SAN DOMINGO, Md.— Newell Quinton would have known just about any face that ducked in to escape the Eastern Shore heat.
He remembers watching customers weave among canned foods, bologna, wheels of cheese and oil canisters as he helped keep an eye on his great-uncle’s general store as a teen in the late 1950s. Shops just 15 miles down the road might have turned Black customers away, but no signs would limit entry for fellow neighbors in this pocket of Wicomico County, Maryland.
On weekdays, some patrons didn’t have enough money. But Uncle Norman had taught Quinton the drill early: Jot it down in the ledger and “settle up” after payday.
Other days the debt may have been covered by produce, chickens, eggs or another commodity in an unofficial bartering system. Locals were carpenters, plumbers, mechanics, teachers and basically extended family.
It was the mindset Quinton — or “Sky” to those who knew him well — grew up with. Everything you need is right here. Stay close.
That mindset sustained one community for nearly two centuries.
In early 1800s, while a slave state raged around them, a village unlike many others formed on marshy land just inland from the Nanticoke River. Plantations stretched across the Lower Shore, present-day Somerset, Wicomico and Worcester counties. Thousands were forced to work on the land pinched between the Atlantic Ocean and Chesapeake Bay — but San Domingo grew its own community. The self-sufficient enclave of over 600 free Black people formed under founders who owned land, set up businesses, built a church and later opened a school.
The tight community coexisted among rural towns throughout segregation, Jim Crow-era discrimination and on, well into the mid-1900s. Today it is a shadow of that former self. Just a few hundred, mostly Black residents live in the census-designated place roughly two hours southeast of Baltimore, near the Delaware border, with a church, a food bank, some homesteads.
And yet, history and meaning live on through its latest generations. The community hopes to celebrate its annual Founders Day, come April 14, barring COVID-19 precautions. After two pandemic years of cancelation, there’s hope to share their stories once again.
One damp morning in February, Quinton carried that idea into the same wooden school he spent his early elementary years. The 77-year-old unlocked the San Domingo Community and Cultural Center, a yellow, two-story schoolhouse restored in 2004, and cleared the foyer in a few strides.
He pulled space heaters across the floorboards, promising the room washed in natural light from grand windows would warm up soon. More footsteps bounced around the room.
His community had historically endeavored to avoid all attention in this place, to thrive quietly in a remote corner of a world that didn’t seem to welcome them.
Now, families like his want to share a story.
Two sides of the same shore
Tom Horton grew up about 12 miles away. He thought he knew every corner of his Eastern Shore playground.
Roads and waterways alike crisscrossed the rural countryside surrounding Federalsburg, Maryland. Horton still remembers his priorities as a teenager. If the white, Caroline County native wasn’t hunting or fishing with his father, he would be riding his bike or driving aimlessly in his car. Saturday nights would find him at the Tastee Freez, hot summer afternoons on basketball courts.
Other days he’d just explore the woods — his own town of a couple thousand not far from the Nanticoke River.
“It was a fairly idyllic existence back then, in the ’50s and ’60s,” said the former Baltimore Sun reporter of over 30 years.
“You could go anywhere you wanted.”
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He would graduate high school just before desegregation began. He’d leave the Shore to work in Baltimore, to report extensively on the environment and later pen books about the Chesapeake Bay region.
But it wasn’t until he wanted to build his own house back home, around 2000, that Horton would encounter a cultural treasure he’d never noticed nearly a dozen miles from where he was raised.
“I began building a house about three miles from San Domingo and still didn’t know it existed,” said Horton, today a filmmaker and Salisbury University adjunct professor. “But I ride my bike a lot, and at some point, I just rode through there. And I thought, ‘My gosh, this is a community.’”
This seclusion came by early design.
Combing through census records in 1810 would yield very few free Black residents on the Lower Shore — then all “Somerset County” — as researcher Mary Klein recalls it. The historian began digging into her master’s thesis at Salisbury University by the early ’90s, looking to study the lives of free Black people in Somerset.
The next decade would light up.
“What was so shocking was the 1820 census,” said the now-archivist with the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland. “To find page after page of free Blacks living together. Between 1810 and 1820, somehow, this large group of free Black people decided to band together for all kinds of reasons, I’m sure.”
Klein could see names, property records, occupations. She could even see multiple freedom certificates describing free Black individuals down to the last chillingly specific detail — 5 feet and a half inch tall, “dark copper color,” missing “the first joint of her middle finger on her right hand,” a scar under the chin, “very pert in her talk.”
But many facets of San Domingo’s early origins maintained an air of mystery.
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Nobody knows exactly how or why San Domingo came into being. Residents were listed as having a range of jobs, from mariners and shipbuilders to grocers and farmers. Many owned and worked acres in the hundreds.
Their community’s name also offered its own clue left at open ends.
Many residents, like Newell Quinton, believe founders like a man named James Brown came to the area by boat from Haiti and surrounding islands, following the largest slave rebellion in the Western Hemisphere. Around 1800, former slaves on the French Caribbean Island of Santo Domingo revolted, taking over the minority white government, killing residents and proclaiming independence.
The uprising sent waves of fear through slave-holding communities, as well as waves of refugees — not only the white planters and slaves but also free people.
“I always thought the choice of the name had to mean something big,” Klein said, thinking back to her research nearly two decades ago. “Everybody knew about Santo Domingo, about the slave uprising and the murder of all the slave owners. Certainly, the white enslavers knew that.”
No record exists to prove the intention. Whether named to keep people out, or inspire an internal culture of collaboration and autonomy, San Domingo thrived under an intentionally low profile as decades continued.
