Finding Harriet Tubman's Early Home Part Of MD Underground Series

BOWIE, MD — When Maryland Public Television’s digital studios collaborated with the Maryland Department of Transportation to create an archaeology film series, they weren’t expecting their discoveries to solely revolve around the history of African Americans, including acclaimed abolitionist Harriet Tubman.

The six-part film series, "Maryland Underground," shifted from documenting sites that were on the state's highway system to discovering artifacts and remains from historic African American landmarks. Luckily, the series name connected to the idea of underground, referring to archaeology and “The Underground Railroad,” the system of safe houses that enslaved people used to escape to freedom in the North in the 1800s.

Tubman used the system to gain her freedom and to lead others to safety in free states.

Earlier this year crews sifted through artifacts at the Dorchester County site of a cabin owned by Ben Ross, the father of Tubman.

She would have spent time there as a child, but also "she would've come back and been living here with her father in her teenage years, working alongside him," Julie Schabiltsky, chief archaeologist for MDOT, said previously. "This was the opportunity she had to learn about how to navigate and survive in the wetlands and the woods. We believe this experience was able to benefit her when she began to move people to freedom."

Schabiltsky said the heightened interest in historical African American sites sparked the focus on them in the series.

“We were in a situation, MDOT, where a lot of times people come to us with ideas and we found that the most popular topic or the thing they wanted us to search for was sites that had to do with Black communities, descendant communities, and African American history,” Schablitsky said.

Schablitsky joined forces with a team of MDOT archaeologists and the statewide public media channel to bring the discoveries to life in the best way possible — through documentaries.

The 5- to 8-minute episodes broadcast the unearthing of past slave cabins, the remnants of a slave town, and most recently, the home of Ross. Remnants from the Ross cabin were discovered on marshy property acquired in 2020 as an addition to Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Dorchester County.

Split into two episodes, “Ben’s 10” covers the discovery of Ross’ cabin and where Harriet Tubman grew up. Although the first episode aired in February, the search process for Ross’ cabin began back in November 2020.

As it was getting late in the fall season, the ground started to freeze, which made it difficult to continue the search, but that did not stop the discovery process. Schablitsky described the discovery as a process rather than one specific moment where the cabin was located.

“A discovery isn’t just one thing, or one object, or necessarily one moment.” Schablitsky said, “It’s a process, we have a process of discovery, so it’s not necessarily a big moment. It's a series of steps that get you closer and closer and closer to confirming a discovery.”

Related: Harriet Tubman's Childhood Home Remnants Found In MD

The Maryland Underground team spent two weeks locating the cabin in November and returned to the site in March for another two weeks to confirm it was Ross’ cabin. In the four-week process of exploring the cabin, the archaeology team found several remnants believed to have belonged to Ross ranging from personal artifacts, buttons, pieces of pottery, plates, nails, and more.

Series filmmaker Amy Oden said one of the best parts of working on the film was seeing the excitement from Ernestine Wyatt, Tubman’s great-great-great-grandniece, finding her ancestors’ past belongings.

“From the conservation I had with [Harriet's] descendant Ernestine,” Oden said, “that seemed to be the most exciting thing to her, too, because she was really excited by the idea that she would be able to see something he had in his home.”

Along with documenting the discovery of Ross’ cabin, it was very important to Oden to portray the connection Wyatt had with Tubman and Ross as a relative that is different from the historic portrayal of Tubman.

Oden said, “One of the things that I was pretty focused on discussing with her was how she felt about Harriet Tubman versus the version of Harriet Tubman that I feel like the rest of us tend to hear.”

The stories passed down to generations of Tubman's lineage differ from the ordinary stories shared about Tubman's activism in the Underground Railroad, learning about her as a person rather than a historical figure.

As stories about Tubman’s past are often left out of history and school curricula, Oden said one of her biggest takeaways from working on this film series was the opportunity to highlight this piece of unknown history. Like Schablitsky, Oden hopes the series will help create more stories on hidden history.

“The 'Maryland Underground' series in general has been really rewarding for me to work on because I see it as hopefully part of a larger trend to shedding light on parts of our region and country’s history that people haven't really looked at,” Oden said.

Tubman was born a slave, Araminta Ross, in March 1822 on the Thompson Farm near Cambridge in Dorchester County, Maryland. She used the Underground Railroad to escape to freedom in the North in 1849, then used it to help others gain their freedom. She also actively spied against the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Tubman overcame abuse, war, chronic illness and extreme injustice to make her mark on American history as a suffragette, an abolitionist and a Civil War veteran, Gov. Larry Hogan's office said previously.

The Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park and Visitors Center in Church Creek, which Hogan marked the grand opening of in 2017, receives hundreds of thousands of visitors each year from all 50 states and over 60 countries.

Tubman Film Coming To PBS

“Ben’s 10” segment on the series is part of Maryland Public Television’s ongoing coverage of Tubman as the media channel produces the upcoming “Harriet Tubman: A Vision of Freedom” film. The two-hour film is expected to air in fall 2022 nationally on PBS along with MPT’s “Becoming Frederick Douglass.”

Travis Mitchell, senior vice president and chief content officer of MPT, said the productions on two iconic Marylanders is meant to do a deeper dive into their lives rather than the history learned only about slavery.

“We’ve heard about Harriet Tubman, we’ve heard about slavery. But this is an opportunity visually for our storytelling to really help people understand through imagery and great storytelling exactly what the circumstances were of the day. Looking at the artifacts, looking at some of the old buildings, you understand that this isn't just something you read about in history, or maybe you haven't heard about in history,” Mitchell said.

To watch the Maryland Underground series, visit MPT’s Digital Studios page.

$20 Bill Debate

After a four-year delay by the Trump administration, efforts to put Tubman on the $20 bill have resurfaced as President Joe Biden's appointees head federal agencies.

The move to replace President Andrew Jackson on the front of $20 bills with onetime slave Tubman in 2020 was put on hold while Donald Trump was in office.