When historians chronicle the story of Perry Hall, they usually begin and end with the plantation that towers over the sprawling suburb, and the man credited for spreading Methodism in Maryland who lived within its gates.

But the history of Perry Hall is bigger than Harry Dorsey Gough and his Perry Hall Mansion. It also runs through families with the names Wicks, Jones, Conway and Harvey.

A pair of Wicks brothers bought 16 acres for a farm on Cross Road in 1855, a time when most white landowners refused to sell property to Black families.

James Harvey, who still lives on Cross Road, descends from those first Black people to own property in Perry Hall. The surnames changed with marriages, but the family remained the same.

Wicks and Conway men fought in the Civil War, Harvey men in World War II and the Vietnam War. James Harvey and his siblings integrated Perry Hall schools two years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision — enduring taunts and occasional punches until high school, when they finally found fellowship with a few other Black teenagers.

The Black community laid the first floorboards 177 years ago for Dowden Chapel, a small, wooden structure off Ridge Road, about 3 miles from the Cross Road homesteads. Here, enslaved and free Black residents of the area worshipped, attended Sunday school, and offered sanctuary to freedom seekers along the Underground Railroad. The cemetery where generations of Conways were buried remains behind the chapel, its headstones bent and some of their inscriptions illegible.

“Up until now, no one really knew what the Black side of the history was in this area,” said Sen. Carl Jackson, the first Black person to represent the eastern Baltimore County district in the Maryland General Assembly. “I didn’t know about this property until last summer, and I’ve lived here a long, long time.”

Jackson has been working with Baltimore County Councilman David Marks and Dowden Chapel’s trustees to establish a clear title to the property in hopes of organizing the chapel as a nonprofit and securing grants for its preservation. Community volunteers and both lawmakers worked with the Harveys to clean debris from around the chapel last summer and improve access to the graves.

The chapel, which opens once a year for a homecoming service, could use more help.

James Harvey, 77, swung a hatchet to break up ice on a recent visit. Funds for a caretaker would ensure he no longer has to do that, and would allow visitors more often. The only way into the chapel now is through family members, who keep keys to the gate.

The Methodist Church closed Dowden for regular worship in 1948, but the family learned they could keep it functioning as a chapel with an annual service. Through the civil rights era, the family felt compelled to maintain a low profile with Dowden Chapel to protect it. Now, family members say, its survival depends on neighbors knowing it’s there so the cherished historic church can receive support.

“My mom always said she didn’t want politics to get in the middle,” said James’ oldest sister, Mary Harvey Miller. “But we’re all in our 70s now, and we are not going to be here forever.”

The family’s story begins before the Revolutionary War, when Wicks family ancestors were enslaved at both Hampton plantation and Howard County’s Waverly plantation. James Harvey’s great-great-great-grandfather Jacob Wicks Sr. married a woman named Keziah in the early 1800s; the couple were enslaved at Hampton.

In 1829, Charles Ridgely — the 15th governor of Maryland and one of the state’s richest men — set Jacob and Keziah Wicks free. They had been enslaved under his daughter, and when she died, it was her wish to emancipate them. But Ridgely stipulated he would only free children under age 2. So, Jacob and Keziah’s eight children remained enslaved, separated from their parents and each other.

By 1850, two of those children — Jacob Jr. and Moses Wicks — had secured their freedom. Five years later, they bought the Cross Road property from Isaac Tyson Jr., a Quaker who prospected for chromite in and around Baltimore.

The brothers already had a church nearby. In 1846, Charles Ridgely’s son David died, and David’s wife deeded the Dowden Chapel property to the Methodist Church. The church then transferred the deed to Isaac Dowden on Nov. 15, 1849, to establish a Black Methodist church.

From family photos, the chapel looks much the same now as it did then — wooden chairs, a worn ceiling and a potbellied stove dated 1861. In the early 20th century, James and Mary’s grandmother Estella packed a pistol for safety as she traveled to and from the chapel to teach school.

James Harvey left Maryland and was stationed in Africa during the Vietnam War, worked in a military pharmacy, and raised his family in Texas.

When he and his second wife, Ida, returned to the Cross Road property in 1999, Perry Hall had morphed from a sleepy farming community to a suburb of 30,000. Attitudes had changed. Some of his former middle and high school classmates reached out on Facebook to reconnect — several showed up at the Perry Hall library for a standing-room-only talk on the Harvey legacy.

He isn’t bitter. People didn’t know us then, he said. And now that they do, he wants to make sure that his story lives on for their children, too.

Leona Mager, a fifth grader at Honeygo Elementary School, asked for his autograph after the library talk. Harvey was happy to oblige, especially at a time when, he noted, the federal government is erasing many Black historical contributions.

“A lot of times, when old people die, the history is thrown away,” he said. “In my case, we went from generation to generation on the same property, from Wicks to Jones to Conway and to Harvey. And the paperwork, and the old pictures, they weren’t thrown away.

“To know your history is to know yourself, and it’s a discredit not to pass things on.”