Press Room

Eric Hartley: A real chance to preserve the past

By ERIC HARTLEY

Published February 17, 2008

Mostly impassable, hilly and overgrown with a snarling maze of brambles and trees, this old cemetery looks like anything but hallowed ground. But that's what happens to the past, isn't it? Years pass, and memories are buried under something new until they're all but forgotten, like the people who may still lie beneath the woods in back of Ruth Berger's house.

This land on Back Creek in Annapolis used to be called the Pinkney Cemetery, named for a pioneering African-American family believed to have buried its loved ones here starting in the late 1800s.

Now the owner of neighboring Blue Heron Marina, Steve Rogers, wants to buy the land. Neighbors don't know what he wants to do with it, and Mr. Rogers didn't return my calls. His wife wouldn't comment when I stopped by their house on Friday.

But some are worried he wants to expand his small marina, whose asphalt parking lot ends where the woods begin, or build something else on the land.

This is only the latest push by neighbors and historians to protect the .62-acre parcel.

Regardless of what Mr. Rogers plans are, they're tired of fighting the same fight every time a development looms and hope to preserve the land for good this time.

Local historian Janice Hayes-Williams, who also writes a column for The Capital, promised to "fight it tooth and nail." City Alderman Sam Shropshire, a Democrat whose Ward 7 includes the cemetery, said he will help.

Ms. Berger and Ms. Hayes-Williams, who's been looking into where Pinkney family patriarch London Pinkney is buried, said they'd like to see the land owned by a conservancy or trust, perhaps with a marker noting the history of the site.

That would be especially appropriate in this year, the 300th anniversary of Annapolis' charter, with the city in the midst of a lavish yearlong celebration of its history.

The downtown costume ball and lecture series are all very nice, and there are plenty of markers honoring Annapolitans' white forefathers, but here's a chance to preserve a real and forgotten piece of history.

"It was once consecrated ground," Ms. Hayes-Williams said.

London Pinkney was an important member of the black community who owned about 90 acres in this part of Annapolis. Indeed, this whole area of Annapolis was important in the development of free African-American culture in the decades following abolition. Not far away is Highland Beach, a historically black town.

Walter Czerwinski, who bought the "cemetery lot" in 1990, applied to build a home there in 1999, but lost on environmental grounds. Mr. Czerwinski has died, and his nephew is closing his estate.

The lot behind Ms. Berger's house is marked on old maps, deeds and other papers as "cemetery lot." Decades ago, you could still see evidence of the old brick crypts. But these days, you can't see any headstones or other evidence of what used to be there.

Ms. Berger, who showed me around the land, is vibrant for her age, which she will only give with a laugh as "old."

A lifelong nature buff who spent time in Alaska studying wildlife during her work as a virologist, she ticked off the animals she's seen on and around her property and the Pinkney lot: white egrets, foxes, deer, ducks, Canada geese and more.

Including, ironically, blue herons, the namesake bird of the marina next door.

"We do all this talk about 'saving the environment,' but it's one little piece at a time, the way I look at it," Ms. Berger said.

"It does more for the welfare of Back Creek than all these fees we pay on our utility bills and all that," Ms. Berger, who bought her home in 1987, said of the open land. "It's a great spot for a little bit of nature to clean up what a lot of people do.

"It's a haven. I don't know where all these birds and animals would go."

And, she'll admit, there's a bit of self interest, too: "I paid a premium for this property because I was promised it would be open."

The way Ms. Hayes-Williams sees it, we've destroyed enough of history in the name of progress. Elsewhere in the city, on Acton Lane, there are townhouses on top of what was once a cemetery, she said.

Can't we leave this tiny spit of land alone, both for nature and out of respect? Is nothing sacred?

Published Feb. 17, 2008, The Capital, Annapolis, Md.
Copyright © 2008 The Capital, Annapolis, Md.