DNA links remains of enslaved people buried in Maryland to nearly 3,000 direct descendants

Over several decades in the late 1700s and early 1800s, at least 70 enslaved African Americans labored under arduous and hazardous conditions at a forge and foundry in Frederick County that produced, among many other items, ammunition used in the Revolutionary War. Many lived out their lives at the Catoctin Furnace, located near the small bucolic town of Thurmont, a few miles from where the presidential retreat Camp David would be built decades later.