Daniel Wallace, Farmer Who Lost All During the Great Depression
Table of Contents
Introduction
Daniel Wallace (1877-1936) was one of eight children in the family of the Civil War veteran Joseph Wallace (U.S. Colored Troops) and his wife Arabella Watts Wallace. Joseph and Arabella are the subject of a Parkers Creek Heritage Trail webpage that tells the first part of this story.
Daniel was married to Ella (born ca. 1876, died after 1940) and census records report that the couple had 10 children from 1898 to 1925. The scant information we have found about Daniel Wallace pertains to the period from about 1905 to his death in 1936. During this period, Wallace managed the family farm until it was lost to foreclosure in 1934, after which he was the tenant farmer on the same land for its new owner.
Setting the stage: subdivisions of Daniel Wallace's father's land, 1908-1924
Joseph (born late 1830s, died 1909) and Arabella (late 1830s, 1923) acquired land between 1880 and 1900. On the map below, the family’s holdings are represented by the shaded areas designated A to D. Variation in the wording and completeness of deeds, mortgages, and surveys make it impossible to state an exact acreage with confidence. Our recent best-effort calculations come to about 269 actual acres–the number we will use here–with historical deed references that total 300.
Joseph Wallace’s Civil War pension application reports that he was in poor health in his final years. At the end of his life and, guided by his heirs in the decade that followed, about 144 acres were sold or transferred to others, all of whom were African American. See the listing following the map. The letter designations were created by the Parkers Creek project in 2024 for this webpage.
1908: Tract D, later subdivided as D1, D2, and D3. Joseph Wallace sold Mary E. Brooks 117 acres (deeded as 100). Mary and her husband Benjamin Brooks were friends of the Wallaces; in 1909, they both participated in the Wallaces’ Civil War service pension process. Later that same year, Brooks sold 37 acres (D3) to David Parker; Parker sold that land to Drusilla Chew in 1911. In 1916, Brooks sold 60 acres (D2) to Julius Boots. A 20-acre tract (D1) was retained by Brooks and is still held by descendants today. (GWD 8/248; GWD 11/491; GWD 8/255; GWD 16/517)
1909: Joseph Wallace died
1916: Tract C . Wallace heirs (widow and children including Daniel) sold a 4.5-acre lot to Albert McCormick, an active member of Brown’s Methodist Episcopal Church in the Parkers Creek community. (GWD 16/545)
1919: exact location unknown. Wallace heirs (widow and children including Daniel) sold a half-acre tract land to the local chapter of an African American mutual benefit group, the Grand Order of Galilean Fishermen. Daniel Wallace was on both sides of this sale: he was one of “the trustees of the Order of Galilean Fishermen (Tabernacle No. 809)” and, as one of Joseph and Arabella’s children, he is also named as a co-seller of this lot. (AAH 4/12) We believe that Tabernacle 809 members planned to build a meeting house but have found no indication that a building was erected. Incidentally, Albert McCormick was also a trustee of Tabernacle 809.
Before 1924: Tract A. Transfer of about 22 acres to William Wallace, one of Joseph and Arabella’s sons (and Daniel’s brother), who moved to Baltimore in this period. We have been unable to find a record of the ownership transfer but there was a 1926 foreclosure on this tract for non-payment of taxes in 1924 and 1925, purchased by George D. Turner in 1928. (AAH 19/427) After a 16-year period of White ownership, in 1944, Turner sold this property to the Black farmer Essie Simms. (AWR 1/388) Simms descendants continue to own the property today.
Tract B: see next section
Remaining land held by Wallace heirs, with Daniel as farm manager, 1905-1934
The transfers and sales reported in the preceding section document the reduction in acreage retained by the Wallace family. Using our estimates: 1908, 152 acres; by 1919, 147 acres; in the early 1920s, 125 acres, represented on the map by tracts B1 and B2. This is the land farmed by Daniel Wallace, probably beginning in the latter years of his father’s life (we are using 1905 as a placeholder). The census records for 1920 and 1930 place Daniel and Ella in the right general location and, in both enumerations, Daniel’s occupation is given as farmer with the 1930 tally listing him as his own boss. In his 1918 draft registration, the subject of the sidebar that follows, he is described as a self-employed farmer. His occupation of and oversight of the family land is suggested by the wording in a 1927 deed for a neighboring property, some boundaries of which run “in a westerly direction to the land of Daniel Wallace, thence with the said Wallace’s land in a southerly direction . . . .” (AAH 17/131)
Sidebar: Daniel Wallace draft registration, 1918
The United States entered World War I after declaring war on Germany in April 1917. The Selective Service Act established a draft system in May 1917. Daniel Wallace registered for the draft in September 1918 but we have seen no indication that he was called to service.
Daniel Wallace’s World War I Draft Registration Card, 1918. It describes him as a self-employed farmer in the Dares, Maryland, neighborhood, with a “home address” of Dares Wharf, a placename associated with the Dares Wharf Post Office that formerly stood near the intersection of Wilson and Dares Beach Roads (today’s names). The registration form includes a modest physical description: tall height, medium build, brown eyes, and black hair.
Land lost to foreclosure, 1934
The final sections of this account are melancholy, no doubt reflecting in part the impact of the Great Depression. The remaining land once owned by Joseph Wallace was lost to foreclosure, followed soon after by the death of Daniel Wallace.
