John W. Scales Jr., Parkers Creek farmer active in community life
Table of Contents
The land
John Walter Scales Jr. (1871-1944) and his wife Sarah Gross Scales (b ca 1877, d after 1946) were African American farmers and owners of a 200-acre tract on the north side of Parkers Creek. Scales bought the land in 1916, and his heirs sold it two years after his death.

John Walter Scales farm on Parkers Creek. The red icon on the map marks the location of the Scales dwelling on the former farm lane. The green dashed lines mark ACLT hiking trails and the green triangle marks the ACLT northside trailhead. The purple dashed line is an approximate representation of the boundaries of the 1651 Parker Clifts land-patent survey.
This land represents the western portion of the colonial-era patent called Parker’s Clifts. As surveyed in 1651, Parker’s Clifts was a 600-acre tract with straight boundaries, extending south of the creek. The 20th century shape of Scales’ 200-acre western half shows the impact of topography on the evolution of boundaries: respect is paid to the creek on the south and to a tributary on the west. Scales’ land is divided from the eastern segment of the former Parker’s Clifts by a wetland called Horse Swamp, referenced in a 1927 deed as “known as Horse Swamp” (AAH 17/131). Intervening owners for the 200-acre tract include members of the Gott family, who called the property Parker’s Creek Farm (GWD 4/269).
Scales family history
The documentation for members of the Scales family born in the 19th century is less complete than one would wish and sometimes contradictory. We conferred with a family member in 2024, and he provided some additional information, especially pertaining to more recent periods. In the 1960s, we learned, the family adopted the spelling Scayles. That spelling does turn up in a 1911 news clipping about John Walter Scales Jr., but we believe that this was accidental on the part of the news reporter.
The most challenging historical document is John Walter Scales Jr.’s death certificate, with details written in at least three distinct hands. His death date of 1944 is no doubt correct but his reported birth year of 1890 and other facts listed on the form are at odds with facts as reported in census and other records.
We know a little about John Walter Scales Jr.’s parents and grandparents. The 1880 census places his parents, John Walter Scales Sr. (1848-1921) and Hannah Hardman Scales (1851-1930), in the same general area as their son’s farm: north of the creek and not far from today’s Dares Beach Road. Hannah’s mother, Ann Hardman (b ca 1825), is enumerated in the Scales household in that census, and Hannah’s death certificate identifies her father as Eli Hardman. John Senior’s death certificate does not identify his parents. Both certificates report their burials in the Carroll M.E. Church cemetery, west of Prince Frederick; a later church merger led to the renaming of the cemetery as Carroll Western. We have not found grave markers for the couple.
John Walter Scales Sr. was active in his community. Five years before his death, he and his cousin-in-law Eli H. Hardman testified on behalf of a pension application from Rachel Smothers Sewell, the widow of the Civil War soldier Leonard Sewell. Their 1916 deposition is in the Civil War pension-record collection at the U.S. National Archives, quoting Scales’ and Hardman’s statement that Rachel and Leonard Sewell had been duly married and lived together without divorce until Leonard’s death.
Excerpt from one page of the Rachel Sewell widow’s pension application that features the deposition from John W. Scales Sr. and Eli H. Hardman made on 12 June 1916. From the collections of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

Other historic documents shed light on John Walter Scales Sr.’s circumstances. Like many other farmers, he borrowed money to tide him over until the next harvest. For example, in 1883, he used his coming crop of tobacco and corn as collateral to borrow $7.82 from George W. Dowell (SS 6/18) and, in 1894, he used his coming tobacco crop to borrow $13 from the brothers John W. and William S. Shemwell (TBT 3/10).
Incidentally, concerning more recent times, in 2024 family members told us about a third John Walter Scales (or Scayles; 1895-circa 1982). His father was the man identified as John Walter Scales Junior (1871-1944) in historical documents, including deeds. In later years, however, the family informally referred to the third John Walter Scales (Scayles) as junior.
John Walter Scales Jr., 1871-1944
Regarding John Walter Scales Jr. (1871-1944), we have gleaned background information from census records from 1910 to 1940, supplemented by the death certificate described above. The records identify Scales’ wife as Sarah Gross. The couple had three children: John W. Scales (later Scayles; b. 1895, the third so named), Ozella Scales (later married to John Miller; 1897), and Charles Shelton Scales (later Scayles; 1898). Census records also name Charles Shelton Scales’ son John Norwood Scales (later Scayles, b. 1926) as a member of his grandparents’ household in 1930 (age 4) and 1940 (age 14). The census also documents the family’s shift from renters to owners between 1910 and 1920, consistent with the 1916 deed for John Walter Scales Jr.’s purchase of the 200-acre farm.
News clippings from 1907 to 1914 offer a tantalizing glimpse into the public side of John Walter Scales Jr.’s life.
- 1907: John W. Scales named as one of seventeen men from the Second Election District called for jury duty by the Circuit Court for Calvert County. Baltimore Sun, 22 April 1907.
- 1908: John Walter Scales was one of four alternate Calvert County delegates to the Maryland State Republican Congressional Convention (there were five regular delegates). Baltimore Sun, 28 April 1908.
- 1909: John Walter Scales was one of eighteen Calvert County delegates to the Republican State Convention in Baltimore. Baltimore Sun, 25 August 1909. Worth saying: in the century after the Civil War, the “party of Lincoln” took a strong liberal stance on civil rights.
- 1911: Formation of the Negro Business League of Calvert County, Prince Frederick, Calvert Gazette, 22 April 1911. John W. Scayles [Scales] is named as a member of the Negro Business League committee on grievance. Calvert Gazette, 24 June 1911.
- 1914: John W. Scales is named as an officer at a meeting of the “colored United Republican Club” in Prince Frederick. Calvert Gazette, 25 April 1914.
News report concerning the 1908 Calvert County Republican Convention selection of delegates to the state convention to select Maryland’s candidate for the U.S. Congress. John W. Scales was selected as an alternate delegate. Baltimore Sun, 28 April 1908. The article states that although “the delegates to the Congressional convention were not instructed, there is a general sentiment in favor of the renomination of Congressman Mudd,” a reference to U.S. Congressman Sydney Emanuel Mudd II (1885-1924, in office 1915-1924), a native of Charles County.

