HANOVER, Md. — “What we’re looking at today are artifacts from the home of Harriet Tubman’s birthplace.”
Five years after discovering the site where Harriet Tubman’s father lived on the Eastern Shore, Archeologist Dr. Julie Schablitsky is sharing news of what her team has found.
VIDEO: Piecing together the early life of Harriet Tubman
“I think the most exciting piece that we found, and I think everyone will probably agree with this, is this coin from 1808, and this particular coin is a 50-cent piece,” said Schablitsky.
It’s just one of hundreds of items from that site and from a second location where slaves’ quarters once stood on their slave master’s thousand-acre property in Dorchester County.
“So another exciting artifact that we found was this tobacco pipe bowl,” said Schablitsky as she plucked another delicate item from a case, “Anyone could have smoked this so Harriet Tubman could have smoked this.”
Written records of specific slaves from so long ago are few, and no one is even sure exactly where Tubman was born on the property, but each item helps to fill in gaps in her story.
“What we’ve learned about Harriet Tubman, I think it’s more through her father just living and working on that property,” said Schablitsky, “We’ve learned that Harriet Tubman used that space as her training ground so when she was ready to move people north to freedom, having the experience of living off the land through eating muskrat, reading the night sky.”
The archeologists have been racing against the clock to unearth items as the rising water table in the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge threatens to leave the rest buried forever and the oft-flooded site is relatively inaccessible.
That’s where MDOT Archeologist Aidan Kirby stepped in to help launch a virtual museum.
“In order to make this collection accessible to the public was make things interactive and so part of that was converting some of these artifacts into 3D models,” said Kirby.
Now, everyone ranging from scholars and historians to teachers and their students can learn from the discoveries, getting an up close look at what time left behind of the iconic conductor of the Underground Railroad.
“The bits of broken things that were thrown away and lost, whether it’s a coin or a pipe bowl,” explained Schablitsky, “all those items come together to fill in this mosaic of their lives.”
