Following Freedom's Path

To understand why Maryland is so central to Harriet Tubman's story, it helps to understand the state's unusual position in 19th-century America. Maryland was a border state, meaning it sat at the edge of the slaveholding South while sharing a border with the free state of Pennsylvania. This geographic reality made it both a place of profound oppression and a place where freedom was tantalizingly close. For enslaved people on the Eastern Shore, the distance to the Pennsylvania border was roughly 90 miles. That distance was both an invitation and a gauntlet.

Tubman was born around 1822 in Dorchester County, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.^[1] She spent the first 27 years of her life there, enduring the brutal realities of plantation slavery. She worked in fields and timber yards, suffered severe physical abuse, and witnessed the constant threat of family separation through sale. These experiences did not break her. They shaped her into someone with an extraordinary understanding of the landscape, the people, and the systems she would later work to defeat. Maryland was her school, even as it was her prison.

When Tubman escaped in September 1849, she used her intimate knowledge of the Eastern Shore's waterways, forests, and roads to navigate north. She knew which farms might offer shelter and which to avoid. She understood the rhythms of the region in ways that no outsider could replicate. That local knowledge became her greatest asset as a conductor. On her subsequent return missions, she guided groups of freedom seekers through the same terrain she had memorized over decades of forced labor. Maryland's geography was not just a backdrop to her story. It was a tool she wielded with precision.

The state's significance extends beyond Tubman's personal story. Maryland was home to a substantial free Black population, particularly in Baltimore, which was one of the largest free Black communities in the antebellum United States.^[2] This community provided crucial support for freedom seekers passing through the city. Free Black churches, mutual aid societies, and individual families created an informal but effective network of assistance. Understanding this community is essential to understanding how the Underground Railroad actually functioned in Maryland.

Maryland also illustrates the legal and social complexity of slavery in America. The state had a large population of both enslaved and free Black residents living in close proximity, which created constant tension and surveillance. Slaveholders and their allies were acutely aware of the threat posed by the Underground Railroad and responded with increasingly harsh laws and enforcement. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, passed just a year after Tubman's escape, made the stakes even higher for everyone involved. Visiting Maryland's sites with this legal context in mind helps explain why every act of resistance required such extraordinary courage.

Today, Maryland has made significant efforts to preserve and interpret this history. The Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park, established in 2013 and opened to visitors in 2017, anchors a broader network of sites across the Eastern Shore and beyond. The park's visitor center in Church Creek, Dorchester County, is an excellent starting point for any journey through this history. But the park is just the beginning. Across the state, from the tidal marshes of the Eastern Shore to the rowhouses of Baltimore, the story of freedom is written into the landscape, waiting to be read.

It is worth noting that this history belongs to everyone. Tubman's story is an American story, one that speaks to the deepest values of freedom, courage, and human dignity. Visiting these sites is not simply an act of historical tourism. It is an opportunity to reckon honestly with the past and to draw inspiration from people who faced impossible odds and refused to accept injustice. Maryland offers that opportunity in abundance, and this guide is designed to help you make the most of it.

This guide is organized to serve a range of travelers, from those with a single day to spend in one region to those planning a multi-day journey across the state. You do not need to read it cover to cover before you go, though doing so will enrich your experience considerably. Think of it as a companion you can consult before, during, and after your visits. Each chapter builds on the others, but each can also stand alone as a reference for a specific region or topic.

The book is structured in two broad parts. The first part, covering Chapters 1 through 6, provides the historical foundation you need to make sense of what you will see. These chapters cover Tubman's life, the realities of slavery in Maryland, the mechanics of the Underground Railroad, and the people who made it work. Reading these chapters before you visit will dramatically deepen your experience at each site. History is always more vivid when you already know the story behind the place you are standing in.

The second part, covering Chapters 7 through 10, is your practical travel companion. Here you will find suggested itineraries, site-by-site descriptions, opening hours, admission information, and tips for getting the most out of each location. These chapters are organized geographically, moving from the Eastern Shore through Central Maryland and into Baltimore and the northern routes. You can follow the itineraries as written or mix and match sites based on your interests and schedule.

Throughout the guide, you will find several recurring features designed to enhance your visit:

• Historical Context boxes that provide deeper background on specific events, people, or systems relevant to each site
• Visitor Tips with practical advice on parking, accessibility, best times to visit, and nearby amenities
• Reflection Prompts that invite you to pause and think about what you are experiencing, rather than simply moving from site to site
• Connecting the Dots sections that show how individual sites relate to the broader network of the Underground Railroad

A few practical notes before you begin. Many of the sites in this guide are located in rural areas with limited cell service. It is strongly recommended that you download offline maps before you travel, particularly for the Eastern Shore. Some sites have seasonal hours or require advance reservations, especially for ranger-led programs. The Further Reading and Resources section at the back of this book includes websites and phone numbers for all major sites, and checking those resources before you leave home will save you frustration on the road.

Accessibility varies significantly across sites. The Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center is fully accessible, with paved paths and accessible restrooms. Many outdoor sites, however, involve uneven terrain, unpaved trails, or limited facilities. Specific accessibility information is noted for each site in Chapters 8 through 10. If accessibility is a concern, calling ahead to confirm current conditions is always a good idea, as improvements are ongoing at many locations.

