The names on the stone behind St. Stephen's A.M.E. Church, Unionville Road, are these:

John Blackwell. Ennels Clayton. Isaac Copper. John Copper. Benjamin Demby. Charles Demby. William Doane. William Doran. Horace Gibson. Zachary Glasgow. Joseph Gooby. Joseph H. Johnson. Peter Johnson. Edward Jones. Enolds Moaney. Frederick Pipes. Henry Roberts. Matthew Roberts.

That is the roster on the Talbot County village plan and on the cemetery marker. The marker spells the fifteenth man Money. The plan spells him Moaney. Families still in the village spell it Moaney.

They had lived and worked on Lombardy and on Wye. The county village plan says more than a hundred Black men left those two places for the Union army. Two hundred twenty-eight from the county as a whole went into the Colored Troops, most of them into the 7th and the 4th. The village plan lists these eighteen as 7th Regiment Infantry men, 1863 to 1866. Service records do not all agree. Matthew Roberts, one of the eighteen, appears in the 4th United States Colored Infantry. Some of the men had been enslaved. Some had been free. A later Historical Society account said eleven of the eighteen had been enslaved on the Lloyd place. Enlistment was one of the roads out of either condition.

The coming home is the scene.

Ezekiel Cowgill, a Delaware Quaker, had bought the worn farm called Lombardy in 1856 and worked it with paid hands. He did not serve. His son John did — drafted in 1863, a captain with Colored Troops and with the 2nd U.S. Volunteers. When the veterans came back, Ezekiel and Sarah Cowgill cut half-acre lots on the neck and leased them. The term in the Talbot Historical Society and Smithsonian accounts is one dollar a year for thirty years. The county's own village plan, and a later report on the Society exhibit, say one dollar a month. One lease, to Isaac Copper, has been described as running ninety-nine years. The leases themselves are the document; the published summaries do not agree. Early papers call the ground Lombardy, or Cowgilltown. From 1870 the leases say the Village of Unionville.

The Cowgills required a church and a school. The congregation formed in 1871. The St. Stephen's that stands now went up in 1892. A one-room school followed. By 1880 the federal census treated Unionville as its own place: forty-six households, two hundred sixty-nine people, at least fourteen of the houses headed by Colored Troops veterans. Descendants of Blackwell, Glasgow, Gooby, Demby, Clayton, Roberts, and Moaney still keep the village.

Two of the founders, Charles Demby and Benjamin Demby, carried the name Frederick Douglass had already written into the Narrative — the man Gore shot in the creek at Wye. Smithsonian reporting calls the Unionville Dembys relatives of that man.

All eighteen are buried behind the church, under government stones. The cemetery is on the National Park Service's Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. The state marked the village in 1998. It sits on Maryland 370 between Easton and St. Michaels, on ground that was Lloyd country before it was Cowgill country, and Cowgill country before it was theirs.

No one of the eighteen has Douglass's fame, or Hopkins's parade, or Brooks's obituary. The village is the life they left.

Sources: Talbot County village plan for Unionville; HMDB “Union Soldiers” marker; Maryland State Archives lives of Ezekiel Cowgill (SC 5496-51878) and John Cowgill (SC 5496-51873); Smithsonian Magazine on Unionville; Maryland Historical Magazine work on Black Unionville. Lease rate and Moaney/Money spelling are splits. The village plan's claim that all eighteen served in the 7th, and that Ezekiel himself served, does not survive the Archives files.