It was an ordinary day. Still searching for information on Harriet Tubman! Yesterday I wrote about how she was born and grew up on Maryland's Eastern shore and was enslaved for many years before escaping and eventually becoming an American folk hero. Her legendary status may be one of the reasons why we don't known more about her. We usually don't like it when a story doesn't have a happy ending, so when we found that she died sick and nearly destitute, it ruins our image of what we picture and believe to be a hero! Much of what was written about her until about the early 2000s was for school children, leaning more into her extraordinary feats as a conductor on the Underground Railroad and less on the accuracy of her history.
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| Woodcut in Civil War clothing |
It was only recently that historians located Harriet Tubman's childhood home which included buried artifacts, including broken pottery, glass, and an 1888 Lady Liberty coin. This discovery helped pinpoint the site owned by her father Ben Ross and where she learned to navigate and survive in the wetlands and woods she would later use to escape to freedom. Another dig is scheduled for this coming Spring to see what else might be found. Just about everything that she grew up with is still at the farmland today. Today there are Black Water River kayak tours showing where Harriet trapped muskrats. The 480-acre Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park follows her early life and is also the site of the Brodess Farm where Harriet was enslaved as a girl and the Bucktown General Store where she suffered her dramatic head injury. There is no better way to experience Tubman's historic trip along the 125-mile Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Byway than a self-guided driving tour. It perhaps will take you three days to drive it so you can imagine how long it took her to walk it. One Byway director, Linda Harris, retraced the journey on foot, walking for eight days from Dorchester County to Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Linda began working at the museum shortly after she made her trek.  |
| Plaque in Auburn, NY in 1914 |
The center offers guided tours of sites associated with Harriet Tubman. In 2019 a mural of Harriet Tubman was added to the exterior of the museum. A few blocks from the Museum sits the Dorchester County Courthouse where slave auctions were held and where Harriet engineered her first escape. In September of 2022 it will become the permanent home of a new 12,000-pound bronze sculpture of Tubman. The story of Harriet Tubman began in Maryland, years ago, but never ended there. She dedicated her life to helping Black Americans survive and thrive. Didn't matter that she never learned how to read or write, but she had an emotional intelligence that made people trust her. Harriet's achievements are astonishing. During the Civil War, she led an armed expedition into Confederate territory, freeing more than 700 enslaved people and served in the Union Army as a nurse, scout and spy. It took another 34 years to be recognized for her service and be paid a pension from the U.S. Government. After the war, she remained an active abolitionist, campaigning for woman's rights next to Lucretia Mott, Martha Wright and Susan B. Anthony. Her New York estate became the 32-acre Harriet Tubman National Historical Park and tells the story of her life as a free woman and preserves her humanitarian legacy.  |
| Harriet Tubman museum in Cape May, New Jersey |
Her home is now an independent nonprofit established by the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. You can stop and take self-guided tours to see where Tubman farmed, created bricks in her kiln and spent the last 54 years of her life. Harriet Tubman took freedom and weaved it into every aspect of life in America, and America is better for it. It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.
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