Carrie Dorsey Park Inauguration and Porch Talk at the Gatehouse Museum

The Sykesville mayor and Town Council proclaimed at their June 25 meeting that Warfield Park has been renamed Carrie Dorsey Park, to recognize the African-American woman who raised her 12 children in Sykesville during the 1920s.

Her son, Warren Dorsey, 97, who currently lives in Frederick, and daughter, Rosie, 92, who still lives in Sykesville, were among family members present for the official proclamation Monday evening. Also in attendance was Warren Dorsey’s wife Carolyn, his two sons, two nieces, his nephew and nephew’s wife.

Carrie Dorsey told her children, “There’s going to be a better tomorrow,” said Warren Dorsey, “and when the [Historic Sykesville Colored] Schoolhouse came, she seizes upon it. She saw a light out: education. ‘Get some [education] kids, and you will find that better tomorrow.’

“And we were never to say a bad thing about anybody,” said Dorsey, “because my mother never said a cross word to anybody. She told us kids, ‘If you don’t have something good to say about anybody, then don’t say anything at all.’ And that was a firm belief, and this was a wonderful woman. In spite of her lack of formal training, she was a tremendous organizer and she dedicated her life to the rearing of the 12 of us, and I’m honored to be one of those 12 kids.”

Jack White, curator of Sykesville’s Gate House Museum, wrote a book about the Dorsey family, “Carrie’s Footprints: The Long Walk of Warren Dorsey,” that was chosen in 2017 as the first in the Carroll One Book project, a collaboration between the Carroll County Public Library and Carroll County Public Schools system designed to foster conversations about race and race relations.

Dorsey’s children, the grandchildren of a slave, went to the Colored Schoolhouse and four of them later obtained college degrees. The book also shares Warren Dorsey’s struggles, as he overcame war, sickness, racism and an impoverished childhood — ultimately becoming a scientist, teacher and school principal.