This guide also encourages a particular kind of travel pace. The temptation with historical sites is to check them off a list and move on. Resist that impulse here. These are places where extraordinary things happened to real people. Give yourself time to stand still, to read the interpretive panels carefully, to look out over the landscape and imagine what it looked like 175 years ago. The most meaningful travel experiences come not from covering the most ground but from going deep in the places you choose to visit.

A note on language: Throughout this guide, the term enslaved people is used rather than slaves. This reflects current historical scholarship and acknowledges that slavery was a condition imposed on people, not a definition of who they were. Similarly, the term freedom seekers is used to describe those who escaped enslavement, honoring their agency and courage.

Finally, consider combining your Maryland journey with visits to connected sites in neighboring states. The Underground Railroad extended from Maryland through Delaware and Pennsylvania, and many freedom seekers passed through Wilmington, Delaware, where the great conductor Thomas Garrett operated, before reaching Philadelphia. The National Park Service's Network to Freedom program maintains a database of certified Underground Railroad sites across the country, and Maryland's sites connect to a much larger national story.^[3]

The name Underground Railroad is one of the most evocative phrases in American history, and also one of the most misunderstood. It was not underground in any literal sense, and it was not a railroad. The term is a metaphor that emerged in the 1830s and 1840s to describe a loose, decentralized network of people, routes, and hiding places that helped enslaved people escape to freedom in the northern United States and Canada.^[4] Understanding what it actually was, and what it was not, is essential to appreciating the sites you will visit in Maryland.

The Underground Railroad was not a single organized system with a central leadership or a fixed set of routes. It was more like a living network that grew organically over decades, shaped by local conditions, individual relationships, and constant adaptation to changing dangers. In some areas, it was highly organized, with specific safe houses spaced a night's travel apart and reliable conductors who knew every twist of the route. In other areas, it was improvised, with freedom seekers relying on word of mouth, the North Star, and the kindness of strangers. Both versions existed in Maryland, sometimes overlapping.

The railroad metaphor did give rise to a vocabulary that historians still use today. Key terms include:

• Conductors: People who guided freedom seekers along escape routes. Harriet Tubman was the most famous conductor, but there were hundreds of others.
• Stations: Safe houses or hiding places where freedom seekers could rest, eat, and receive assistance before moving on.
• Stationmasters: The people who operated safe houses and provided shelter, food, clothing, and sometimes money.
• Passengers: The freedom seekers themselves, the enslaved people making the journey north.
• Stockholders: People who provided financial support to the network without directly participating in escapes.

It is important to understand that the vast majority of people who escaped enslavement did so without the help of the Underground Railroad in any formal sense. Most freedom seekers relied primarily on their own resourcefulness, their knowledge of the local terrain, and assistance from other Black people, both free and enslaved, along the way.^[5] The white abolitionists who operated safe houses, while genuinely important, were one part of a much larger and more complex system of resistance. Keeping this in mind helps correct a historical narrative that has sometimes overemphasized white participation at the expense of Black agency.

In Maryland specifically, the Underground Railroad operated under conditions of intense surveillance and legal danger. The state's position as a border state meant that slaveholders were acutely aware of the proximity of freedom and responded with aggressive enforcement. Slave patrols, informants, and the constant threat of capture made every step of an escape journey dangerous. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 extended that danger into the nominally free North, requiring even northern citizens to assist in the capture of freedom seekers. This legal context explains why so many participants in the Underground Railroad kept their activities secret, which in turn explains why the historical record is incomplete and sometimes difficult to verify.

Historians have worked for decades to piece together the story of the Underground Railroad from fragmentary evidence. Oral histories, letters, Quaker meeting records, newspaper accounts of escapes, and the memoirs of participants like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman herself all contribute to the picture. But significant gaps remain. Many safe houses were never documented precisely because documentation was dangerous. This means that some sites identified as Underground Railroad stations are based on strong oral tradition and circumstantial evidence rather than definitive written proof. This guide notes the evidentiary basis for each site's identification, so you can understand the degree of historical certainty involved.

The scale of the Underground Railroad is also frequently misunderstood. Popular accounts sometimes suggest that tens of thousands of people escaped through the network each year. The actual numbers, while still significant, were smaller. Historians estimate that between 1,000 and 5,000 people escaped from slavery annually in the decades before the Civil War, with the Underground Railroad assisting a portion of that total.^[6] What made the Underground Railroad so significant was not its numerical scale but its symbolic power. It demonstrated that slavery could be resisted, that the system was not impenetrable, and that ordinary people could act on their convictions at great personal cost.

For Harriet Tubman, the Underground Railroad was not an abstraction. It was a lived reality of cold nights in swamps, coded messages, trusted contacts, and split-second decisions. She made approximately 13 missions back into Maryland after her own escape, guiding around 70 people to freedom over roughly a decade.^[7] Each mission required her to re-enter the most dangerous territory imaginable, a state where she was a wanted fugitive with a bounty on her head. Understanding the mechanics of the network she used, and the landscape she navigated, makes those missions even more astonishing.

As you travel through Maryland, you will encounter the physical remnants of this network: old farmhouses that sheltered freedom seekers, rivers that served as both barriers and highways, roads that led north through darkness and danger. Each of these places is a piece of a larger puzzle. This guide will help you see how the pieces fit together, and why the picture they form is one of the most important in American history. The Underground Railroad was built by people who believed that freedom was worth any risk. Walking the ground where they worked is a way of honoring that belief.