In the quiet rooms of the 1746 Custom House in Chestertown, the air often feels thick with the presence of the past. Worn floorboards show the imprints of many generations’ footsteps; tabletops hold stacks of handwritten pages; and shelves are filled with books examining four centuries of American history and culture. But at Washington College’s Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, now headquartered in the 280-year-old building, the past is treated as a living laboratory. Students and staff work with digital scanners and audio mixing software as much as with traditional manuscripts and artifacts.

As the Center celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, it finds itself at a historic triple-confluence: a quarter-century of its own innovation, the nation’s semiquincentennial, happening this July, and the approaching 250th anniversary of Washington College in 2032. This milestone offers a moment to reflect on a mission that began in 1998 with a visionary $5 million grant from The Starr Foundation, aimed at creating an institute that would not just archive the American experience, but critically engage with it in the public square.

Washington College’s unique place in American history is one of its most distinctive assets, much like its location in the heart of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. As one of the country’s very first small liberal arts colleges, Washington has had a unique place in the evolution of higher education. When students cross Cater Walk between classes, they are walking in the footsteps of people like George Washington, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Toni Morrison. But the connections to history stretch far beyond that. Here on the Eastern Shore, they are in the heartland of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Henry Highland Garnet. Here, they can understand both the darkest and brightest chapters in the American experience. They can sail or paddle on rivers and creeks that were once traveled by the indigenous Tockwogh and Revolutionary soldiers. They can explore buildings that are like portals into another era, and delve into documents from attics or archives that reveal centuries of stories. 

So why should this matter to an 18-year-old? In a world that often feels like it’s living in a permanent “now,” dominated by the instantaneous and the ephemeral, the Starr Center provides what Adam Goodheart, the Center’s Hodson Trust-Griswold Director since 2006, calls “the long view.” It is an understanding of where one stands on the broad arc connecting the past to the future. This perspective is not a luxury, but, as Goodheart sees it, a necessity for navigating the complexities of the 21st century—no matter your major, no matter your calling in life. 

The Center’s riverfront home, the Custom House, serves as the physical anchor for this philosophy. Once a colonial mercantile headquarters and a site intimately tied to the history of Atlantic slavery, it has been transformed into a space for continuing dialogue and discovery, both joyful and painful. Since its inception under founding director Ted Widmer, the Center has evolved into a base camp for intellectual curiosity, experiential learning, and civic engagement—embodying Washington College’s “Learn by Doing” philosophy.  

The Center’s dedicated staff and community historians lead innovative projects that shape the undergraduate experience, engage the broader public, and inform national conversations.

“For me, the Starr Center’s greatest strengths are our programs and our people, which are interdependent,” Goodheart said. “The people here at the Center have created some amazing programs, and those programs in turn have drawn some amazing people.” 

For Students, By Students

The Center’s most profound impact is measured by the lives of the students it touches. Through its annual Explore America Summer Internship program, Washington College students are dispatched to the nation’s premier cultural and political institutions, where they work alongside curators, archivists, researchers, and policymakers. Through this program, hundreds of Washington students have held full-time, paid positions at over 50 nationally renowned nonprofits, including five different Smithsonian museums, several National Parks, the Library of Congress, National Archives, Brookings Institution, and Apollo Theater. 

The stories of these alumni are a testament to the Starr Center’s influence. Rachel Brown ’16, formerly an associate editor at National Geographic, credits a Starr Center dinner with the magazine’s editor-in-chief for her career break. Jack Bohrer ’06, a documentary producer for Rachel Maddow’s production company, notes that the “intellectual reflexes” he learned at the Center—the ability to synthesize complex historical data into a coherent narrative—still guide his approach to storytelling. Then there is musician, mentor, and community organizer Kentavius Jones ’04, who worked with the Center in 2003 to host an international dialogue program with 21 visiting students from South Asia. More recently, Jones has returned to help the Center build the Hip Hop Time Capsule, a summer arts program which has employed 75 local high school interns over the past five years. 

The Center’s Quill & Compass program epitomizes the Center’s interdisciplinary, student-based programming. Students with an interest in American studies, political science, and civic engagement can join the program at any point during their time at Washington College. They take trips to historic sites in the region—including Washington, D.C., Annapolis, and New York City—and even have opportunities to explore overseas: this year’s spring break trip to Bermuda delved into the colonial roots of the American experience. Quill & Compass students also meet authors, curators, and nonprofit leaders who can help open new pathways for their professional careers. 

Community and Civic Engagement

The Starr Center’s innovative, inclusive approach is most evident in Chesapeake Heartland: An African American Humanities Project. Launched in 2018 in collaboration with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture—and supported by the Mellon Foundation, National Archives, and National Trust for Historic Preservation, among many others—this project is a national model for grassroots digital preservation. 

Deploying a mobile Humanities Truck and dedicated community historians, the project meets residents in their own neighborhoods to digitize materials and stories central to our region’s—and nation’s—history and culture. Supported by dozens of Washington interns, the effort has preserved and shared over 7,300 artifacts that vividly capture four centuries of Black life on the Eastern Shore, including film reels and photographs of civil rights protests, audio recordings of local gospel performances, business records of early Black entrepreneurs, and narratives of Underground Railroad escapees.  

Chesapeake Heartland has grown from a community digitization effort into a driver of campus and community change, attracting more than $2 million in grants and engaging thousands of residents, students, alumni, and scholars in the preservation and interpretation of African American heritage. Local Black-led museums and organizations have leveraged the archive to preserve their materials, grow new programs, and generate fundraising opportunities. Community members have utilized the project to support the preservation of family homes, churches, and schools. Public school teachers across multiple counties have learned how to use the archive with their students, rolling the materials into lesson plans, homework assignments, group projects, and local tours. 

