The Man in the Knit Cap

Peale wasn't the best of orthographers. In addition to the obvious misspellings, he got the name of the bank officer wrong. The president of the Columbia Bank of Georgetown then was not "Mr. Bell" but rather Thomas Brooke Beall. He was a member of the prominent Beall family of Maryland. His great-great grandfather, Ninian Beall, had come from Scotland and purchased property along the Potomac River that he called the Rock of Dunbarton. Today it is called Georgetown. Peale's spelling error is understandable, though. The name Beall is often pronounced "Bell." Ninian himself reportedly told strangers to pronounce his name "like a ringing bell."

From the bank, Peale went to visit the "Widow Bell," who had freed Yarrow. She was in fact Margaret Beall, widow of Brooke Beall; he was a distant cousin of bank president Thomas Beall. A Montgomery County researcher, Eleanor Vaughn Cook, discovered this 20 years ago when she saw Yarrow's name in the inventory of Brooke Beall's estate. Another researcher, Diane Broadhurst, discovered Yarrow had a son named Aquilla.

According to Peale's diary, Margaret Beall told him that Yarrow came from Guinea when he was about 14 years old and was purchased by the Beall family from a Capt. Dow. She said her husband planned to build a new house in Georgetown and asked Yarrow to make the bricks for it. He told Yarrow that he would free him when the house was finished. Yarrow made the bricks, but Brooke Beall died before the house was completed. So, Margaret Beall freed Yarrow.

Thus, the basic facts seem to be these. Yarrow was born in Guinea about 1736. He was brought to Maryland as a slave and purchased by Brooke Beall's father, Samuel. Brooke Beall inherited him. Yarrow was freed after nearly half a century of servitude and four years later bought the house and lot on a street now called Dent Place in Georgetown. He was about 83 when Peale painted him, and died four years later, on January 19, 1823. This last was documented in an obituary in the Gettysburg Compiler of February 12, 1823. The obituary's wording is so similar to Peale's diary entry that Peale himself may have written it:

"Died -- at Georgetown, on the 19th ultimo, negro Yarrow, aged (according to his account) 136 years. He was interred in the corner of his garden, the spot where he usually resorted to pray . . . it is known to all that knew him, that he was industrious, honest, and moral -- in the early part of his life he met with several losses by loaning money, which he never got, but he persevered in industry and economy, and accumulated some Bank stock and a house and lot, on which he lived comfortably in his old age -- Yarrow was never known to eat of swine, nor drink ardent spirits."

Yarrow's Dent Place property, where he died and was buried, stayed in his son's name until 1838, when the city of Georgetown auctioned it to recover unpaid taxes of $100.

Two townhouses now occupy Yarrow's lot. They have large back yards where the garden and grave must have been. In the mid-1950s, then-Sen. John F. Kennedy and his new wife, Jacqueline, rented the house across the street from Yar-row's property.

Early last December, I went to Dent Place with Nancy Kassner, archaeologist for the District of Columbia. We wanted to see if ground-penetrating radar could be used to spot an underground anomaly indicative of a grave. The current owners had consented. But, unfortunately, the back yards are landscaped, and the lots themselves have been terraced. Radar couldn't be used in most spots and might not do any good in any event. Yarrow's body may have been moved or buried under fill dirt too deep for radar to penetrate. We abandoned the plan. Besides, as Kassner pointed out, after almost 200 years, Yarrow's body has probably "returned to the earth."

At the office of the D.C. recorder of deeds, documents show that, although Yarrow purchased the Dent Place property in 1800, he worried that he did not have clear title. Perhaps this was because he had not yet recorded, in D.C., the manumission paper that freed him. So, in 1803, he and Francis Deakins, the man who had sold him the property, re-deeded it to Yarrow's son Aquilla.

The procedure for recording a transfer required the deed be taken to the recorder and copied by hand into a large ledger, and then returned to the owner. The original has disappeared.

However, the old ledger book, Volume 10 of Liber K, is at the National Archives. Yarrow's deed is recorded on page 71. Opening the cumbersome book, I expected to see "Francis Deakins" and perhaps an "X," indicating that Yarrow was illiterate, in the signature block of the deed. Deakins's name was there all right, copied in the legible hand of the recorder of deeds. But in place of "X" or "Yarrow Mamout" were foreign-looking words.

Kevin Smullin Brown, a scholar of Arabic and Islam at University College London, looked at a copy that was e-mailed to him. He guessed that the recorder of deeds was trying to copy a signature that was in Arabic. And, given that the signer was Yarrow Mamout, Brown speculated the original may have read, "Mahmoud Yaro, God Willing."