Were the preceding news reports about John Walter Scales Senior, then in his 60s, or Junior, then in his 30s and 40s? After conferring with a family member, this writer has provisionally attributed these accomplishments to John Walter Scales Jr. The attribution is partly made in respect to age and partly considering literacy, which may have been a de facto requirement for delegates to political conventions or participants in trade groups like the Negro Business League. Census records state that Senior, who grew up in a period when little or no formal education was offered to Blacks, did not read or write. In contrast, Junior was literate and probably attended the schools that served Black students after the Civil War. The Parkers Creek School, for example, opened in 1869.
There is, however, no doubt that it was John Walter Scales Jr. whose Prince Frederick lunchroom business was established in 1929, the date of a Census of Distribution survey form. The first of three pages is reproduced above, informing us that the business is “operated by Negroes,” and features oysters and “meats” as its most valuable items in trade. On page two, we learn that the lunchroom’s annual costs come to $83 dollars ($60 in rent) and revenues are estimated at $150, indicating a $67 profit.
The Scales farm
The 1938 aerial photograph below carries handwritten, black-ink land-use markings added by a Calvert County Soil Conservation District (SCD) staff member, probably after 1948, when the county’s SCD was established. Although the markings postdate the Scales family’s sale of the property in 1946, we are confident that the land use documented by these markings represents the layout of fields during the latter years of Scales ownership. In the 1916 deed recorded for the Scales family, and in the deeds for preceding and following owners, the property is consistently described as containing 200 acres. In the SCD land-use markings, the total reported acreage comes to about 209 acres: close enough.

The Scales property on the north side of Parkers Creek, shown on a 1938 U.S. Soil Conservation Service aerial photograph. The land-use markings were made by a Calvert County Soil Conservation District (SCD) staff member after 1948. The green boundary and the markings in red were added in 2024 by the author of this webpage.
Three forms of land use are indicated via the SCD staffer’s notes on the photograph. First: 30 acres of tilled fields together with the Scales’ homestead at center. We do not have additional information about the Scales’ operation but offer the following generalizations. For those used to farm sizes elsewhere in the United States, 30 tilled acres will seem small. For tobacco, however, 30 acres with, say, 10 acres in triennial rotation would be plausible for a family operation. One estimate for the year 1940 reported an average of more than 800 pounds of tobacco per acre. At the 1940 average market price of 33 cents, this would yield about $240 per acre, or revenue on the order of $2,400 for 10 acres, not too far from national median figures for household income. (Southern Maryland, a Tobacco Economy, University of Maryland, Bureau of Business and Economic Research, 1954.)
Second: 35 acres identified as pasture in the marsh adjacent to the creek. This is a landform often called a meadow in local parlance.
Third, 144 acres as woodland, the largest defined portion of the farm’s land. This reflects the presence of numerous steep ravines, a fact of life for many properties near Parkers Creek and, indeed, in much of bayside Calvert County. Although such slopes were not suitable for field crops, they produced timber that could be harvested for use in buildings, fences, and to serve other farm needs, as well as for the lumber marketplace.
Farm products were generally marketed via brokers or middlemen. Until the 1930s, virtually all tobacco was packed in hogsheads and transported by steamboat to auctions in Baltimore. Timber and milled lumber generally travelled by schooner. Some farmers were able to use small craft to move products to landings and steamboat wharves by water, while others moved goods by oxcart on dirt roads.
In the 1940s, improving roads and better vehicles meant that trucks could provide transport. Farmers who continued to pack hogsheads shipped them to Baltimore by road. In this period, many farmers stopped using hogsheads. Instead, they packed tobacco on large flat baskets, often called burdens, to be trucked to the new looseleaf auctions in nearby towns like Hughesville. Similarly, timber or milled lumber was transported by boat until the 1940s and 1950s, when better roads made truck transport feasible.
We have not turned up any information pertaining to the Scales’ farm-product sales. In 2020, however, the neighboring landowner Wilson Freeland told us the local placename for a sharp bend in the creek adjacent to the family’s land: Scales Landing, marked on the aerial photo above. Freeland was uncertain about the family’s use of the landing, although the shallow depth in that segment of the creek suggested to him that the Scales family would not have used small craft to shunt tobacco hogsheads or lumber to larger vessels in the Bay. “They would have gone by road to Dare’s wharf,” Freeland said, even when oxcarts provided the transport. Freeland said that he thought the Scales family would have launched skiffs from the landing to harvest finfish or crabs for home consumption if not for the market.
The Scales dwelling
The Scales dwelling consists of two parts: a smaller and older log section and a larger and newer frame section. This writer documented the Scales dwelling, already badly deteriorated, in March 2001 and April 2002, following up on 1997 documentation by the archaeologist Matthew Reeves. Reeves did not estimate the age of the log section but noted that some shards of ceramics found nearby dated to the 1840s, suggesting pre-Civil War occupation. Reeves estimated that the frame section was built in the late 19th century; this writer comments that it is equally possible that the frame section was added at the time of the 1916 purchase of the property by the Scales family.

