Black Land Loss Timeline

 - 1773

George Pointer was born enslaved on a plantation near present-day Potomac, MD (Illustration: Map of area)

 - 1786 – 1793

Pointer is hired out at 13 to work on George Washington’s Potomac Canal Company, and buys his own freedom at age 19. He initially manages the explosives used to build the canal and lives in a cabin on what is now Lock 6.

 - 1793 – 1820s

At age 19 Pointer buys his own freedom for $300 and marries Elizabeth Townsend, a free woman who is recalled in family stories as part Native American. They have three children. He is promoted to the rank of supervisory engineer in a 40-plus year career; captains his own fleet of boats delivering sandstone for federal buildings. On July 4, 1828, he assisted his granddaughter, Mary Ann Plummer, in piloting the boat that ferried U.S. President John Quincy Adams to the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal groundbreaking. Family lore states Mary, then 8, piloted the boat on a bet.

 - 1829

On Sept. 5, 1829, Pointer pens an eloquent appeal to save his family cabin from destruction by the new C&O Canal Company. Much of what we know about Pointer comes from this 11-page petition, which was preserved in the National Archives.

 - 1830s – 1840s

Pointer and his wife likely die in a cholera epidemic around 1832. Their granddaughter, Mary Ann Plummer, who they raised on the canal, marries Thomas Harris and moves to a small farm on Broad Branch Road in the 1840s.

 - 1850s

The Harrises buy approximately two acres on the Broad Branch tract from John Milburn, an African American, and begin to raise eight children – five to adulthood – on the land. They are market gardeners and live free while plantations in several directions around them are worked by enslaved labor.

 - 1863

The Harrises send two sons to fight in the Civil War.

 - 1860s – 1907

As the Harris children reach adulthood, some move to Georgetown or elsewhere to make a living, but the family enclave endures, home to another three generations with the surnames Harris and Moten.

Neighboring properties along Broad Branch are owned and rented out by at least three other Black families, including the Dorsey/Shorter family, the Johnsons, and the Hysons. Other Black families move in as renters. A separate but closely linked enclave of at least 13 other Black families also existed just a stone’s throw away. Records indicate that Blacks and whites successfully lived, traded, and worked as neighbors for decades. (map of both enclaves from the late 1800s)

 - 1907

The Chevy Chase Land Company (CCLC), which had been buying up dozens of farms along Connecticut Avenue since the 1880s, began to develop the DC side of Chevy Chase into a suburban oasis in 1907, with prices unaffordable to most lower-income people and Blacks. Francis Newlands, who founded CCLC, was a white supremacists whose suburban ideal excluded other races.

 - 1910s – 1920s

The political culture of Chevy Chase DC becomes increasingly hostile to Blacks. As the local E.V. Brown School reaches overcapacity, homeowners lobby for a new school by forming a site selection committee of civic and business leaders. Only one site was officially proposed – a 12-acre parcel along Broad Branch Road, half of which was owned by Black families who had farmed and lived on the land for decades.

 - 1923

Three of the Harris lots sell to an auctioneer and ultimately wind up in the hands of the Horace S. Jones heirs, who were the single largest landowner of the eventual Lafayette Park site. Black families, such as the Brooks family, remained renting in some of the three frame houses on that land until around 1928 .

 - 1924

The heirs of Horace S. Jones owned about five acres of the proposed 12-acre school/park site. They began platting and building houses on the northern boundaries of this parcel in the early 1920s, and in 1924 did a complete renovation of the original Jones farmhouse at 3622 Quesada Street NW on spec. One of the Jones heirs, Francis Moore, was head of the school site selection committee. Similarly backing the park, these plots were simply accommodated by the school and park, unlike the land owned by Blacks.

 - 1928

Mary Harris Moten, daughter of Mary Ann Plummer Harris, and her family are forced off the land around the time The Washington Post runs a photo of her sitting on the stoop of her farmhouse at 5803  Broad Branch Road NW. The caption briefly tells a story about how her mother, Mary Harris, a century earlier had piloted a boat that ferried a U.S. President to the grand opening of the C&O Canal in 1828. It does not mention that she has been notified she will soon be evicted from the land.

 - Mid-late 1920s

The National Parks and Planning Commission and the DC Public Schools approve the community’s site selection for a new elementary school and park and begin negotiations to acquire the land. The Jones heirs sell property to the government but are allowed to retain ownership of plots along the site’s northern boundary. A few other landowners whose tracts back up to the park on Northampton and 33rd Street are also allowed to stay. The government begins eviction proceedings only on the Black landowners.

