The Secretary of the Interior joined many community members on Maryland’s Eastern Shore to celebrate the establishment of Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument as the 399th unit of the National Park System.
The new monument commemorates the life of the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad, a fearless woman who enabled many enslaved people to emancipate themselves and escape to freedom in the North.
The National Park Service’s (NPS) annual peer-reviewed report found that the 279 million visitors to our national parks generated $30.1 billion in economic activity and supported 252,000 jobs nationwide in 2011. More than one third of that total spending, or $13 billion, went directly into communities within 60 miles of a park, and the national parks return more than $10 for every $1 the American taxpayer invests in the National Park Service.
The new national monument is located on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and includes large sections of landscapes that are significant to Tubman’s early life in Dorchester County and evocative of her life as an enslaved person and conductor of the Underground Railroad.
These include Stewart’s Canal, dug by hand free and enslaved people, including Tubman, between 1810 and the 1830s. Stewart’s Canal is part of the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge and, although part of the new national monument, will continue to be managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The new monument also includes the home site of Jacob Jackson, a free black man who used coded letters to help Tubman communicate with family and others. The Jacob Jackson Home Site was donated to the National Park Service by The Conservation Fund for inclusion in the new national monument.
The State of Maryland’s Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park Visitor Center will be another key site in the national monument when it opens in 2015.
Often referred to as “the Moses of her people,” Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross) was born enslaved in 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland, where she grew up and worked until 1849. At age 27 she emancipated herself and fled north through the wetlands and tidal streams that still characterize Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
Tubman achieved fame in her lifetime by stealthily returning many times to the familiar Maryland landscape to lead family members and friends out of slavery. She was never captured and she became one of the most prominent “conductors” on the Underground Railroad.
Tubman also served as a nurse and a spy for the Union during the Civil War and later became active in the women’s suffrage movement. Her death on March 10, 1913 was reported in the New York Times and was followed a year later by a grand commemoration of her life featuring, among other notables, Booker T. Washington.
Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument is one of five national monuments established on Monday. Also designated are the Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers National Monument in Ohio, home of a distinguished officer in the United States Army who was the third African American to graduate from West Point and the first to achieve the rank of Colonel, and the First State National Monument in Delaware, a monument to tell the story of the early Dutch, Swedish, Finnish and English settlement of the colony of Delaware, as well as Delaware’s role as the first state to ratify the Constitution. These three national monuments will be managed by the National Park Service; two additional monuments, Rio Grande del Norte National Monument in New Mexico and San Juan Islands National Monument in Washington, will be administered by Interior’s Bureau of Land Management.
First exercised by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 to designate Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming, the Antiquities Act has been used by 16 presidents to protect unique natural and historic features, such as the Grand Canyon, the Statue of Liberty, and Colorado’s Canyons of the Ancients.
For additional information about the park and the life of Harriet Tubman, visit the park’s website at www.nps.gov/hatu.