The Plummer Family

Adam Francis Plummer was an enslaved man who was moved from the Calvert's Mount Albion plantation to Riversdale when he was 10 years old. He met his wife, Emily, when she was visiting from the Three Sisters Plantation to care for her sick aunt. They married at the 5th St. Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC in May 1841, and went on to have nine children together, despite the fact that they did not live together until just before Emancipation in 1864. 

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When Adam was a young man, a traveling pastor taught him to read. Adam's diary has survived until today and is digitized through the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum. His daughter, Nellie Arnold Plummer, continued her own diary within Adam's and turned these thoughts into a book about her family's journey from slavery to freedom. This book, Out of the Depths; or the Triumph of the Cross can be accessed through Archive.org or HathiTrust. The Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum also holds the Plummer-Arnold Collection, which is a series dating from the 19th century to 2005.