A run for freedom
Gilbert was researching her family history in 2010 when she came across a runaway slave ad. The notice had been published in the Baltimore Sun in mid-August 1848, two days after a group of enslaved people had slipped away from a Methodist tent revival.
“$600 reward will be given for the delivery in Baltimore or Howard District Jail, or $200 for either, of the following described Negro Boys, who left the Camp Meeting at Hobbs’ School House.”
The third listed was Oliver, then 16, who was described as “a stout, thick set Black … about 5 feet 7 inches high.”
She stared at the words, imagining her great-great-grandfather’s peril.
“I realized, wow, you ran away and they were really coming for you. There was a reward. There was a bounty on your head,” she said. “You’re 16, and you decide that you’re going to leave your family, leave everything you know behind and go to some unknown place that you don’t even really know if it exists.”
Oliver, she said, was now alive for her.
A waiter at Richland, he’d been born on the 600-acre estate next door known as Walnut Grove, owned by Col. Gassaway Watkins, a Revolutionary War hero. Oliver, who had nine enslaved siblings, was the son of an enslaved cook at Walnut Grove, Cynthia Snowden, and Joseph Kelly, a free Black man. After Watkins died in 1840, his daughter Margaret inherited Oliver, but, with more servants than she could manage, she gave the boy — then about 8 years old — as a gift to her brother, William Watkins, a physician and the owner of Richland.
There, as he served Watkins in his dining room, the boy bore witness as the plantation’s enslaved people escaped or were sold down South.
First, Oliver’s sister Sarah fled. Then in 1842, his older brother Remus ran away. Later, he listened to the frantic protests of his cousin’s wife as Watkins sold William Dorsey — a trauma that would sear itself into Oliver’s memory.
In 1848, amid rumors that Watkins was considering selling all his enslaved people, a slave trader arrived at Richland and attempted to buy Oliver.
It was clear the time had come to find freedom.
Oliver would later recall listening at the camp revival as the Rev. R.W. Brown, an enslaver himself, warned the human property present to “obey your masters … be faithful, upright and industrious and great will be your reward.”