 - 1931

Rose Branham Shorter recorded her family’s history on Broad Branch Road in photographs and passed them down to her descendants. This undated photograph shows Willie and Rosie Shorter on the family land. The third child in the photo was not identified. (Courtesy of Jocelind Edwards Julien)

 - 1931

The last African American holdouts – the Robert and Rosa Shorter family who live next door to the Motens – were forced to leave by a government sellout and their home was razed, while the school under construction nearby was nearly complete.

 - 1940s – 2010s

A Washington Post article reports that the land had been barren but is now thriving. Meanwhile, the cohesiveness of the Black families who had lived so long on Broad Branch among multiple generations soon shattered as branches scattered outward, losing touch with each other and with their shared history.

 - 2009

Barbara Boyle Torrey and Clara Myrick Green began researching George Pointer after reading his remarkable letter filed away in the National Archives. Their historical research involved tracing Pointer’s descendants. Watch a Jan. 18, 2023, Webinar hosted by HCCDC in which Torrey and Green talk about their research.

 - 2011

James Fisher, a retired government worker, met Tanya Hardy, an educator-turned-genealogist, and they began building a family tree. He was highly skeptical that Tanya would find anything worthwhile, as he recalls that all he knew about was a “broken” family.

 - 2013

The family tree that Tanya posts on Ancestry.com was discovered by Torrey and Green, who reach out to Fisher and realize they’ve connected with Pointer’s eighth-generation direct descendants.

 - 2015

Pointer family begins sharing the family history and rallying to hold a first-even family reunion at the old homesite. A two-day reunion in August 2015 at the very land where their family ties began brought together many who didn’t even know each other.

 - Spring 2016

HCCDC, once learning about the newly uncovered facts regarding Black removal from Broad Branch, began to consider how to address the issue. An oral history of James Fisher and Tanya Hardy was conducted in March 2016, about the same time Torrey and  Green’s article about the Pointer connection was published in the Washington History magazine.

 - 2018-2019

HCCDC collects more than 500 signatures for a petition to honor Black landowners by adding “Pointer” to the name of Lafayette Park and a new recreation center under construction. HCCDC lobbies the ANC to support the request, which votes unanimously in July 2019 to propose legislation to the D.C. Council. Among its supporters is former DC Councilman Brandon Todd. DC Mayor Muriel Bowser announced her early support when she attended the groundbreaking of the new rec center.

 - 2020

The grassroots effort to acknowledge this history by changing the name of the park to Lafayette-Pointer Park was joined by a group of Lafayette Elementary School students who wrote letters of support to members of the DC City Council.  Finally, in December 2020, after Covid-related delays in the legislative process, the DC Council approves the measure, making George Pointer an officially recognized figure. Meanwhile HCCDC successfully lobbies the DC Department of Parks and Recreation to fund two historic signs at Lafayette-Pointer Park to disseminate and codify this important history.

 - January 2021

HCCDC Partners with the University of the District of Columbia to conduct oral histories of Broad Branch descendants by young college students.

 - June 2021

Two historic signs honoring the African Americans who lived for generations on Dry Meadows were unveiled at a well-attended community celebration at Lafayette-Pointer Park. Several descendants of the families who had been displaced attended the ceremony to hear speeches by DC Mayor Bowser and other luminaries acknowledge the racist actions that took place a century before. Among the most poignant voices were those of two Lafayette students who helped run the letter drive to get the name changed.

 - Summer 2021

Georgetown University Press publishes Torrey & Green’s book, Between Freedom and Equality: The History of an African American Family in Washington, DC

 - June 2023

Descendants participate in a virtual webinar hosted by HCCDC and the ANC 3/4G Committee on Race and Social Equity to talk about what this type of racial displacement cost their families and society in general, and to share their personal experiences with the rediscovery of this family story. Snippets from a pre-recorded conversation between descendants and the Rev. William H. Lamar, pastor of Metropolitan AME Church in Washington, DC., were aired as part of the webinar.

 - October 2023

The National Park Service honors George Pointer’s 250th Birthday in October 2023 by hosting a celebration at Great Falls National Park in Virginia and by using an illustration of Pointer on next year’s Great Falls Park Pass. (photo of illustration to be on park pass)