Cultural Landscape Report: Harmony Hall

Williams, Brenda; Redding, Stephanie Austin; Lawrence, Rebekah; Mitchell, S.; Kennedy, Adjoa

The Cultural Landscape Report (CLR) for Harmony Hall provides a site history summary of existing conditions documented in August 2023 and December 2023, analysis and evaluation of landscape changes and historical significance, recommended treatment for the study area landscape under NPS management, and an example concept for development and use if a future partner is identified. The CLR provides NPS with the information necessary to rehabilitate and preserve the cultural landscape and builds upon previous planning documents including the 2022 Development Concept Plan (DCP). The study area on Broad Creek in present-day Prince George’s County, Maryland, has been used by humans since the Late Archaic Period. Indigenous groups including the Piscataway and Nacotchtank used the land for seasonal hunting, fishing, and potentially settlement. European settlers began encroaching on these lands in the seventeenth century, bringing violence and diseases that led to the decline of the Indigenous populations. As settlement progressed, the area became home to two significant plantations: Battersea and Want Water, which thrived in tobacco cultivation, largely through the labor of enslaved people. These plantations were owned by various families over time, with Enoch Magruder acquiring both properties in the 1760s and constructing a Georgian-style manor house at Battersea, later known as Harmony Hall. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ownership of the properties changed frequently. After being sold to Robert Stein in 1892, the Stein family established a presence in the area, renaming it “Silesia” for their homeland in what was then Prussia. In 1929, Charles W. Collins, a White supremacist, bought Harmony Hall and altered the landscape to reflect a colonial revival style, erasing much of its previous character. After his death in 1964, his widow sold the land to the National Park Service, which intended to incorporate it into the George Washington Memorial Parkway. However, the parkway project stalled, and the site was left to deteriorate. The NPS leased the property to a horseback riding school in the 1980s, but after ongoing repairs were not completed, the lease ended in 1999. By the twenty-first century, the site had become overgrown. Harmony Hall was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. Although the nomination noted some outbuildings extant at that time and the Want Water manor house ruins, the statement of significance was based solely on the Harmony Hall manor house. Harmony Hall was listed as significant in the area of Architecture (now Criterion C). This CLR proposes the landscape possesses additional significance under Criteria A for Commerce, 1748–98, Criterion B for the site’s association with Charles Collins, 1929–64, and Criterion D for Archeology, and recommends 1708 to 1798 and 1929 to 1964 as the two periods of significance. The first period, 1708 to 1798, begins with the building of the Want Water manor house and concurrent development of a tobacco plantation on the tract, encompasses the development of Battersea (later Harmony Hall) as a tobacco plantation and residence, and ends with the last confirmed date that the official Broad Creek tobacco inspection warehouse at Want Water was in operation. The second period of significance, 1929 to 1964, remains largely as the CLI suggested to encompass Charles Collins’s years of ownership but extends it to 1964 through the end of Collins’s life. The proposed treatment for the Harmony Hall landscape will disrupt the segregationist narratives of the Collins Era, reveal the site’s erased Black history, and provide an inspirational framework for future partnership, community healing, and resilience within the tidal system. The treatment is presented in three parts: guidelines for protecting the historic character of the cultural landscape, initial treatment recommendations tailored to NPS management of the site before identifying a partnership, and an inspirational example of potential landscape treatment following the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards with a local partner. The partnership concept presents a long-term vision for the Harmony Hall landscape, incorporating both immediate stabilization needs and a long-term concept to support a potential appropriate future use and interpretation. The treatment represents one option based on a cultural landscape perspective with the understanding that an individual partner, funding, timing, and additional research will likely require phasing or adjusting the desired landscape condition. In particular, ongoing ethnographic research and future archeological investigations may reveal new significance, historic information, or descendent communities that may require reconsideration of landscape treatment to ensure their integration in site planning and design.

Cultural Landscape Report: Harmony Hall

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