“Oak Hill” was the name of the main dwelling estate of Benjamin Lee who owned land on what is now called West Kettering. Lee acquired the land from Samuel Sprigg who owned the large estate on the patents Northampton and Kettering. The estate is said to have been between what is now Central Avenue and Largo Road, west of Watkins Regional Park. It sat west of the Western Branch.
Benjamin Lee was a doctor and large landowner, acquiring land throughout the first half of the 1800s. He married Eleanor Belt, the daughter of a merchant, Captain James Belt. His brother-in-law, Marsham Waring, was a neighboring Catholic landowner. Both men enslaved large numbers of people on their estates in the western part of Queen Anne District.
Inventory of Enslaved People
Benjamin Lee died in 1863, during the Civil War. (WAJ 3:127) His nephew, James Waring, and Joseph K Roberts appraised his personal property creating the inventory, which contained the given names and ages of the people enslaved by Lee on his estates. The farming tools and livestock were designated as being on the dwelling estate, the “Chelsea” farm and the “Stewart” farm. The people named in the inventory would have labored not only in the home to polish the sideboards, dining tables, secretaries, dust the China Vases and chandlers, and plated candlesticks, but also in the fields. The labor forced from those he enslaved also cared for the multiple horses, the pigs, the sheep and the cattle, as wells cultivating corn, tobacco and wheat fields.
The purpose of this page and the posts is to use Benjamin Lee’s inventory with other records (e.g., White Marsh baptisms, death certificates, census records) to identify the family groups enslaved by Lee and to recreate the kin groups as those enslaved by Lee connected with the broader Black community in Queen Anne District.
stories of Then 