Their journey to unearth a cemetery for enslaved people led to communitywide interest
CHEVY CHASE, Md. — Rachel Perić was pushing her stroller through her neighborhood in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic when she noticed an older home with a log cabin on the property — something she hadn't noticed before. She went home and logged in to the Chevy Chase Historical Society's website looking for information.
Perić learned that in the 1800s, Chevy Chase consisted of farms and slaveholding plantations. "That was a huge surprise to me," Perić says. "It wasn't the history that I had grown up with. So I kept digging."
Chevy Chase is made up of about a dozen subdivisions, including Rollingwood, where Perić lives — an affluent, quiet, leafy suburb of Washington, D.C.
On the historical society's website, Perić came across a 1997 report written by the Montgomery County Historic Preservation Commission. She says, "There was this reference to a burial ground where people who had been enslaved on these farms were buried. And I said, 'What is this?'"
She recalls vivid memories of long nights when she would be "sitting hunched over my phone, waiting for my children to fall asleep at night, poring through these historical society records."
Nationwide historically, Black burial
