Scrapple and San Domingo, which originated as a free Black community established in 1820, were the focus of the day during a recent farm tour in Maryland.
In a place and at a time when the slave trade was at its strongest, and when most Black people classified as free lived on property owned by others, San Domingo’s founders owned and tended land, set up businesses, built a church and a school, raised families, and generally created a close-knit, thrifty and self-sufficient community that coexisted peacefully with the white towns around them well into the mid-1900s.