old great-great-great granddaughter on her mother’s side—reflected Saturday as the plaque detailing his life was dedicated in the park named for him.
“As a resident of Leisure World, this park and interpretive marker help me to recognize and to appreciate that my roots are deep in this land, and in this community, although it has changed vastly since 1857,” she said.
District 19 Del. Charlotte Crutchfield—a Silver Spring Democrat and herself a descendant of an African American family that has been in Montgomery County for 150 years—addressed Mays-Patrick toward the end of the commemoration, praising “the perseverance, the endurance of your family to go through all that they went through to get here and to actually own land in Montgomery County.”
Alluding to Saturday’s event, Crutchfield declared, “This is a celebration to that.”
(The Edmonson Historical Society was created in 2016 to help preserve Norbeck—a free Black community prior to the Civil War—and the surrounding community, to highlight descendants of the original owners of the land on which Leisure World now sits, and to raise awareness of the area’s history through exhibits and events. Those interested in learning more about the activities of the Edmonson Historical Society and/or becoming a member can contact one of its co-chairs: Diane Bradley at dbradmz@comcast.net and Juanita Sealy-Williams at sealyjaws@gmail.com)
