“SO MUCH OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN HISTORY IS STILL BURIED IN TRUNKS, ATTICS, BASEMENTS AND CLOSETS. THEY KEEP FINDING MAYAN CITIES AND TOMBS OF PHAROAHS. THEY’VE GOT TO FIND MORE MANUSCRIPTS FROM BLACK PEOPLE IN THE 19TH CENTURY. IT’S JUST THE WAY IT HAS TO BE.” Dr. Henry Louis Gates.
In 1997 Jay Meredith moved his family to Bucktown, Maryland, to settle on property where his slaveholding ancestors had once lived. He hoped to create a tourist site at the refurbished Bucktown Village Store when he established the nonprofit Bucktown Village Foundation to protect and restore local heritage.
It was at this store where, Harriet Tubman, as a young slave, once ran to warn a fellow fieldworker about a pursuing overseer and was hit in the head by an iron weight the enraged overseer heaved at the fleeing slave.
Meredith says that Bucktown’s slaveholding past is “my heritage and part of history. You can’t hide it or pretend it doesn’t exist.”
He and his wife, Susan, and their three children hope tours reflecting Tubman’s life and the Underground Railroad will not only illuminate neglected aspects of Maryland’s past but help bridge the color line within their own community.
In the early spring of 2003 Meredith heard that the heirs of a family that had lived for generations in the same house on High Street in Cambridge, Maryland, had sold the house. Early in the 19th century, the family published the local newspaper called the CAMBRIDGE DEMOCRAT.
When the new owners came they began throwing everything in the house out into dumpsters.
Meredith asked if he might take a look at what they were discarding and the owners agreed. He and his wife put on their old clothes and dug in. They found bound volumes of Dorchester County newspapers from the 1830s through the 1860s had been missing for a hundred and fifty years. The Library of Congress didn’t have copies of them; nobody did.
Apparently, the family kept the bound volumes and loose newspapers sitting in their attic all these years. He picked them all up and took them home.
He started looking through the old newspapers and soon realized that he had discovered a treasure.
On September 17, 1849, Harriet Tubman ran away with her brothers Ben and Henry.
The reason we know it was September 17 is that in one of the old newspapers, the Cambridge Democrat from October 3, 1849, Meredith found a typical runaway slave advertisement.
The ad read:
THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS REWARD
Ran away from the subscriber on Monday the 17th (of September); three negroes named as follows: HARRY, aged about 19 years, has on one side of his neck a wen, just under the ear. He is of a dark chestnut color, about 5 feet 8 or 9 inches hight (sic); BEN, aged aged (sic) about 25 years, is very quick to speak when spoken to, he is of a chestnut color, about six feet high; MINTY, aged about 27 years, is of a chestnut color, fine looking and about 5 feet high. One hundred dollars reward will be given for each of the above named negroes, if taken out of the State and $50 if taken in the State. They must be lodged in Baltimore, Easton or Cambridge Jail, in Maryland.
ELIZA ANN BRODESS
Near Bucktown, Dorchester County, Md.
Oct. 3, 1849
MINTY was Araminta Ross, born in 1822, owned by the widow of Edward Brodess, whose name was Eliza. When MInty married a free black man named John Tubman in 1844, she changed her first name to Harriet in honor of her mother.
Harriet escaped with her brothers Henry and Ben.
In a brief biography written after an interview with abolitionist Franklin Sanborn in 1863, Harriet Tubman told him that she ran away the same year her owner, Edward Brodess died.
“In 1849, the young man died and the slaves were to be sold,” Sanborn wrote in the Boston Commonwealth on July 17, 1863. “Harriet resolved not to be sold and so, with no knowledge of the North—having only heard of Pennsylvania and New Jersey—she walked away one night alone.”
The old newspaper Jay Meredith discovered in 2003 contained the first piece of evidence documenting the escape of Harriet Tubman.
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Sunday, June 13th 2010 at 3:00PM
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