---
title: Uncovering a Pioneering Town’s Hidden History
date: 2022-06-15T05:30:00-04:00
author: University of Maryland
canonical_url: "https://today.umd.edu/uncovering-a-pioneering-towns-hidden-history"
section: Articles
---
# Uncovering a Pioneering Town’s Hidden History

*June 15, 2022* — by [Maggie Haslam](/author/maggie-haslam)


> Student Excavation Project Offers Clues to Daily Life in County’s Oldest Black Community

*Henry Randall House 06132022 SC 2178 1920x1080 — Main photo: Olivia Meoni '21 (left) and Rhys Burns '23 excavate near where the 1892 Henry Randall house once stood in North Brentwood, Md. Randall's son's house, built in the same style a year later, stands in the background. Bottom photo: Kari Maygers '23 (right) shows the group a tile that volunteer Tammie Gillums (left) found while the pair was digging at the Henry Randall house site on this past Monday.*

The overgrown lot in the small town of North Brentwood, Md. is easy to miss for the thousands of commuters who pass it daily on Rhode Island Avenue heading to and from Washington, D.C. But just under its weedy surface lies a remarkable story waiting to be unearthed—one told through amber glass and 19<sup>th</sup> century nails, peculiar metal and old coins.

With each shovel of dirt, students from the University of Maryland are hoping to piece together a chronicle of the Henry Randall House, the first residence built in one of the state’s oldest Black incorporated towns, and with it, capture more than a century of daily life marked by emancipation, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement.

Armed with trowels and sifters, students in a summer archeological field school taught by Historic Preservation Postdoctoral Associate Stefan Woehlke Ph.D. ’20 are spending the next four weeks meticulously navigating tangles of tree roots, rocks and decades of compacted dirt to reconstruct the house’s history. Working within three-foot squares, students carefully peel back inches of soil at a time, a layering method that allows them to recover evidence from different eras, rolling back the clock the farther down they dig.

“We have to be really careful,” said Emily Lucie ’23. “If we were just to rip up a root, depending on how deep it goes, it could then pull soil up from lower layers and potentially pull up tiny artifacts with it, which contaminates the timeline.”


*Students examine artifacts from dig*



**Sidebar note:**

Stefan Woehlke and his students will display found artifacts beginning at 10 a.m. Saturday at the dig site on the southbound side of Rhode Island Avenue, between Wallace Road and Webster Street, in celebration of North Brentwood’s 98<sup>th </sup>anniversary and Juneteenth celebration. A barbecue at Sis’ Tavern (4512 41<sup>st</sup> Ave.) will begin at 2 p.m. and is open to the public.





**Topics:** [Research](https://today.umd.edu/tags/research)


**Tags:** [Historic Preservation](https://today.umd.edu/topic/historic-preservation), [Research](https://today.umd.edu/topic/research)


**Units:** [School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation](https://today.umd.edu/topic/school-architecture-planning-and-preservation)