Plan view of the Scales dwelling, documented by Carl Fleischhauer in March 2001.


Left: Elevation of the Scales dwelling, March 2001.
Right: Frame section, March 2001.
Reeves’s archaeological report notes the presence of an “old roadbed” on the west side of the dwelling–it is the main farm lane shown in the 1938 aerial photograph–supplanted later by the farm lane on the east side, which now serves as the ACLT’s Turkey Trail for hikers. Both log and frame sections of the house have door openings on the west- and east-facing long sides, thus providing access to the older and newer roadbeds.


Left: Mapping of old roadbed (blue shading) and new road (green shading), today’s ACLT Turkey Trail for hiking. Tan rectangle is the Scales dwelling. Basemap by Matthew Reeves, 1997, color overlays, 2024.
Right: Scales dwelling from the old roadbed on the west side, March 2001.
The log section would more accurately be described as log-slab construction, featuring slabs hewn from logs with the openings chinked with ironstone and mortar. When visited in 2001 and 2002, some remaining segments of the outer wall were covered by vertical siding, while others by horizontal clapboarding. The interior walls were finished with lath and plaster. Overall, the log section is about 16×16 feet square, a story and a half high with tight-wind stairs in one corner. At one end is a stone fireplace that opens into the frame section. Although neither chimney nor chimney materials remained, the area above the fireplace and an opening at the end of the log section’s roof indicated that a chimney had once been in place. This writer was not able to determine if the fireplace had originally opened into the log house–which seems likely–and then modified to serve the frame section when that section was built.




Photographs, log section of dwelling, April 2002. Left: Exterior view of log-slabs and chinking, showing vertical exterior siding, and interior lath. Center-left: Interior view of exposed log slabs and chinking. Center-right: Tight-wind staircase, log-slab and chinking, and exposed lath. Right: Where the log section faces into the frame section, ironstone fireplace base.
The next owners of the property
In 1946, two years after John Walter Scales Jr.’s death, the property was sold by his heirs, Sarah Scales, widow; Shelton and Bernice Scales, son and daughter-in-law, of Calvert County; and Ozella Miller and John Miller, daughter and son-in-law, of Baltimore. The buyers were George A. and Elizabeth C. Shahan of Prince George’s County (AWR 6/554).
We have not found information about the Shahans or their motivation to buy this land. Three years later, there was an advertisement in the Washington Evening Star that we take to be an offer to sell this property: “200 acres, 80 arable, fine timber, ducking marsh, 1-mile frontage on Parkers Creek. 38 miles District. Only $5,000 down, balance $5,000, easy payments, hundreds of beautiful building sites overlooking Chesapeake Bay; white or colored.”

Classified advertisement, Washington Evening Star, 9 October 1949.
Even with the loose zoning rules at the time, it is difficult to imagine building “hundreds” of cottages on the property, let alone larger buildings. In any case, the property did not sell. The next recorded deed is dated in 1950, and it documents the sale of the property by the Shahans together with Cecil H. and Anna W. Kerns, also of Prince George’s County, to Louis L. and Hazel H. Goldstein of Calvert County (AWR 24/569). Over time, the property was bundled with adjacent land also owned by the Goldsteins and, in 1999, after Louis Goldstein’s death, the entirety was bought by The Nature Conservancy and sold to the State of Maryland the following year. The land is now a property of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, managed on their behalf by the ACLT.
Acknowledgments
This webpage was researched and written by Carl Fleischhauer in December 2024. Historic archaeological research was carried out in 1997 by Matthew Reeves. Art Cochran provided land ownership and survey information, mapped by Exa Marmee Grubb using ArcGIS tools. Shelby Cowan provided the Sewell pension document, Michael Kent the Washington Evening Star real estate advertisement, Mary Rockefeller the news clippings and death certificates, and Michelle Caram the lunchroom census form. Darlene Harrod put the author in touch with Curtis Scayles, a great-grandson of John Walter Scales Jr., and Curtis’s daughter Shawnte Scayles, who provided information about the family.