Archaeologists Solve a Decades-Old Harriet Tubman Mystery
State and federal officials announced on Tuesday that they had located the site of the Maryland cabin where the Underground Railroad conductor lived as a young adult.
The discovery of a coin from 1808, the year Harriet Tubman’s parents were married, led archaeologists to the site of the cabin.Credit.Maryland Department of Transportation
April 20, 2021, 5:38 p.m. ET
For at least two decades, historians had been searching for the site of the cabin in which Harriet Tubman lived with her family as a young adult.
“Land records told us it was here somewhere,” said Julie M. Schablitsky, the chief archaeologist at the Maryland Department of Transportation State Highway Administration, who led an excavation of the swampy terrain on Maryland’s Eastern Shore beginning last fall. “We couldn’t understand why we weren’t finding anything. It was like, ‘Where is this place?’”
Harriet Tubman’s Family Home Located in Dorchester County
The historic homesite of the father of abolitionist and Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman has been located, according to a press release Tuesday from Maryland Lieutenant Governor Boyd K. Rutherford and federal partners at the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center.
The home of Ben Ross, Tubman’s father, was discovered on U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service land that was acquired in 2020 so it could be added to the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Dorchester County. An archeology team led by the state Department of Transportation State Highway Administration conducted research that resulted in finding the Ross home.
Archaeologists discover site of Harriet Tubman s father s home in Maryland baltimoresun.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from baltimoresun.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Tubman reportedly had a beautiful singing voice and would sing two songs – “Go Down Moses” and “Bound For the Promised Land – as signals while leading escapes. Tubman would change the tempo of the songs to let escaping slaves know if it was safe to come out of hiding.
2.) Two years after escaping, Tubman came back for her husband. But, he wasn t interested.
Around 1844, Tubman married a free man named John Tubman. When Harriet escaped slavery in 1850, she did so alone, leaving her husband behind in Maryland. Two years later, she returned to the Eastern Shore, hoping to bring her husband north with her.