About the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park
This park on Maryland's Eastern Shore protects the countryside where Harriet Tubman was born into slavery, worked as a child and young woman, escaped in 1849, and then returned repeatedly to lead about 70 enslaved people north. The marshes, fields, and waterways of Dorchester County look much as they did then, which is the point: the park interprets a landscape rather than a single building. Tubman left the best summary of her record as a conductor: "I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger."
The site came into the National Park System in two steps. President Barack Obama proclaimed the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument under the Antiquities Act on March 25, 2013. The National Defense Authorization Act for 2015, signed December 19, 2014, then directed the Park Service to manage its portion as the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park and authorized acquisition of up to 4,207 acres in Dorchester, Caroline, and Talbot counties. The park's core today is the 480-acre Jacob Jackson Home Site, donated by The Conservation Fund. The rest of the original monument is managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as part of Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge. A sister unit, Harriet Tubman National Historical Park in Auburn, New York, where she lived after the Civil War, was established in January 2017.
The visitor center is a partnership: the National Park Service, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, and Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park jointly operate the 16,000-square-foot, LEED Silver building and its 2,700-square-foot open-air pavilion on the 17-acre state park next to the refuge. Its design concept, "The View North," orients the building south to north, and a legacy garden offers walking paths for reflection. Inside are permanent exhibits, a film, a museum store, an information desk, and a research library. The building also houses the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom program, which coordinates Underground Railroad sites nationwide.
Collections and Research Services
The research library in the visitor center is the park's public reading room, and the Network to Freedom office there is a useful contact for anyone documenting an Underground Railroad site or family story. The park website offers a downloadable brochure, classroom lesson plans, field-trip resources, and a Junior Ranger book. Because this is a landscape park rather than an archive of Dorchester County records, researchers tracing enslaved or free Black ancestors on the Eastern Shore will also need county court and land records, Freedmen's Bureau files, and church registers; our guide to free family-history research explains how to locate them, and finding where someone is buried covers cemetery sources.
Planning Your Visit
The visitor center is at 4068 Golden Hill Road, Church Creek, MD 21622, south of Cambridge; phone (410) 221-2290. There is no entrance fee. Hours and holiday closures are posted on the park's operating-hours page, so check before driving out, since the site is rural and services are limited. Groups of ten or more who want a ranger-led program register through the Maryland Park Service. The center is the logical starting point for the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Byway, a driving route through the surrounding Tubman sites. Details are at nps.gov/hatu. Across the Chesapeake Bay, the Annapolis Maritime Museum and Baltimore's Maryland Historical Society are also profiled on this site.
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