Post 1--St. Luke’s Church: Relationships, Spare Time, and the Spirit of a Community

By: Brianna Baker

        I spent the month of July 2022 in Bellevue, MD as a student-worker during the "Black Life in Bellevue" field school. I was commissioned along with nine other black professionals to study the architectural and environmental history of this tiny town on Maryland's Eastern Shore. It seems that after emancipation, some of the African Americans once enslaved on the Clay’s Hope plantation moved across the Tar Creek River, in full view of the big house and their former enslavers, and established what would become a thriving self-sufficient community. From the late 19^th century to the last decade of the 20^th, Bellevue was sustained primarily by crabpickers, oyster farmers, watermen and—as one local woman will not let anyone soon forget—waterwomen.

        Researchers have been intrigued for decades by Bellevue’s successful, black-owned seafood canneries and self-sufficient economic structure, but these institutions were built on the bedrock of community. On the clock, generations of families spent hours in the canneries singing as they cleaned crabs, building their own schooners, and training their children to do the same. Off the clock, they spent time caring for each other and bearing one another’s burdens—over a seafood stew or a crab boil of course. These are the undercurrents that have and continue to define Black Life in Bellevue; the historical superstructure that is woven throughout this town’s history and legacy. I discovered it not in the classroom with my amazing colleagues, but over dinner at the De Shield’s, sitting on the front porch taking in the breezes of the Tred Avon, and greeting locals as I walked the streets of Bellevue. I wish to unpack this phenomenon through three venues where I experienced what I will call “the spirit of Bellevue:” St. Luke’s United Methodist church, the Bellevue-Oxford ferry, and on the waters of the Tar Creek river. These venues were significant to my work and relationship with the community, significant to local history, and representative of the values that have sustained Bellevue for 250 plus years.

        St. Luke’s was the base of operations for the field school, and it was once the base of Bellevue’s community. We heard in oral interviews how its pews were once filled with Bellevue locals who gathered to more than worship God. They came for breakfast, voter registration, speeches from government officials, mingling with neighbors, and biblical encouragement. We found it this summer as the shell of a dispersed and largely deceased congregation. My pastor has a saying that I think explains what has happened at St. Luke’s: “the church has left the building.” It means that the few hours we spend in church do not define a congregation, but how we live when we leave does. I would propose that what started along that dirt road at St Luke’s has not been lost but has “left the building” in a way. I saw this spirit of community, Christian ethics, education, and hard work as I walked the streets named after the founding fathers of Bellevue, was welcomed into homes built a hundred plus years ago as a refuge in a hostile world, and in the eyes of the descendants of resilient, skilled, and intelligent African Americans. I am honored to have been a part of such a project to preserve the history of Bellevue, and I look forward to sharing more of their story and mine with you.

To learn more and support the people of Bellevue and their partners, please visit the following:

Bellevue Passage Museum: https://bellevuepassagemuseum.org/

Water's Edge Museum: https://www.watersedgemuseum.org/

"Black Life in Bellevue" Field School: https://www.washcoll.edu/learn-by-doing/ces/black-life-bellevue.php