Artifacts
Illustration by Meilan Solly / Photos via the Maryland Department of Transportation
A new virtual museum is bringing the history of Harriet Tubman’s early years to the world. Launched by the Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT), the museum showcases artifacts found at the home of Tubman’s father, Ben Ross, who lived in Dorchester County, Maryland. The discovery offers rare insight into Tubman’s formative years and the challenges faced by the enslaved and freed people of the region.
Since the site, located in the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, is not accessible to the public due to its remote location and rising sea levels threatening the area, the state agency's archaeologists developed the interactive online platform that's free for all. It includes 3D models, photographs and details about what was found at Ross' plot.
“We've been digging on there for about four years,” Julie Schablitsky, MDOT’s chief archaeologist tells Adam Thompson of CBS News. “Now that we are done, we've analyzed all the artifacts and taken some of those artifacts, scanned them with a 3D scanner and loaded them to a virtual museum.”
The discovery of the Ben Ross home was a long-awaited breakthrough. Historians had speculated for years that the cabin was located in Peter’s Neck, but it wasn’t until 2020, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service acquired 2,600 acres of marshland, including the Peter’s Neck property, that access to the site became possible. With permission to explore the area and a historic deed that helped pinpoint the cabin’s general location, the MDOT team was able to find the first evidence that ultimately led to the creation of the virtual museum.
The artifacts on display include a range of domestic items such as plates, pitchers and bowls, offering a window into the everyday life of Ben Ross and his family. The collection also features pottery fragments and animal bones, indicating that the family relied on both domesticated and wild resources for survival.
Alongside these household items, the virtual museum showcases stone tools and pottery from Native American campsites. These objects that pre-date the arrival of Europeans to the region help contextualize the land’s long history and its use by Indigenous people.
Ben Ross had originally worked as a timber foreman under his enslaver, Anthony Thompson, a wealthy landowner in the county. When Thompson married, his new wife brought enslaved workers with her, including Rit Green. Green and Ross formed a union and had 9 children, including Araminta "Minty" Ross, better known today as Tubman. When Thompson died, his will provided for Ross' eventual emancipation, who then settled nearby the Thompson estate. That home was a site of both hardship and resilience, and Tubman, lived with her father during her teenage years and where she learned survival skills that would later help her lead others to freedom via the Underground Railroad.
“Her father is teaching her how to live in those woods, how to forage in those woods, how to do what she needed to do to survive in that landscape,” historian Kate Clifford Larson tells Rona Kobell of the Baltimore Banner.
As an Underground Railroad conductor, Ross eventually relied on his daughter to help him reunite with his family, who were still enslaved. After Tubman first escaped in 1849, she returned to Maryland as a conductor on the Underground Railroad about 13 times to lead about 70 enslaved people, including Rit, north to freedom. Ross, Rit and other family members later settled in New York, where they lived near Tubman.
The Ross home is now threatened by climate change and sea-level rise, complicating efforts to preserve it. The wildlife refuge where the site is located is highly susceptible to flooding due to rising waters.
“The further we drive out there each year, we’re seeing more water,” University of Maryland agro-ecologist Kate Tully tells the Banner. “We know there’s so much that we’re never going to be able to recover.”
Tully has also observed a rise in saltwater intrusion on farmland in Dorchester County, which is causing widespread tree mortality and further destabilizing the land. This phenomenon, known as "ghost forests," signals a significant alteration in the landscape that may never revert to its previous state.
The creation of the virtual museum is not just an effort to protect the artifacts, but also a way to ensure that the history of Ross, Tubman, and the region’s enslaved people is not lost. As the physical site faces increasing challenges from climate change, the digital platform offers a lifeline to these important historical narratives.
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Ella Jeffries | READ MORE
Ella Jeffries is an editorial intern with Smithsonian magazine.
Filed Under: Harriet Tubman, Museums, Native American History, Native Americans, Slavery