New Light on Hidden Lives: A Talk on Discovering the Histories of Hampton’s Enslaved Workers
In 1790, the Ridgely family’s Hampton Mansion was the largest house in the United States. Who worked to keep this enormous estate running efficiently? Who labored in the surrounding gardens and, a little farther away, in the lucrative, but treacherous iron furnaces? Although the Ridgely family hired indentured servants and free blacks, the estate depended on slave labor for over 100 years, ending only when Maryland State law ended the institution in 1864. The Ridgely’s owned over 500 enslaved people during that period.