Major Charles and Laura Douglass Town Hall at Highland Beach

Major Charles and Laura Douglass Town Hall at Highland Beach. . , In 1892, Major Charles Douglass, youngest son of Frederick Douglass, and Charles' wife Laura, were turned away from a restaurant at the Bay Ridge Resort and Amusement Park because of their race. The resort was separated by a narrow channel, the mouth of the Black Walnut Creek, from property owned by a local black family. Crossing the channel, it was through a chance encounter between a member of the Brashears family and Charles and Laura Douglass that the origins of Highland Beach are rooted. In the spring of 1893, they settled on the purchase of twenty-six and two-thirds acres of land that would become Highland Beach. And almost a century later, in 1988, Highland Beach annexed the eight-acre Dr. John E. Washington tract., By 1894, Douglass had built the first cottage, establishing a retreat for himself and others on the Chesapeake Bay. With 600 feet of beachfront, he turned it into a summer enclave for family and friends. Frederick Douglass, famed activist and for abolition and women's suffrage, orator, publisher, diplomat and advisor to President Abraham Lincoln, perhaps the most famous black man of his time, and one of the most photographed personalities in our nation's history, would have become a resident had he not died in 195 before the summer home, that his son Charles was building for him, was completed. The Town of Highland Beach became a gathering place for educated blacks, including many of the well-known blacks of the time and later years.