On a rainy Wednesday evening at a public hearing about a proposed public garden — Howard County’s first — there seemed to be an elephant in the room.

About a dozen or so people spoke and offered ideas to the county’s garden focus group last month about what native plants they want to see when the garden, to be located on a former plantation along Route 97 in the western part of the county, comes to fruition.

Will there be edible plants? How will the garden be sustainable and accessible? Let’s avoid invasive plants. I want a seat at the table! Model the garden after the Mt. Cuba Center in Delaware.

Three people, meanwhile, spoke up about something else: The site’s history of enslavement, and the importance of learning more about it.

Marlena Jareaux, executive director of the Howard County Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Inc., spoke at the public hearing and submitted written testimony, where she described the need to fully tell the story of the Longwood property in Glenwood.

“In these times, truth should be paramount,” Jareaux wrote. “I am famous for saying in presentations that even uncomfortable truths hold value, because they make communities have to decide who they are today.”

Before finalizing a master plan for the garden, Jareaux said, the site’s history should be established.

“When people are standing there on the same grounds where you know that someone else did long ago and what those people’s stories are, it really has the power to be transformative for people,” she said. “It can help refine the garden’s shaping, it can create empathy with and for people who don’t necessarily look like you. I believe our society needs that.”

County officials said they plan to fully research the site’s history and acknowledge it as part of their process to plan and develop the public garden.

When it comes to getting the history right, Jareaux is no rookie. Last year, her history nonprofit corrected the historical record about a log cabin in Ellicott City.

Jareaux said in an interview with The Baltimore Banner that one of the biggest values of looking at history is for the community to see how far it has come.

Maryland had about 90,000 enslaved people and more than 74,000 free Black people in 1850, according to the Maryland State Archives; it was common for enslaved people to see free Black people living out the dream they desperately craved.

The garden will be located somewhere on the nearly 100-acre Longwood property. The land has soft hills and lush greenery along the perimeter, with a constant buzz of cicadas.

The property is anchored by a two-story, stone manor house that was built in the 1820s and received a major facelift in 1907, according to a Maryland Historical Trust form.

Visitors who make their way up the long driveway are greeted by two eagle statues, one of which is missing its wings, perched atop white brick columns. The road forks, and the white-columned house emerges in the green space between the two road branches.

Directly to the left, in a tree alcove, is a cemetery that on a recent day was perfectly lit by the afternoon sun. Worn tombstones mark the names of family members who once lived at Longwood. Some county residents also suspect that enslaved people are buried there.

Little is known about the day-to-day life of nonfamily members who lived or worked at Longwood, Jareaux said. Records show Dr. Gustavus Warfield, the son of a Revolutionary War veteran, acquired about 400 acres in 1813 that he renamed Longwood. Warfield is believed to have practiced medicine at the property and might have used Longwood as a hospital, and it possibly was the county’s first doctor’s office, records state.

But first things first. Jareaux said figuring out the correct history of the property should be the priority. And then, the garden focus group and the county can decide how best to honor the history, whether it be through a memorial, markings, exhibits or displays.

Changing hands

The Longwood property is currently owned by Walnut Springs Nursery, Inc., which has a wholesale plant store across the street. The family-owned and -operated grower of annuals was founded in 1964 by J. Alvin Smith.

According to 2016 article in The Baltimore Sun, Smith acquired the property in 1998 when he learned that the property was going to be subdivided for development.

“I fell in love with this place,” Smith said. “I could come over after a stressful day in the business and it’s so peaceful. This is a place where you can dream about all kinds of projects.”

The owners were unavailable for comment.

The county expects to own the property by the end of the year, said Nick Mooneyhan, the county’s recreation and parks director.

In April, County Executive Calvin Ball announced the county’s plans to build the public garden at Longwood.

He put together a 14-person focus group made up of residents and horticulture experts to offer recommendations. The group first met in May, held a public hearing in July, and has been gathering one to two times a month.

Ball has said the group will present its plan to him, and then disband in December, which is when the planning phase will begin. The current fiscal year budget includes $400,000 for design of the garden. It is unclear what the county is paying for land acquisition.

Mooneyhan said the county Department of Recreation and Parks will be in charge of upkeep.

Acknowledging history

Stephanie Oberle, the chair of the focus group, wrote in response to emailed questions that the group cannot speculate on how best to reflect the historical aspects of Longwood at the future garden because the “County has not yet chartered a historical study of the site that would inform that interpretive message.”

She said its history is important, and that the focus group is looking at both the human and natural history.

“The Focus Group agrees that it is important to acknowledge the history of [the] site and honor the people who lived and worked there,” Oberle said in an email. “But it’s beyond the scope of our work to decide exactly what that will look like.”

At the July public hearing, focus group members emphasized the importance of placing a monument or marker at or near the future garden.

Jareaux agreed that it isn’t the focus group’s job, nor are they equipped to discover the actual history, and that it will take a separate process with history experts.

Mooneyhan said he plans to approach the garden planning with regard to the site’s history in a thoughtful way.

“Our goal is not to just erase the history of the site with a public garden, so we plan on engaging in a public process,” he said.

But, he said, it’s too early to say what that process will look like.

“What we do know of the history of the site is that it had several uses in the past, which included a site in which human enslavement occurred,” Mooneyhan said.

Once the focus group’s work is done, Mooneyhan said, the county will hire consultants, possibly including archaeologists, to research the history. The goal will be to have the research inform many elements of the garden and on-site programming.

“We need to ensure that the most accurate history of the site is available before we can get to that effort,” he said.

Misconceptions

After Ball announced plans for the public garden, Jareaux said, many took to social media to express hope that those with ancestors who had been at Longwood would be provided a place to reflect, among other things. She also saw many people make assumptions about the on-site cemetery, where a tombstone bears the name of someone named Peggy Fosset.

“I got alarmed right away when I saw that everybody was hanging their hat on Peggy and the notion that the cemetery that was on the site, that it’s a slave cemetery,” she said.

Jareaux said Fosset was not a slave, adding that she knows this because Fosset appears in the 1850 Census as a free Black person in the Longwood house. Still, some assume that she was a slave because of her identification on a Maryland Historical Trust form for the property.

“The marked grave outside the cemetery contains the inscription ‘To our faithful nurse / Peggy Fosset / Born 18 Jan. 1795 / Died 25 June 1865 / By Dr. and Mrs. Warfield and / their children / Longwood.’ Peggy Fosset was likely a slave,” says the MHT form for Longwood.

These assumptions were the catalyst for Jareaux to post a blog about Peggy, whose legal name was Margaret Fosset.

“People, for decades, had simply been going by … what was on those MHT forms and then just running wild with it, as opposed to anybody actually doing the research in primary source records that is required in order to be able to have some semblance of what the truth really is,” she said.

Going forward, Jareaux said she is pushing to find out more about the property because even if the history isn’t always pretty, it’s always something to learn from.

“While there was talk of a monument being there, understand that the entire site will also be a monument,” she said in her written testimony to the focus group. “Monuments often make us reckon with who we have been and allow us to compare it to who we say we want to be. How far have we come on that collective societal path? What work remains to be done? These are individual decisions as well as a collective one.”