On campus, Washington faculty have incorporated the project into well over two dozen courses, while students use the archive to develop research projects and senior capstone experiences. And the project has created more than 200 paid internships for college and high school students, offering them hands-on professional experiences in digitization, museum curation, community engagement, oral history, marketing, archival research, and much more. 

“Washington College students choose to spend four years in a community that is a microcosm of the American experience, where you can see that history in the buildings, in the landscape, and in the people around you,” said Darius Johnson ’15, a Washington College alum and Kent County native who directs the project. “Our project team has included students from Ghana, Brooklyn, Ireland, and Chestertown, and no matter where they’re from, they come to understand that if you want to make a real difference in people’s lives, you have to know their history—especially the African American history that has shaped this region and so often goes overlooked. That process of getting to know a place and its people becomes central to the student experience, and it’s what allows them to build real connections across difference. It’s something they carry with them wherever they go next.”

The Center’s work stretches far beyond the classroom, according to Patrick Nugent, the Thomas V. Mike Miller director of civic engagement. “While we wholeheartedly support communities in their efforts to document their own history, our impact resounds well beyond interpreting the past,” Nugent said.  “It helps revitalize our region’s buildings and commercial districts, shapes its tourism and development plans, supports its nonprofits and cultural institutions, and bolsters K-12 education and workforce development.”  

“I’ve never lived as close to history as I did in the Patrick Henry Residence. I felt like I was in the right place, at the right time, telling the right story.”

Wil Haygood

National Impact

The Center’s ongoing research and community impact often lead to remarkable recognitions on a national scale. The $50,000 George Washington Prize, co-sponsored with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and George Washington’s Mount Vernon, is one of the nation’s largest and most prestigious literary honors. Recognizing work that combines deep historical research with the narrative power of great literature, the prize has honored works that have reshaped the American consciousness, including Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton—the spark for a global musical phenomenon. In a full-circle moment for the Center, the prize eventually led to a special achievement award for Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show’s creator. 

While the prize honors finished works, the Center’s annual Patrick Henry Writing Fellowship nurtures them in their infancy. Housed in a beautifully restored 1735 colonial residence on Queen Street, the fellowship provides authors the “gift of time” and $45,000 to complete major books. Other residents have included National Book Award finalists and Pulitzer Prize winners who don’t just write in isolation; they integrate into the Washington College community, mentoring students and participating in local life. For instance, Wil Haygood, the author behind the feature film The Butler, used his residency to pen both Tigerland and I Too Sing America: The Harlem Renaissance at 100, all the while teaching a small writing seminar for Washington students on biography. Reflecting on his time in Chestertown, Haygood noted, “I’ve never lived as close to history as I did in the Patrick Henry Residence. I felt like I was in the right place, at the right time, telling the right story.” 

The “living history” philosophy of the Center even reached the highest office in the land. It began when Goodheart and his students discovered a long-unread stash of 19th-century letters in the attic of a local house called Poplar Grove. The correspondence, which detailed a family’s agonizing debate over Union or Confederate loyalty in the spring of 1861, became the heart of Goodheart’s bestseller, 1861: The Civil War Awakening. 

“Reading those letters gave me a new appreciation of how history is decided not just on battlefields and in cabinet meetings, but in individual hearts and minds,” reflected Goodheart.  

When President Barack Obama read an excerpt of the book in the New York Times Magazine, he was moved to use the Antiquities Act to declare Fort Monroe, Virginia—a site central to the story of emancipation told in the book—a National Monument. Goodheart later stood in the Oval Office, watching as the President signed the order, a powerful reminder that the tools of public history can shape the present-day nation. 

Another example of the Starr Center’s mission to uncover and amplify hidden narratives of the American experience happened in 2025, as nearly two decades of student research led to the federal recognition of the Isaac Mason Escape Site. Generations of Washington College students, staff, and faculty conducted intensive archival research to pinpoint an old building in Chestertown as the house from which Mason fled enslavement in 1846. The research team navigated complex land deeds, wills, and Mason’s own 1893 memoir, Life of Isaac Mason as a Slave, to verify the location. This multi-decade effort culminated in May last year, when the National Park Service officially added the site, which is now the headquarters of the Kent Cultural Alliance, to its National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. 

“It’s just incredible to be part of something as an undergrad, and to realize that you can make those kinds of research contributions,” Kathy Thornton ’13, who was there for the early stages of discovery, told Chesapeake Bay Magazine when they covered the site recognition. “It’s really a testament to professors and mentors like Adam Goodheart, who are teaching young people how to ask questions, how to really dive deep into the sources and put together something that is meaningful.” Thornton now works at Washington College as the Natural Lands Project Field Technician at the Center for Environment & Society. 

As the Starr Center enters its second quarter century, its mission to provide “the long view” is more urgent than ever. In a time of national polarization, the Center serves as a vital space where the study of history and culture is a bridge rather than a wedge. It is a place where a small liberal arts college on the Eastern Shore can become the beating heart of the American story. By the time Washington College celebrates its 250th anniversary, the Starr Center will have spent three decades proving that the American experience is a shared, ongoing, and deeply human endeavor. Whether through a digitized photograph of a local veteran, a student’s internship at the Smithsonian, or a Pulitzer-winning biography, the Center ensures that we are all, in some way, history-makers.