100 Places in the USA Every Woman Should Go by Sophia Dembling

Author:Sophia Dembling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Travelers' Tales
Published: 2014-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

THE STRETCH OF UNPAVED ROAD IN Caroline County, Maryland, along the Choptank River is pretty enough, but undistinguished: flat, tree- lined, with lawns on either side and the river in the distance. But to Kate Clifford Larson, PhD, “It is magnificent. Very spiritual, very beautiful.”

This stretch of road is where scholars believe Harriet Tubman ran away for the first time and where she rescued her brothers on Christmas Day, 1854. Today, the road is unchanged from the days Tubman walked it.

Harriet Tubman. We learned about her in elementary school. Short story: Former slave, helped other slaves escape to the North via the Underground Railroad. She seemed almost a mythical figure. We knew she was good, but she was hardly flesh and blood. We learned about her as children and then moved on.

When Larson read about Harriet Tubman with her daughter, a second-grader in 1993, her interest was piqued. “I just thought she was a very cool person,” Larson says. She looked for a biography about Tubman written for adults, and found just one, published in the 1940s. “I was stunned.” Larson wrote her dissertation on Tubman. Although Tubman couldn’t read or write, Larson found a lot had been written about her by others. “And of course, slaves were considered property, and property was pretty well documented,” Larson says.

Today Larson is a consultant for the National Park Service, which has started recognizing Tubman’s historic significance. The Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historic Monument was designated in March 2013 in Maryland, where Tubman was born, enslaved, and where much of her activity with the Underground Railroad occurred. The national park is a lot of nothing, but Maryland also has created the 125-mile Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Byway through Dorchester and Caroline counties and is developing a state park in her honor. Delaware picks up the route at the border for another 95 miles. As of this writing, Auburn, New York, where Tubman lived the last 50 years of her life and is buried, was awaiting designation.

www.nps.gov/hatu/index.htm

www.harriettubmanbyway.org

www.deldot.gov/information/community_programs_and_services/byways/railroad.shtml

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