Juneteenth celebrations across the state signify progress — 2023 marks the third year in which the third Saturday of June is commemorated as a national holiday for the national end of slavery in 1865.
The Friends of Cooch’s Bridge Historic Site hosted a Juneteenth program Monday afternoon, bringing leaders around the community together, along with signaling a mark of progress for the Cooch’s Bridge site that is undergoing renovations.Rick Deadwyler, a director of government and industry affairs for Corteva Agriscience’s Eastern region in Wilmington and the featured speaker during the event, referenced quality education — something he received at The Tatnall School in the 1980s — as a crucial necessity for all Delawareans to have.”Education underscores it all,” said Deadwyler, who was the only Black student in his graduating class. “Providing the opportunity for everyone to run that same race.”
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Celebrating Juneteenth
Deadwyler, a former University of Delaware men’s basketball player during the 1990s, emphasized just how lucky he was to receive a quality high school and college education en route to becoming a successful Black man in corporate America. He previously worked for the DuPont chemical company before his time with Corteva.
Some of the recent progress he referenced was the CROWN Act (Create a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair), a 2021 bill passed in the Delaware legislature that prevents discrimination on the basis of hairstyles or textures associated with race.
He also mentioned the implementation of legislation that requires Black History to be integrated into K-12 learning experiences as a step forward.
But the work isn’t done by any means, and the strive towards equality requires more and more “good people,” Deadwyler said, from policy-makers to teachers to everyday Delawareans.
Take Savannah Shepherd, the founder of the Delaware Social Justice Remembrance Commission and an adviser for the Friends of Cooch’s Bridge group. At just 20 years old, she’s made her mark advocating for social and racial justice in the state, along with attending Swarthmore College.
Shepherd spoke at the event as well, offering her perspective on Juneteenth and the work that must be done moving forward, specifically by the younger generation. She considers much of that “freedom dreaming.”
“Freedom dreaming can take whatever shape you would like it to,” she spoke. “For me, it includes things like free and accessible education. It includes prison abolition, it includes a world where Black people aren’t being lynched by the police. It includes things like community gardens and sharing amongst each other.”
Important identity uncovered
A key part of the Friends of Cooch’s Bridge efforts is to appropriately honor and remember everyone that worked at the site — whether in the mill, battlefield or houses. The group’s historian, Wade Catts, made a new discovery earlier this year when he uncovered the history of Benjamin Harris Martin, a slave at the property during the Revolutionary War.
In Catts’ findings, Martin’s enslaver wrote that “Benjamin served his country three years in the Continental service under my command faithfully and…as a solider and poor fellow being a humble friend, companion, and servant, bravely risked his life.”
A list of those enslaved at Cooch’s Bridge included Martin and 16 others, which were read out loud during Monday’s program.
“Welcome back to our consciousness, Benjamin,” said Friends of Cooch’s Bridge President Vince Watchorn. “More will be found. More will be known.”
Renovating Cooch’s Bridge
In 2018, the Cooch family sold the Cooch’s Bridge battlefield and surrounding property to the state of Delaware. Now, the state’s Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs (HCA) is undertaking an ongoing effort to renovate the property and prepare it to be a historic site open to the public.
Daniel Citron, a historic sites team manager with HCA, said some of the renovations include simply adding a parking lot and accessible public restrooms. The state division is working with the Friends of Cooch’s Bridge to renovate the Cooch Homestead and Cooch Dayett-Mill complexes.
Along with increasing accessibility, Citron said HCA is working with the county to connect the Cooch’s Bridge property to and from Iron Hill Park, Glasgow Park and Newark.
Part of HCA’s vision is to make the historic site a place for a number of stories to be told — especially those of the free and enslaved Black workers from the Revolutionary era, along with the Eastern Woodland and Lenape indigenous communities that inhabited the land for thousands of years.
“We need to make sure we have archaeology done so that we’re not disturbing anything that we aren’t aware of that’s underground,” Citron said.
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And while the state is feverishly working on accessibility, renovations, archaeology and researching Black and Indigenous history at the site, it is looking forward to 2026 — the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence — as a benchmark.
“For the semi-quincentennial, we’re looking to have regular operating hours,” said Citron. “We’re a few years away from being regular set hours as opposed to monthly and by appointment. But we’re going to be slowly ramping up as we can.”
Some may notice that Cooch’s Bridge removed “battlefield” from their official title and added Historic Site. That is all part of the effort to increase the visibility of the stories that aren’t always told, Citron said.
“There’s a lot more research to go, but there are a ton of stories to go, the agriculture stories, the industrial stories, the Indigenous stories,” he said. “The name change to Cooch’s Bridge Historic Site is really to represent all of the people and all of the things that happened here, no matter what time period it was.”
