Nathaniel Hopkins was born enslaved in southern Talbot, near Trappe and Bellevue. The year is a split. A death certificate and a stone have been read as January 18, 1834. The Maryland State Archives short life says about 1831. He was called Nace. His father was Madison Hopkins. The name of his mother is not in that life.

He married Caroline. Between 1861 and 1868 they had children named James, Lourana, Alexander, and Madison. He could not read. He wanted them taught.

Maryland was still a slave state in 1863. Lincoln's proclamation had not touched it. There is no surviving enlistment paper under Hopkins's own name, and the Archives note that he may have gone in under another. Two letters fix the service. On January 4, 1864, a pass sent “N Hopkins, (Colored) soldier” home to Talbot by boat. On February 15, Lieutenant J. L. Foster of the 30th U.S. Colored Troops wrote that Nathan was an enlisted man of that regiment, on sick leave, and was not to be interfered with. He was never called back. That October he was jailed in the county for giving an enslaved boy thoughts of running. Maryland did not abolish slavery until the new state constitution took effect on November 1, 1864.

He came home to Trappe and stayed. In the years after the war he helped put up the first schools for Black children at Trappe and at Barber, and helped incorporate the congregation that became Scotts United Methodist Church.

The scene that outlived him is a parade.

In the summer of 1867 he and two friends, Jeremiah Thomas and Morris Trippe, marked Maryland's emancipation with a public day — church, a meal, and a march. He drilled local boys and girls and borrowed a drum, a flute, an accordion, and a tambourine. The first year held. He led the line every year after that, his Aunt Audy beside him, until he died. After 1900 the day took his name. Bands came from the Shore, then from Baltimore, Delaware, and New Jersey. It is still walked. The date has moved around the calendar. The name has not.

He died March 23, 1900. A Maryland roadside marker on U.S. 50 records the soldier, the schools, the church, and the celebration he headed for thirty-three years. Nathaniel “Uncle Nace” Hopkins Park is in Trappe. Scott's still stands on Main Street.

The Baltimore Sun, writing in November 1901 after the death of his Easton counterpart Joe Gray, filed both men under a headline about Black politicians who died in poverty. The parade did not take the Sun's point.

Sources: Maryland State Archives life, MSA SC 5496-51877 (the January 4 and February 15, 1864 letters; 30th USCT; no enlistment paper under his name); Talbot Historical Society; Route 50 marker text (Trappe and Barber schools). Birth year split as above. The November 20, 1863 enlistment date that circulates locally is not in the Archives file.