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Lakeland is the historical African American community of College Park, Maryland, in Prince Geroge's County. African Americans first made their homes in Lakeland near Indian Creek on the eastern side of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad tracks. The…

Lake Artemesia was initially dug in the mid-19th century by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to retrieve gravel for use as ballast. It was later developed for recreational use by Edwin A. Newman in the 1890s. The lake was a center of recreation for…

In 1835, the Washington branch of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad became an important part of the landscape when it opened and bisected the area that became Lakeland. By the early 1900s, the railroad was a major source of communication,…

Joseph G. Brooks was born in 1871 and married his wife, Rosa, in 1896. The 1910 census lists him as living in a home he owns mortgage free on Lakeland Road with his wife and seven children. Oral history tells us he lost his arm in an accident while…

John Calvary Johnson came to Lakeland with his wife, Sarah Butler Johnson, and his mother around 1890. They, along with the Brooks family, were the earliest African American residents to live on the west side of the railroad tracks in Lakeland.…

Located directly across from Lake Artemesia and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad tracks, the Gray family home was for more than sixty years the site of many gatherings for family and friends. The family began hosting students in 1909 when space in…

James Henry Gray was born in Calvert County, Maryland, in 1865, the year the Civil War ended. He and his wife, Eliza Colby Gray, shown in this photo, first lived in neighboring Berwyn, where their eldest son, William, was born in 1896. The family…

George Randall and his wife, Ellen Hunter Randall, met when she came to Lakeland from North Carolina to work as a caretaker in a local home. They are posed with their three oldest children who are, from left to right, Lucy, Dessie, and Victor,…

Alfred Gross (left) and Horace Brooks (right) are pictured here around 1910. The horse is believed to have been owned by Ferdinand Hughes, an uncle of Gross. Hughes farmed a nearby parcel of land and used a horse-drawn wagon to transport his produce…

George Isaac Walls moved to Lakeland at the turn of the 20th century from Westmoreland County, Virginia. Walls came with his mother and siblings to join his maternal aunt in Lakeland. On November 18, 1904 he married Hattie Dyce in one of the early …