Beall Dawson House

Beall Dawson House. Location: 103 West Montgomery Avenue. , Upton Beall, wealthy landowner and clerk of the court, owned 25 slaves when he died in 1827. Although the family did not purchase additional slaves after his death, the three Beall sisters owned 52 individuals by 1860., The Beall family did not sell the children of their slaves. The slaves worked in the house, on the farm or at one of the other family properties. The Bealls did hire out slaves for service to families in Washington, D.C., and many of the slaves resided with those families., In 1862, an act of Congress ending slavery in the nation's capital freed 17 of the Beall sisters' slaves, as they were in Washington, D.C., at the time. The Beall sisters filed for and received $9,400 for them under a federal compensation program. The remaining slaves were freed when emancipation was granted in Maryland in 1864. The Bealls sold land along Martin's Lane to their former slaves, where some of them had lived during their enslavement. Those families had long made up a mixed free and enslaved African-American community called "Haiti."