For decades, visitors to the Hampton National Historic Site could tour what was once one of the country’s grandest houses and learn about the Ridgely family’s vast landholdings. They could marvel at the deep reds and bright yellows of the parlors, the whale-oil-lamp chandeliers in the dining room, the grand gardens outside next to a giant cedar tree.

What they wouldn’t hear about were the more than 500 enslaved men and women who made the empire possible: the iron workers who forged the cannons, the dairy maids who churned the butter, the gardeners who painstakingly dug out those terraced showpieces. They were the backbone of the plantation and the 25,000 acres over which it sprawled — an area now covered by thousands of private homes in Towson, White Marsh and Lutherville.

Hampton’s story began to change in 1999, when the National Park Service opened the property’s enslaved quarters on occasional weekends.

By 2016, the Park Service embarked on a full-scale genealogy project led by University of Maryland archaeologist Cheryl Janifer LaRoche that traced the lineage of hundreds of formerly enslaved persons. Since then, the Park Service has partnered with Goucher College, which sits on land once part of the plantation, and East Towson, a neighborhood where many formerly enslaved families settled, to tell the history of how slavery affected three distinct places.

Now, Hampton historians worry that this lens on a Maryland family’s harsh treatment of their enslaved servants could be obscured. After President Donald J. Trump ordered the elimination of all diversity, equity and inclusion efforts across the federal government, the Air Force removed Tuskegee Airmen information from its sites, only returning it after an outcry. The National Cryptologic Museum briefly covered up accomplishments of women and people of color. Park Service pages detailing the suffering at Japanese internment camps and the battle for gay rights at the Stonewall National Monument were briefly inaccessible. When the Stonewall page returned, the Park Service had removed any reference to transgender individuals. Could slavery, some worried, be far behind?

Hampton is the first home acquired by the National Park Service — in 1947.

Staff declined to speak about any possible changes; the main Park Service spokesperson would not comment.

Several partners have said that it’s the website, far more than the tour, that elucidates the history of Black land and people in northern Baltimore County. The tour, while more inclusive than it was 25 years ago, still glosses over much of the abuse.

For example, a guide recently lauded the Ridgelys for freeing Nancy Davis, one of the children’s beloved caregivers. It does not mention that, when the Ridgelys freed Nancy’s mother decades earlier, they kept Nancy enslaved, separating her from her mother. That information is on the website, though.

The threat of erasure of Black history after the painstaking work to reconstruct it alarms LaRoche. Many former plantation sites in Maryland barely mention slavery, let alone undertake complex studies with federal support.

“No one has done what Hampton has done,” she said. “We have elevated the accuracy for all of the people visiting. And we have given this history back to the people of Hampton.”

Hampton’s history also explains how Baltimore County became one of Maryland’s most segregated counties, according to Towson University anthropologist Sam Collins.

First, the end of slavery in Maryland in 1864 unraveled the plantation economy. The Ridgelys unloaded large chunks of land, but only to white farmers. In 1929, the Ridgelys founded the Hampton Development Co. and attached covenants that read, in part: “at no time shall the land included in said tract or any part thereof, or any building erected thereon, be occupied by a Negro or a person of Negro extraction.” Other white farmers that developed land followed this practice, too.

Some Towson neighborhoods still have these racist covenants on the books, even though they were nullified by fair-housing laws more than 50 years ago and are no longer enforceable.

Next, Collins wrote, came zoning changes that reinforced segregation and an all-white County Council controlling it. That continued until 2002, when the county carved out a majority-Black district on the west side and voters there elected their first African-American representative. It remains the only county district with a Black councilman.

Today, Hampton, just northeast of Towson past Interstate 695, has no apartments and no public transit other than a few bus stops along Dulaney Valley Road. Its Black population is less than 1%, according to census records. The council district that includes Hampton has both the largest land area and the lowest percentage of voting-age Black residents in the county 7%. With about 120,000 residents in each district, that amounts to around 8,000 people.

Hampton’s Black families settled where they could buy property, including in the East Towson and Sandy Bottom communities. Politicians rezoned and destroyed Sandy Bottom in the 1970s when they built the county’s jail and several shopping centers along York Road northwest of downtown Towson.

East Towson remains strong, with many Hampton descendants. In an 1866 letter to his nephew, Julian White, Charles Ridgely derisively called the area “a haven of rest to the emancipated darkies” and said he frequently recognized some of his formerly enslaved men and women among them. Despite hardships, the institutions that formerly enslaved Marylanders built — churches, community centers and benevolent societies — remain.

Nancy Goldring, president of the Northeast Towson Improvement Association, said circumstances there are far better than in 1853, when one freed slave, Daniel Harris, paid $187.50 for little more than an acre and founded the community. But the struggles continue — a bypass road, an electrical substation and multiple affordable housing developments have cut into the community. East Towson had 300 families in the 1920s; it has fewer than 75 today.

“African Americans in East Towson are directly connected to enslavement terror, lynching, environmental injustice and the continued breach of our civil rights,” Goldring said in a speech to the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project in 2022. “These practices may have become or grown more subtle in their execution, but they have not stopped or been mitigated in their determination to go forth.”

Goldring continues to work with Goucher and the Park Service on a planned land bridge to connect the three properties. She said she is finally “able to see a positive, sustainable, generative and inclusive way forward.”

If the Trump administration pushes the removal of LaRoche’s research, the information will live elsewhere, LaRoche said. Removing the truth, she said, won’t change that it happened.

“If you want a different history told, the solution is not to lie about it,” LaRoche said. “The solution is to act differently.”