Residents owned cattle, hogs, sheep and more. There was some manufacturing, a shoe business, according to Klein, and residents hardly had to leave the community. Over the years, many found work in nearby white towns, though likely returning to San Domingo by sundown.
“They seemed to be surviving,” Klein said. “Not just surviving but owning land and being self-sufficient in a slave society that existed outside the confines of their little community.”
Threats to that existence would only change shape.
Safe haven in changing tides
Newell Quinton pulled white tables into a circle, as about a dozen other residents shuffled into the restored school. The youngest among them was 53.
As space heaters made no dent in the morning chill, Quinton, his sister Alma Hackett, her son Thaddeus and many more faces bundled in chairs. They filled what was once, for some, their own first-grade classroom — the structure one of thousands in Rosenwald Schools built for Black children across the South in the early 1900s.
San Domingo’s history stretched further.
Nearly half the population of free Black people in Somerset County lived in San Domingo by 1820, Klein found in her research. Over 100 households were planted there, while over 6,000 slaves were recorded on the Shore.
In the county’s “First Election District” — being all towns west of Salisbury at the time — 10% of the population were free Black people and an estimated 10% of the district’s commerce occurred in San Domingo, according to a 36-page pamphlet from Klein’s research. “These Roots Were Free,” just a fraction of her thesis, remains the only academic study of San Domingo.
Jim Crow segregation persisted from post-Civil War to the late 1960s.
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At least 40 of over 4,000 Black Americans lynched between 1865 and 1950 in the Jim Crow era were killed in Maryland. Three men were lynched in the city of Salisbury alone. The state’s last recorded lynching took place in Princess Anne, some 30 miles south of San Domingo, 89 years ago.
Back in the school, family names from Goslee to Stanley and back to Brown would repeat around the room. Each voice marked a different connection to the land families carried for generations and the community they remembered.
Hackett and Quinton shared stories of their mother, laughing together about working in the fields as seasons changed, storing money to put toward school. They described a close-knit community, where neighbors shared what they had, and nearly any good or service could be found knocking on the right door.
Many recalled work coming outside of San Domingo, from housekeeping to manufacturing or packaging plants, as well as the importance of focusing on education, which also largely came outside. Some described refuge from the most hateful Jim Crow discrimination, while others knew to avoid areas where they were unwanted.
One thread persisted: San Domingo never ceased to offer safe haven.
“I didn’t realize that our parents and grandparents were protecting us from so many ills of society,” Quinton said, he and all seven siblings going on to graduate from now-Morgan State University. “When I came home, I felt safe. I felt relaxed. I felt comfortable. I knew of the ills of society, but I didn’t have to deal with it because I was protected by our own community, our own lifestyle.”
He joined the Army and later led a four-decade career in federal government. Never staying away for long periods, even while working in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, there wasn’t much question of where Quinton would retire.
“When I went out into the world, I always had to be on guard,” he said. “San Domingo was a refuge. All of us felt that way.”
What’s the future for San Domingo?
He grew up on San Domingo Road. Even at 31, Jamaad Gould remembers the same air of cooperation his elders discuss with romance. He rode bikes, meeting the other kids of the community at the park or by the green electrical box.
He always knew faces in his New Zion United Methodist church — another San Domingo epicenter — but he would never have expected to marry the girl he first saw there at 7 years old.
“Those are my earliest memories,” the educator said. “It’s just that that sense of belonging and everybody looking out for everybody.”
Gould didn’t realize how unique his community truly was, until he left.
Bowie State University, the historically Black institution pulling him across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge to central Maryland, opened his mind to more U.S. history than ever before. He had heard about Rosa Parks, heard of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Harriet Tubman.
“But we don’t hear much about the bravery of the people that existed during slavery,” he said, his fascination with his own hometown piqued.
“That’s something we can relate to — that courage, that spirit, that drive to start your own community. Wanting to feel like you belong somewhere, and then going and capturing it.”
The future is harder to study.
After many bike rides, Tom Horton’s own fascination with the small unincorporated township led to a short documentary. He sees the work as barely scraping the surface of “Saving San Domingo.”
Quinton is reminded by the restored school around him that some efforts to preserve his heritage persist — heritage that defied slave holders, put land and quality of life into the hands of free Black people and ultimately supported his own upbringing. It’s why he and his family started The John Quinton Foundation.
Other threats come at a painfully natural pace.
For the residents sitting around him, rundown houses, discarded trash, young people not returning and outsiders moving in without understanding their history is “heartbreaking.”
Gould saw his only chance of having success or making money in leaving San Domingo. He moved to Salisbury, and he plans soon to marry his fiancée, Brittany Marshall. He hopes one day he might buy up land in San Domingo to help preserve its history and combat what he sees as rural gentrification.
Quinton has all but become the spokesperson for history he doesn’t want to see vanish, giving hours of his time to advocacy. The center still hopes to pull hundreds in to discuss their community’s story on this Founders Day.
“It’s frightening,” the leader said, looking at the handful of people gathered. “Few people want to live outside of urban areas… Some people may return and build their homes here in areas like San Domingo — but I think, in time, these small African American communities will disappear.”
History, he said, and core values that held generations together must survive. And they must be shared.
“Things didn’t happen by accident,” he said. “Things happen by commitment and sacrifice.”
Kelly Powers is a culture reporter for the How We Live team — covering race, culture and identity for the USA TODAY Network’s Atlantic Region. Contact her at kepowers@gannett.com or (443) 694-0770, and follow her on Twitter @kpowers01.
