Beall-Dawson House
100 West Montgomery Avenue
Upton Beall, wealthy landowner and Clerk of Court, owned 25 slaves when he died in 1827. After Upton Beall died, his family did not purchase additional slaves, however, by 1860 the Beall family owned 52 slaves.
The Beall family did not sell the children of their slaves. The slaves worked in the house, on the farm, or at one of the other family properties. The Bealls did hire out slaves for service to families in Washington, D.C., and many of the slaves resided with these families.
In 1862, the Beall sisters freed 17 slaves who worked in D.C., receiving $9,400 for them under a federal compensation program. The remaining slaves were freed when emancipation was granted in Maryland in 1864. The Bealls sold their former slaves the land along Martin’s Lane and Middle Lane on which they lived. Those families had long made up a mixed free and enslaved African American community called “Haiti,” Rockville’s first African American neighborhood.
Marker is on West Middle Lane west of South Adams Street, on the left when traveling west.
Courtesy hmdb.org
