|
Home > About
Harriet Tubman > Places Associated with Harriet Tubman
Places Associated with Harriet Tubman
The Harriet Tubman study law names five sites
in Auburn, New York, and two in Dorchester County, Maryland, as
places associated with Harriet Tubman. The study team has begun
collecting information on these sites, which are listed below, and
on other sites that have been identified by researchers.
Harriet
Tubman Home, Auburn, New York. Today, the property at 180-182
South Street consists of a brick house, a frame house (Home for
the Aged), and the foundation of a building called the John Brown
Hall, all known to have existed during Tubman's life. In addition,
two buildings were added to the property after her death.
 |
Harriet Tubman Home, Auburn, New York
(National
Park Service) |
Harriet Tubman contracted with William Henry Seward
for seven acres of this property in 1859 to provide a home for her
parents and family members. The house in which they lived is thought
to have been destroyed by fire, and Tubman and her husband, Nelson
Davis, built the existing brick house on the property after 1883.
In 1896 she purchased twenty-five acres adjoining her property,
which included the frame house, to expand her charitable work providing
for the poor, sick, and elderly formerly enslaved people. She deeded
this property with the frame house to the AME Zion Church in 1903,
ten years before her death. The church has owned it continuously
since then, and in 1990 purchased the brick house, making the full
32-acre property known collectively as the Harriet Tubman Home.
Both historic structures are national historic landmarks.
Thompson Memorial AME Zion Church, Auburn, New
York. Incorporated in 1838 as the Auburn African Methodist-Episcopal
Church, the church was well established by the time Tubman moved
to Auburn in 1859. Built in 1891, the church structure and its interior
retain the most original fabric of the Auburn sites. It is a national
historic landmark.
Harriet Tubman's grave, Fort Hill Cemetery, Auburn,
New York. Harriet Tubman was laid to rest in 1913 at Fort Hill Cemetery
with military honors in a section of the cemetery designed with
curving roads and paths winding through hilly terrain. The Empire
State Women's Federation erected a monument at her gravesite within
a year of her death and in 1937, replaced it with the current three-foot
granite marker. It is an important site for the annual Harriet Tubman
pilgrimage to Auburn as well as for others who visit the Auburn
sites which convey her legacy. It is listed on the National Register
of Historic Places.
William
Seward House, Auburn, New York. The home of President Lincoln's
Secretary of State, this 17-room house is owned and operated by
the Seward Foundation Historical Association as a house museum.
Its huge collection of original Seward family items has been only
partially catalogued. Seward and his wife, Frances, were fervent
abolitionists thought to have harbored fugitive slaves. They befriended
Tubman, and sold property to her. Much more research is needed on
this connection.
Harriet Tubman Birthplace, Dorchester County,
Maryland. The place of Tubman's birth is not known definitively,
although it is assumed that she spent at least some of her childhood
on the Brodess Farm in Bucktown. Recent archeological work at this
site has been inconclusive, and the investigation is continuing.
There are no Tubman-era buildings remaining at the site, which today
is a farm. Adjacent to the Brodess Plantation is the 27,000 acre
Blackwater
National Wildlife Refuge, which contains natural features thought
to be like those of Tubman's time.
Bazel Church, Bucktown, Maryland. Organized as
the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1876, it was moved to the site,
which may have been the location of open air-worship by African
Americans in Bucktown during Tubman's years in the area. Local tradition
asserts that Tubman's extended family worshipped at the church;
she herself had fled north more than 20 years earlier. The Brodess
farm is one-half mile away.
View a map of sites identified
so far by the study team.
|
