Winnie Steele lived and worked near Bob and Edith’s Diner on Columbia Pike. Horace Branson toiled at a farm along Langston Boulevard.
Henry Speaks worked at two Arlington home sites—one near what is now the East Falls Church metro stop and another at the present-day location of St. Ann Catholic Church.
Samuel Smith’s workplace was a large spread of land near Yorktown High School.
What did these four individuals have in common? They were enslaved people who worked for prominent local citizens and laid the foundations (in some cases, literally) for the community we know today.
Their lives are among those chronicled in Memorializing the Enslaved in Arlington (MEA) —a joint effort of the Arlington Historical Society (AHS) and the Black Heritage Museum of Arlington (BHMA). Project researchers have so far identified some 1,600 people who were enslaved in the area—roughly 800 of them by name.
“It’s important that we recognize these people,” says Scott Taylor, co-coordinator of the project and director of the BHMA. “These people were real human beings, not just a story.”
Until now, only Arlington’s enslavers (including familiar names such as the Custis, Lee and Mason families) were known to the general public. We’ve known little about the enslaved people who came to our region against their will as early as 1669.
“This project will go a long way toward bringing attention to the county and the narratives that have not been told historically,” says Stephen Hammond, a family historian and member of the Syphax family—a branch of which was enslaved at Arlington House, the plantation home of Robert E. Lee and Mary Anna Custis Lee. The Syphaxes count among Arlington’s oldest families, with a legacy that dates back centuries.
Jessica Kaplan, an AHS board member and co-coordinator of the MEA project, has spent the past two years identifying the names and locations of the enslaved population of Arlington (formerly Alexandria County), poring through land records, deed books, historical maps and newspapers, D.C. Slave Emancipation records, U.S. Census records, the Virginia Slave Birth Index, Virginia wills and probate records, and other sources. She and other volunteer researchers, including Arlington high school students and a local Eagle Scout, have so far found 101 sites in the county where enslaved people lived and worked.
“The reason we’re such a prosperous community now is because of the contributions of the enslaved people of Arlington,” Kaplan says. “They built some of our biggest infrastructure. They cleared land, made bricks, built places like Arlington House, and dug and worked quarries along the Potomac.”
Many associate slavery with sprawling southern plantations that enslaved large numbers of people, and indeed, Arlington had two large plantation estates—Arlington House (the former Custis-Lee estate, now a historic landmark and museum on the grounds of Arlington National Cemetery) and Abingdon, the ruins of which are adjacent to Reagan National Airport.
But new research reveals that most of the enslaved people in the area lived and worked not on large plantations, but rather on smaller farms that dotted the rural landscape. About 85% of the sites identified so far had fewer than 16 enslaved people on the premises.
That’s part of what makes this effort so important, says Cassandra Good, associate professor of history at Marymount University and an advisor on the project: “We don’t have the visual marker [in Arlington] of what we think of as the presence of slavery.”
At a farm near the present-day site of the Netherlands Carillon in Rosslyn, for example, Elizabeth Walker, born 1836, worked as one of fewer than 12 servants and farmhands for her enslaver, Randolph Birch.
Birch described her as among a group of “first class servants of sound mind and good morals and of no defects or infirmities whatsoever.”
In what is now Arlington’s Glencarlyn neighborhood, an enslaved woman named Nancy, born around 1776, worked as a nurse and servant for Elizabeth Carlin, the lady of Ball-Sellers House, a county landmark that today is Arlington’s oldest extant dwelling. Carlin owned one other enslaved person as well.
A property owned by Samuel Birch at the intersection of Langston Boulevard and Powhatan Street was home to enslaved people named Eliza, John, Mary, Louisa, Rob, Cloe, Sam, Jim and a dozen others.
On a farm located at 1230 S. Arlington Ridge Road— later called Prospect Hill—Daphne and six others served their enslaver, Benjamin Sebastian, until his death in 1772.
Black Heritage Museum of Arlington director Taylor, who was born in Arlington’s Halls Hill neighborhood, sees the MEA project as an important component in coming to terms with Arlington’s complicated past. “This was not a perfect place. People need to know the good and the bad,” he says.
The impetus for MEA began with Arlington resident Tim Aiken, who was inspired by a June 2021 op-ed in The Washington Post about Germany’s reckoning with its Nazi past. In that essay, writer Michele L. Norris referenced German artist Gunter Demnig‘s Stolpersteine (Stumbling Stones) project commemorating the names and birth dates of Holocaust victims. The memorial that began in Germany with 75,000 brass cobblestones has since rippled out into 1,200 cities and towns in 30 countries throughout Europe.
After reading Norris’ piece, Aiken proposed to the Arlington Historical Society that the stumbling stones concept be applied to markers honoring the enslaved in Arlington. AHS subsequently received a grant from Virginia Humanities and a sponsorship from JBG Smith Cares to do just that.
Designed and fabricated by APS career and technical education students, the first three bronze stumbling stones were installed on Oct. 28 at the Ball-Sellers House, honoring three enslaved people who worked there for members of the Carlin family. MEA organizers are now building an interactive StoryMap that allows users to click around a map of Arlington to learn more about the people and places of enslavement.
As MEA co-coordinator, Aiken hopes the stumbling stones are as affecting to Arlingtonians as the ones in Germany were for him. “It’s a part of our past that you wouldn’t otherwise realize,” he says. “These stones aren’t forcing anyone to do anything, but they are a powerful way to say something, to show how extensive and pervasive [slavery] was.”
He hopes the markers impart a greater appreciation for the disadvantages African Americans have faced throughout history.
The project research is already trickling out into the community in various ways. Arlington Public Schools (APS) social studies teachers have used the maps and other materials in lesson plans for 4th grade Virginia Studies, 6th grade U.S. History, and 11th grade U.S. and Virginia History classes for the 2023-2024 school year.
With this momentum, Hammond hopes to see local “schools making the [MEA] curriculum a routine, accepted part of what we teach.” Efforts like this, he says, are central to recognizing past injustices and closing the opportunity gaps that still exist for African Americans in education, wealth building and real estate. He thinks the project will help “the community and the nation to have candid conversations to repair and heal.”
“Change happens over generations, and maybe this will take two to three generations,” Hammond says. Projects like this take patience and persistence, “but you have to start.”
Arlington, like so many parts of America, is coming to terms with its history of slavery and racism.
“We can’t put this under the rug anymore,” Taylor says. “We need to acknowledge that slavery was a big part of building America’s wealth, and [the enslaved people of Arlington] did, in fact, have names.” Some named their children after U.S. presidents.
“They were still patriotic,” Taylor says. “They loved America—even though it didn’t love them back.”
Sue Eisenfeld is one of the AHS volunteers researching and writing about the enslaved people of Arlington for the MEA project. She frequently writes about history, travel, culture and nature and is the author of Wandering Dixie: Dispatches from the Lost Jewish South and Shenandoah: A Story of Conservation and Betrayal. Find her online at www.sueeisenfeld.com. Jessica Kaplan of the Arlington Historical Society contributed research to this article.