Historic Harriet Tubman sites threatened by rising sea levels

Harriet Tubman is one of the most iconic women in American history. She navigated dangerous landscapes from Maryland to Pennsylvania, often at night, to guide dozens of enslaved people to freedom.

Tubman was born into slavery in 1822 in Dorchester County, Md. In 1849, amid rumors she was about to be sold, she escaped to Philadelphia. But she never forgot the land she came from and went on to become the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad, helping more than 70 people follow the same path along Maryland's Eastern Shore she took to freedom.

But that land, along with other historical sites in the region, could be lost forever.

A recent study by Climate Central, a nonprofit news organization based in Princeton, N.J., that reports on the impact of climate change, identified imminent flood risk to areas crucial to understanding Tubman and The Underground Railroad. Kelly Van Baalen worked on the study and co-authored the report.

"The headline is that a good proportion of these historic sites related to Harriet Tubman -- which have been very well-curated along the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Byway -- are at significant flood risk."

Climate Central analyzed 45 sites along the byway, a 125-mile, self-guided, scenic driving tour originating along Maryland's Eastern Shore, continuing through Delaware and ending in Philadelphia. According to the byway website, "It is the only place in the world that preserves and interprets the places where Harriet Tubman was born, lived, labored and where she fled from."

Since much of the byway is situated only a few feet above sea level, coastal flooding already poses a significant risk to many of these sites. Climate Central's report says that "as the climate continues to warm and sea levels rise, the risk of flooding to these historic sites will increase dramatically."

The organization found 25 locations face such threats by the end of the century -- and 16 of the sites will experience significant flood risk by 2050. The report identifies 10 significant sites around Dorchester County that have already experienced chronic flooding due to sea-level rise.

They include Long Wharf, now a park on the water's edge of Cambridge, which once served as a hub for the trans-Atlantic slave trade Stewart's Canal, a 7-mile-long logging waterway dug by enslaved and free Black people and was used for secret communication networks to organize escapes, and The Bucktown General Store, which is the site of a young Tubman's first recorded act of defiance. She sustained a brutal head injury when she refused to help an overseer restrain an enslaved man. Also on the list is Malone's Church, which was the first African American church established locally after the Civil War.

This photo of Harriet Tubman was taken in 1848 by Horatio Seymour Squyer. Photo courtesy of National Portrait Gallery

Angela Crenshaw manages the center and explained how the land is a crucial connection to Tubman's legacy. Visitors to the park can experience the same fields, woods, marshes and water that Tubman navigated and actually visualize the scope of the geography she and others traversed in pursuit of freedom.

Van Baalen said historic sites like this are often overlooked in favor of infrastructures like roads and bridges. "These are challenging sites to conserve, and there's not necessarily the incentive structure to protect them as we have for other industrial infrastructure sites," Van Baalen said.

This is something Julie Schablitsky, an archaeologist with MDOT's State Highway Administration, knows all too well. She and her team spent several cold, wet weeks in the fall of 2020 sifting through muddy land in the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge searching for clues that could help them figure out where Harriet Tubman's father's cabin once stood.

According to old documents, upon the death of the man who enslaved him, Ben Ross, Tubman's father, was eventually granted his freedom in 1836 and given 10 acres to live on in what is now the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge. Schablitsky and her team spent weeks digging through muddy water searching for artifacts that could confirm the location where Ross's cabin once stood.

MDOT SHA Chief Archaeologist Julie Schablitsky (L) works with her team digging for artifacts at Ben Ross' homesite in the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge. Photo courtesy of Maryland Department of Transportation

"We're finding drawer pulls from his bureau, we're finding a button from his shirt, we're finding pipe bowls and pipe stems from when he smoked," Schablitsky said while standing in boots to protect her from the mud and sometimes knee-deep floodwaters. "Each piece of ceramic, each broken shard gets us close to building a story and a vignette of what life was like here in this marsh area where Harriet Tubman lived and where Ben Ross also lived and worked."

Schablitzsky said rising seas won't just make it harder to identify artifacts but harder to access the sites themselves. The current sites are located off long dirt and gravel roads in flooded woodlands.

"We're very much worried that the rise of sea level is going to continue to impact it. Not just from the decomposition of the artifacts, but also the deeper you go in the soil, you start to have that water rise up. In 10 years, we might not even be able to access the site, so it's important that we're excavating it today," Schablitsky said.

The home site is now highlighted on the historic Thompson Farm where Ross and his family were enslaved and has been officially added to the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Byway. Tina Wyatt is grateful for the work. So much has already been left out of Black history, she said, that knowing about the flood threat motivates people to preserve what we have now.

Preserving history isn't often a top priority, Van Beelen told AccuWeather. "I think historical sites represent a kind of a gap in public concern about flood risk." While it can be easy to quantify the monetary value of mitigating the flood risk of infrastructure, the often intangible importance of history and what we lose when it's gone can be more difficult for some people to understand.

This is something Van Baalen hopes Climate Central can help explain because the first step toward protecting these threatened sites is being aware of exactly what's at risk, such as those highlighted in studies, like the one on key sites along the byway.

"There's definitely an environmental justice aspect, and we like to get to highlight a place that has such cultural history that maybe hasn't been considered," Crenshaw said.

Tina Wyatt, great-great-great grandniece of Harriet Tubman, said the discovery of Ben Ross' cabin location means a lot to her family. Photo by Tim Pratt/Maryland Department of Transportation

She offered praise to those involved "for having the vision, and also to keep funding things that relate to it that keep the story going and expanding. It expands the story of our family but also tells the story of enslaved life and afterward for the United States and the world to be able to see."

Climate Central's free online tool allows anyone to explore sea-level rise and coastal flood threats by adjusting location and year to see land projected to be below annual flood level.