EASTON, MARYLAND—Mark Leone of the University of Maryland, College Park, is leading a team of students in the excavation of The Hill neighborhood in Easton. They are looking for evidence that could prove it was the country’s first free African-American community, and not the Treme neighborhood in New Orleans, which dates to 1812. The team is currently excavating a building where three free non-white residents lived, according to the 1800 census. “We also know that by around 1790 there were a few free African Americans who were actually purchasing property in this neighborhood. And so we’re excavating here, one, to figure out what their lives were like and also to better understand the community more broadly in order to help support the claim that this is the oldest free African-American community in the United States,” Stefan Woehlke told Delmarva Now. Those first 400 residents may have been freed by Methodists and Quakers who lived in the area in the eighteenth century.
