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Clapping, singing and the clang of a plantation bell filled the air at the Button Farm Living History Center in Germantown this weekend in celebration of the abolition of slavery in Maryland.
Concerts in the Country, an arts organization, hosted a Fall Festival and Emancipation Day Celebration on Saturday and Sunday at Button Farm, a historic farmstead depicting 19th century slave plantation life run by the nonprofit Menare Foundation.
The Emancipation Proclamation that freed slaves in 1863 did not apply to the four border states that did not secede — Maryland, Kentucky, Delaware and Missouri. Maryland lawmakers wrote a new constitution forbidding slavery that took effect Nov. 1, 1864.
"My hope was always that we'd take it statewide," Anthony Cohen, executive director of the Menare Foundation and a former county historian, said of Emancipation Day, which is marked with events at historic sites related to slavery in Montgomery County. "Next to Washington, D.C., Maryland was the first to abolish slavery as an act of its legislature."
The festival was also a chance to showcase Button Farm, said Marianne Ross, co-founder of Concerts in the Country. The Menare Foundation finalized its lease with the state for the 60-acre property in February, Cohen said, and he hopes that about two years of work to upgrade a farm house built in 1927, stabilize a Civil War-era barn and widen the property's access road will soon get under way.
"This is an unknown location in Montgomery County," Ross said. "It's a secret little corner and we hope more people find out about it."
On Sunday, visitors listened to work and labor songs, rang a historic plantation bell to make a wish, walked through a historic barn and community garden peopled by life-sized animals farmers made from papier-mache and yarn, visited a historic slave cemetery and watched a puppet show about the Underground Railroad.
"It was about slaves running away from their masters," Lily Boogaerts, 9, of Kensington said of the show. "I didn't know that Harriet Tubman had such a big reward." There was a $40,000 reward for capturing Tubman, a "conductor" of the Underground Railroad.
There were also 19th century crafts and activities, such as a cider press. Children made spirit bottles, an African and African-American tradition where glass bottles are decorated and hung in trees to trap evil spirits or keep a family's ancestors close by, and tussie-mussies, bouquets of flowers used to deliver messages. Each flower had a meaning— sage for wisdom, marigolds for sacred love, rosemary for remembrance, yarrow for curing heartache.
"They're absorbed, especially the kids, with these workshops, they really enjoy it," Ross said. "Participation is such an important part of events like this."
The festival was the first event put on by Concerts in the Country since co-founder Richard Wagner, 52, of Boyds drowned in Ocean City on Sept. 21. Ross said she is deciding what the future of the organization will be.
