From Slavery to Freedom in Adams Morgan 

Author: Sarah Hogue

Link: http://www.streetsense.org/2011/10/adamsmorganhistory/

A tour through Adams Morgan on Saturday, September 24, offered a chance to take a stroll back in time, into the neighborhood’s Civil War past.

Participants were handed maps of the neighborhood as it appeared back in those days, a place more far more rural than the urban enclave it is today. They were invited to imagine the estate of John Little, a Civil War-era slave owner, and to listen to the narratives of slavery and escape.

They were also allowed to visit the final resting place of some of D.C.’s oldest inhabitants in what is now known as Walter C. Pierce Community Park.

The park, just off Calvert Street NW, is a magnet for modern-day dog-walkers, families, chess-players and community gardeners.

But the land was once used as burial ground by The Colored Union Benevolent Association and the Quakers. The park includes 8,428 old graves.

Howard University Professor Mark Mack and students have been working since 2006 to survey every inch of the park using non-invasive techniques, locating the graves.

They have also found the exposed remains of at least nine individuals, according to Cultural Tourism DC guide Mary Belcher.

Belcher used the tour to deliver a message about the fragility of old places teaching tour-goers that cultural sites can be destroyed if they aren’t protected.

“We have to raise public consciousness; that’s three-fourths of the battle,” she said.

Belcher and members of the Adams Morgan community have been actively involved in making sure that city improvements to the park do not destroy or disturb any of the graves.

“We all have a sense of what’s right,” said Belcher, who, together with co-tour guide Eddie Becker encouraged participants to share their own knowledge of Civil War history and to ask questions challenging the historical expertise of the guides.

In the process, everyone was given a new appreciation for the overlap of the past and the present, the rural and the urban. What is gone truly lives on under our feet.