Projects
Button Farm Living History Center
The Button Farm Living History Center is the premier project of The Menare Foundation. Set on 40-pristine acres inside Seneca Creek State Park in Germantown, Maryland, Button Farm is Maryland’s only living history center depicting 1850s slave plantation life.
Our site features a 19th century Farmhouse, Outbuildings, Museum Garden, Heritage Breed Animals, a Slavery-era burial ground and is home to The Underground Railroad Immersion Experience, a sensory experience of the journey from slavery to freedom. We invite you to experience the farm, attend a program, and help us shape our mission.
Chesapeake Tours
Menare operates Chesapeake Tours, a full-service receptive tour provider, guiding history lovers on excursions to historically black sites and destinations throughout the Greater Washington and Mid-Atlantic region.
We custom design each itinerary, provide professional step-on guides for bus tours, and offer event planning services for groups and family reunions around your chosen destination. Every tour is inspired by the unspoiled uniqueness, and deep-rooted history and culture, of the Chesapeake region and the African-American experience.
Watch Anthony Cohen on MPT’s Destination Maryland at the Bucktown Village Store—one of the stops on Chesapeake Tours’ Harriet Tubman: Heart and Soul tour.
COLLABORATION
Great Escapes: Journeys on Maryland’s Underground Railroad
Great Escapes is a forthcoming book on the Underground Railroad in Maryland. This new publication will feature stories of anti-slavery figures, the location of sanctuary sites, and reveal the routes to freedom used by freedom seekers statewide.
A project of The Menare Foundation, Inc. and Heritage Montgomery, this book explores the people, places and social forces the created a pathway to freedom, forged by self-emancipators and their allies from colonial times to the brink of the Civil War.
Image (above): Map of Maryland routes surveyed for the Balt. & Ohio Rail Road, c. 1831. CO# gm70005000. Courtesy Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division
COLLABORATION
Rooted Wisdom: Nature’s Role in the Underground Railroad
Travel through Adkins Arboretum with historian Anthony Cohen to understand how self-liberators used their knowledge of the natural landscape to forge a path to freedom. Their methods for navigating, concealing themselves, finding food, and evading capture reflect a deep connection to, and understanding of, nature.
The ongoing project includes a guided experience, audio essay, and 26-minute film that is available for community screenings. The guided experience—short film and companion website—is presented at rootedwisdom.org. Visitors are invited to watch a five-part film series and then take a deeper dive into the lives of freedom seekers introduced in the film through contextual information, related historical sites and narrative accounts, and resources that examine the landscape both then and now.
The guided experience was produced by Adkins Arboretum, Schoolhouse Farmhouse Studio, and The Menare Foundation, and is now overseen by Beech Works, Inc. Anthony Cohen served as the project’s historical and interpretive advisor, the film’s co-writer and on-screen guide, and has led Rooted Wisdom guided tours at Adkins Arboretum.