Imagine being one of the tens of thousands of people who poured into the city during and after the Civil War, no longer enslaved and looking for a new life. You may have found a place to live in the hastily built and crowded alley dwellings. There you would find ways of "making do," a practiced way of life for African Americans. According to the 1880 census, African-American laundresses and laborers were the heads of household here in Essex Court. Small amounts of archaeological testing found some children’s toys, cosmetic jars and a man’s porcelain shirt stud, probably lost in the laundry.

Perhaps you’d have relatives in southern Maryland in which case you’d be the "city cousin" and guide your rural relatives when they came to visit or look for work. Like others, both black and white, you’d probably move frequently between the city and countryside. If you were lucky, you’d work and save enough to move back to a place like Charles County and eventually buy farmland.

One small testimony to connections between urban and rural whites was found in St. Mary’s County. Archaeologists recovered a soup bowl with an inscription that read "Atlantic Lunch." This artifact came from the Atlantic Hotel on the corner of 6th and Pennsylvania, which was a meeting place for county people for the first half of the 20th century.