DORCESTER COUNTY, MARYLAND—Herald Mail Media reports that traces of a cabin that belonged to Ben Ross, Harriet Tubman’s father, have been unearthed in the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Born into slavery as Araminta Ross in 1822 on the Thompson farm, she and her mother were separated from Ben Ross a few years later. Ross was bequeathed ten acres, where he built his cabin, and achieved his freedom five years after the death of Anthony Thompson in the early 1840s. Archaeologist Julie Schablitsky of the Maryland Department of Transportation said nineteenth-century nails, brick, glass, dish fragments, and a button have been recovered at the site. “[Tubman] would’ve spent time here as a child, but also she would’ve come back and been living here with her father in her teenage years, working alongside him,” Schablitsky said. The experience of living in this difficult landscape probably helped Tubman to learn the navigation and survival skills she needed to escape slavery, make her way to Philadelphia in 1849, and later help others, including her parents, do the same. To read about excavations at a mountain cabin owned by a formerly enslaved man who became a California legend, go to "The Amazing True Story of Nathan Harrison."
