“That was the time of Jim Crow, when musicians would encounter what they called the ‘Route 40 problem,’” Mitchell said. “As you were traveling from New York to Philly on Route 40, the Pulaski Highway, there were no restaurants or hotels where you were welcome as a Black entertainer. And so the Elktonian cottages answered that and made Carr’s Beach a feasible, workable, attractive stopping point for traveling musicians doing the Chitlin’s Circuit.”
They hosted iconic musicians between the 1930s and 1970s as a result, including Chuck Berry, Cab Calloway, The Temptations, Ike and Tina Turner, The Shirelles, Little Richard and Billie Holiday.
“Everybody who was making impactful music in the late ‘40s, ‘50s and early ‘60s was playing Carr’s Beach,” Carolyn Mitchell explained.
Many of the events put on in the Beaches were captured through photography currently held in the Maryland State Archives. To Philip J. Mitchell, founder of the Black heritage consulting firm Nanny Jack & Co, LLC, these pieces of visual mementos are a crucial part of the work of historical preservation.
“Mainstream society for generations showed stereotypical racist buffoonery images of us on postcards and magazines and minstrelsy,” Phillip J. Mitchell said. “So this counters all of that, because you see us doing everyday activities in nice clothing, enjoying ourselves in spite of Jim Crow, in spite of redlining, in spite of lack of access to capital, in spite of segregation and so forth. We still found a way to enjoy ourselves, and it’s important to see us in a positive light, because of the mainstream negativity that was constantly being put in front of us.”
But most of the Beaches were sold off soon after 1974 to make way for residential housing and a wastewater treatment plant. Elktonia’s five acres are all that’s left.