Information about the foreclosure is provided by a pair of documents. The first is a Circuit Court petition that leads off with this sentence: “In the matter of the Tax Sale of Land Assessed in the name of Arabella Wallace by John L. Gibson, Treasurer.” (Petition 714, Circuit Court, Calvert County, Final Order filed July 2, 1934) This document asserts that taxes were due in October 1930 and reports that, on April 4, 1931, a constable “failed to find Arabella Wallace in the 2nd District. Left a copy of within bill with Agent of Arabella Wallace (Cornelius Gross) . . . .” Cornelius Gross was the husband of Daniel Wallace’s sister Rachel. In the 1920 census, the Grosses were enumerated as the next household to that of the widow Arabella Wallace and, in 1930, next to Daniel and Ella Wallace, whom we believe occupied the former family home after Arabella’s death in 1923.
Nowhere does the petition acknowledge Arabella Wallace’s death eight years before the constable’s 1931 visit. The document proceeds to list additional procedural steps, concluding with the “Court House Door” auction sale of the land to the physician Hugh W. Ward (1898-1978) on January 30, 1934. The petition file includes the newspaper advertisement for the auction, which states the extent of the land as 156 acres. The second document that offers information about the foreclosure is Hugh Ward’s deed for the land, filed in April 1935, with a property description for 150 acres. The deed asserts that the Wallaces failed to pay taxes from 1927 to 1930. (AAH 34/90)
Copy of the newspaper announcement of the foreclosure sale of the Wallace property, to occur on 30 January 1934, together with the certification that it was published as required. From Circuit Court Petition 714. (AAH 34/90, April 1935)
Daniel Wallace as tenant farmer and recipient of 1934 relief action, death in 1936
After the loss of ownership, Daniel Wallace lived on the property as Hugh Ward’s tenant farmer. Wallace needed a workhorse, a necessity addressed by a Depression-era relief agreement he signed in May 1934, between the courthouse land auction and the filing of Ward’s deed. The agreement was issued by the Calvert County Welfare Board, an entity created after the 1933 passage of state-level legislation that established a Board of State Aid and Charities.
To today’s readers, the relief agreement’s terms and conditions pertaining to the workhorse do not seem very generous:
. . . the said Board has purchased and hereby loans and agrees to sell [to Wallace] one sorrel horse with a white streak in his forehead beginning about two inches above the level of his eyes and extending toward the tip of his nose for a distance of about eight inches, purchased . . . from Frank Brightwell. [Wallace] agrees that he will use said horse in the conduct of his farming operations on the property of Dr. Hugh Ward, in Calvert County, in a careful and humane manner. . . . [Wallace also] agrees that he will buy said horse for the sum of one hundred and fifteen dollars ($115) . . . payable . . . within fifteen months from this day, with interest . . . .
Meanwhile, another stipulation in the agreement sounds like a farm tenancy contract rather than a relief agreement:
[Wallace] agrees that he will plant a crop of tobacco of 30,000 hills of tobacco on said farm, unless prevented by circumstances beyond his control, will properly and seasonably cultivate, harvest, cure, strip, pack and market said crop. . . .
Finally, the agreement puts this requirement on the provision of relief:
[Wallace] agrees that during such slack seasons as the Board may designate, he will, if and when requested by the Board, work on such public projects as may be designat[ed] by it, at the rate of (30¢) thirty cents per hour . . . .”
Whatever the merits of the agreement, it was not in effect for long: Daniel Wallace died in 1936 at the age of 59. Meanwhile, the 1940 census lists Ella Wallace as a 64-year-old widowed mother in the home of her daughter Ada and son-in-law Edward Coats, in Edmonston, Prince George’s County, Maryland.
About Hugh W. Ward and the barn standing on the former Wallace property
Hugh Walter Ward (1898-1978) was born in Calvert County, growing up in the vicinity of Chaneyville and the Patuxent River. He lived in that area for most of his life, with a mailing address in Owings, and practiced medicine for 49 years. His biography cum memoir Country Boy to Country Doctor (Conway Robinson and Helen Ward Wheeler, 2004) describes him as an archetypal rural general practitioner, caring for people of all backgrounds and at all levels of wealth for cash or in-kind payments. He owned several working farms, including the former Wallace property.
Above: The still-standing tobacco barn on the property discussed on this webpage. This barn was built by Hugh W. Ward in the 1950s or 1960s, during his period of land ownership. The stripping room in which tobacco was prepared for market is below grade, built with cement-block walls. Photographs 2012 and 2021.
Ward retained the Wallace property from 1934 until his death 44 years later. The tobacco barn that still stands on the land was probably built in the 1950s or 1960s. After Hugh Ward’s death, the property was passed to his widow and daughter. In 1995, the family sold it to The Nature Conservancy who in turn sold it to the State of Maryland Department of Natural Resources. ACLT manages the land on behalf of Maryland’s DNR.
Acknowledgements
This webpage was written by Carl Fleischhauer in 2025. Research was carried out by Fleischhauer, who emphasizes that the narrative relies upon an inferential interpretation of the information at hand. Hugh Ward’s daughter Helen Ward Wheeler provided a copy of Daniel Wallace’s 1934 Relief Agreement, found in her father’s papers, and provided additional information. Property research by Art Cochran and mapping by Exa Marmee Grubb.
