USA TODAY International Edition
Park visitors can follow in Tubman’s footsteps
Small Md. site makes a big impact with public
SALISBURY, Md. – Harriet Tubman looked north in 1849 and, seeing freedom, fled the Eastern Shore of Maryland and its system of human bondage.
What separates her from many other self-liberating slaves of the time was that she looked back. Tubman returned a dozen times or more, ferrying at least 70 people out of slavery on the Underground Railroad.
Nearly one year ago, a museum opened where her journey began near Church Creek in the swamps of southern Dorchester County.
And the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park has proved a hit with the public. The National Park Service and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources recorded more than 100,000 visitors in its first year.
Not bad considering the 17-acre park, one of the Park Service’s smallest properties, was designed to host a maximum of 75,000 per year.
“We kind of blew that out of the water,” said Dana Paterra, manager of the state park side of the operation. “We didn’t realize how far people would travel to learn about Tubman in her homeland.”
The park can trace visitors from all 50 states and 60 countries, she said.
Her staff has had little time to celebrate. February brought Black History Month and a slate of events to celebrate a central heroine. And March brings the first anniversary of the park’s opening, and festivities March 10-11.
Meanwhile, park employees are prepping for the first round of upgrades, including the installation of listening stations for self-guided museum tours
“You can look out our window and see what Tubman saw.”
Dana Paterra park manager
and the addition of books and computer equipment for a new research library.
The site’s popularity may lie in a quality it shares with its namesake. Like the 5-foot-tall Tubman, the park packs a force much greater than its relatively diminutive size suggests.
History in the ‘middle of nowhere’
The parking lot was nearly full on a recent Tuesday, but that was because of a seminar for schoolteachers. For some of the teachers, it was no easy journey.
“Driving up, I was like, ‘Dear Lord, this is in the middle of nowhere,’” said Kylie Vogelsang, a social studies teacher at Washington High School in Princess Anne, Md.. “But I see why they did that.”
Bereft of any artifacts from Tubman’s life, the museum relies on the landscape to tell her story. And the land is little changed from Tubman’s time.
“You can look out our window and see what Tubman saw,” Paterra said. “It creates a very powerful connection for people to stand where Tubman stood.”
The park is nestled near two places that figure prominently in Tubman’s early life: the plantation south of the community of Madison where she was born and the small farm near Bucktown where she grew up.
No one can say for sure if the young Tubman’s feet trod the property where the museum rises from Dorchester’s silt loam. But she often hunted muskrat and worked alongside her father, Ben Ross, cutting timber, so there are few places she didn’t visit in the region, historians say.
The visitors center is the starting point to the Tubman Byway, a 125-mile driving tour that stretches through Maryland and Delaware and into Philadelphia. Highlights include the Bucktown Village Store, where her early resistance to slavery earned her a blow to the head, and the Cambridge wharf where kidnapped Africans were sold.
Space for the $22 million visitors center was carved out of the adjacent Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, a hub for migratory birds. It’s not uncommon in the winter months to hear from the Tubman property the sound of snow geese, honking in unison.
A synergy has emerged between the neighboring parks.
Missy and Seth Warfield of Easton, Md. who brought another couple from the Washington, D.C., area on a day trip to the refuge and Tubman museum.
“More people should know about it,” Missy Warfield said. “We come down to Blackwater many times over the year and remember when (the Tubman site) was just an empty field.”
She said her great-grandfather was a Methodist minister and abolitionist who helped raise money for a home for Tubman in Auburn, N.Y.
Immersing herself in Tubman’s life, if only for a morning, filled her with a “very good feeling,” she said.