Lost Legacy: The Search for a Descendant Community

Summary

Catoctin Furnace is a community at the base of the Catoctin Mountains in Frederick County, Maryland, that descends from a thriving iron-working village. From the furnace’s foundation in 1776, European immigrants and enslaved African-Americans comprised its labor force, producing the iron tools and armaments that powered a growing nation until the furnace’s demise in 1903.

From the Revolution until the mid-19th century, the iron furnace and associated agrarian enterprises relied primarily on the labor of enslaved Africans. Many descendants of the European immigrant laborers who replaced the enslaved and free blacks live in the village, but knowledge of the lineage of the African-American workers has been lost. Through DNA and genealogical research; oral history; and online databases such as 23andme, Ancestry.com, and GEDmatch; we are searching for the descendant population of the enslaved workers to reunite them with their heritage and legacy.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• From Pages to Pits: Using Texts and Archaeological Evidence to Examine Interconnected Trading Networks in the mid-Atlantic   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018

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Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 1086