Free African Americans of Oxon Hill

Free African Americans of Oxon Hill. . , Free Blacks Owned Parts of Oxon Hill Manor , By the end of the 1700s, there were a number of free African American families living in the Oxon Hill area. Several of these free blacks were manumitted by members of the Addison family, including brothers John Addison, Thomas G. Addison, Rev. Walter Dulany Addison and their cousin Anthony Addison., Charles Beall, a free black man, purchased his wife, Henny and their children from Thomas G. Addison and manumitted them in 1796. Beall also manumitted Thomas and Margaret Moore in 1809., Between 1812 and 1818, Charles Beall acquired about 113 acres of Oxon Hill Manor from Rev. Walter Dulany Addison. Methodist preachers who visited Oxon Hill in the 1790s noted the presence of a meeting house in the area. Charles Beall dedicated a ½ acre of his Oxon Hill land for the construction of a Methodist Episcopal Church. A later church on this tract was destroyed by fire in the 1950s and all that remains is the burial ground., Several of the Addisons' freed slaves settled on Addison land along the east side of the Anacostia River in Washington, DC in the 1830s. By the 1860s the communities of Anacostia, Stantontown or Hillsdale, and Good Hope were largely occupied by free blacks, including members of the Addison and Moore families. The 1878 Hopkins Atlas of 15 Miles Around Washington Including County of Prince George, Maryland shows Addisons and Moores in the Good Hope and Stantontown communities in Southeast Washington. Many of their descendents still reside on this land., African-Americans of Good Hope, Lemuel Robert Addison (1881 - unknown) and his wife Mary Ellen Moore (1882-1976) were among several African-American families living in Good Hope during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mary Ellen Moore was a descendent of Thomas Moore, an Oxon Hill slave who was manumitted by Charles Beall in 1809. After obtaining his freedom, Moore lived for a time in the Oxon Hill community before moving to Good Hope in the years prior to the Civil War.