Chesapeake Heartland Project Celebrates One-Year Anniversary

The digital archive celebrates a full year of telling the untold stories of Kent County, Maryland.

The mission of the Chesapeake Heartland Project is to “preserve, digitize, interpret, and make accessible materials related to African American history and culture in Kent County, Maryland and beyond.” Nothing more powerfully brings that mission to life than one of the project’s central features, its Digital Archive, which officially launched in February of 2021 after three and a half years in development.          

The Digital Archive brings to light the rich, complex heritage of local African Americans. From the 1720 will of landowner and slaveholder William Pearce, to the dapper 1890’s portrait of an unidentified, suited man, to the group image of the 1964 Kent County debutante cotillion, the Archive currently spans three centuries of materials relating to Black history and culture.

“We want to partner with the community to tell that story together,” said Patrick Nugent, the deputy director of the Starr Center and project manager of the Chesapeake Heartland Project. “Rather than interpreting the history ourselves, we’re trying to work with people to tell that story together. That’s really the key.”

The Chesapeake Heartland Project also gained national attention last year with the unexpected addition of a new collection to its Archive. In the spring of 2021, thanks to the quick actions of community members, the generosity of several donors, and the efforts of Washington College’s Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, a collection of family papers from the attic of a soon-to-be-demolished 200-year-old house near Chestertown, Maryland was saved from the auction house.

Among the approximately 2,000 pages — which date from the late 1600s to the early 1800s — were 100 documents illuminating the lives of African Americans in Kent and Queen Anne’s Counties, both free and enslaved. That portion of the documents were named the Commodore Collection, in honor of Washington College alumnus Norris Commodore ’73 and his family. The name honors the Commodore family’s role in rescuing the documents, the family’s deep roots in Kent County, and Mr. Commodore’s historic status as the first African American from the local community to graduate from Washington College. These papers belong to Sumner Hall, a cultural nonprofit in Chestertown, while being conserved and archived along with the rest of the collection at Washington College’s Miller Library. Two of the national articles written about the Commodore Collection can be found here and here.

In addition to realizing success with its Archive and newest collection, the Chesapeake Heartland Project’s African American Humanities Truck has been on the road for a little over a year now. This truck, also known informally as “Rolling Sankofa” or “Big Blue,” is a key tool of the Project. It functions as a mobile museum and digitization space, outfitted with hi-tech equipment that digitizes and preserves items from out in the community. In addition to bringing Kent County Black history out to local festivals and celebrations, the Truck also meets community members on their own ground. With the ability to gather historic items on-the-spot, the Truck team can immediately digitize the items presented and return the precious pictures or documents immediately to the community member. In 2021, the Truck hosted 14 programs in the region with 11 pop-up exhibits and employed six Washington College students as Truck Ambassadors.

Lastly, the Digital Archive of the Chesapeake Heartland Project has supported the work of 19 community and faculty fellows over the last two years and birthed an exciting and creative summer program called the “Hip Hop Time Capsule.” In the summer of 2021, the program paired Kent County teenagers and Washington College students with musicians, college professors, and museum professionals to specifically research, explore, document, and interpret the rich history of African American music in Kent County, Md. 

As part of the program, the student interns drew from music and interviews in Chesapeake Heartland's Digital Archive to produce their own beats and musical compilations and created cover art reinterpreting historic images. Their innovative work can be found here. The search for interns for the 2022 Hip Hop Time Capsule program will launch shortly.

It will be hard to beat the last blockbuster year, but over the next ten months the Chesapeake Heartland Project and its Digital Archive hopes to preserve Kent County’s history for years to come. And much like the mythical Sankofa bird at the center of its logo, the Project will continue to move forward while always looking backward.