"In 1849, Harriet Tubman escaped from the Eastern Shore farm where she was enslaved. Over the next several years, she would return 13 times, rescuing more than 70 enslaved relatives and friends, and inspiring many others to find their own path to freedom. She has become a hero, with two national parks established in her honor, several biographies about her feats, and a major motion picture about to be released about her life.
But time has not been as kind to the lands that Tubman left behind, or the descendants of the first free African-American communities that called them home.
The Chesapeake Bay and the rivers that feed it are rising, along with most of the rest of the world’s bodies of water, encroaching on the now-marshy expanses where Tubman lived and worked alongside her father, Benjamin Ross, a gifted woodsman. The land is subsiding, too, as farmers withdraw water to irrigate crops and communities reach ever deeper into the aquifers for clean drinking water. Graves, some unmarked, are collapsing, hidden in woods next to forlorn houses of worship. Ghost forests dot the landscape, once-lush loblolly pines reduced to mere skinny sticks; timbering thinned the forests, and saltwater intrusion is trying to finish the leveling.
The loss of these lands will make it much harder for future generations to understand Tubman’s story and how the community of freed and enslaved peoples networked and relied on each other to free themselves from bondage. That Maryland — and the rest of the nation — might be willing to lose these places speaks volumes about how governments and preservationists view the first lands that African-Americans were able to call their own."
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