Sea-level rise threatens efforts to dig into Harriet Tubman’s past in Eastern Maryland

PETER’S NECK — On a patch of soggy ground in Dorchester County, Julie Schablitsky and her team of archaeologists are digging, sifting and sorting. What they’re looking for is the exact location of Ben Ross’ cabin — and they’re running out of time.

Almost 200 years after Harriet Tubman’s father settled on this hidden 10-acre patch near Indian Landing in the woodlands around where Tubman’s extended family was enslaved, the once-fertile soil has given way to wetlands plants and salt patches. Loblolly pines that once towered over these lands are now spindly sticks, barely alive as salt water moves in beneath them.

Sea-level rise, sinking land and saltwater intrusion are accelerating the landscape alterations so much that Schablitsky, the chief archaeologist for the Maryland Department of Transportation, isn’t sure how much longer her team will be able to dig here. As it is, they have to reach the site in an all-terrain vehicle that teeters in the mud despite its high tires.

“Climate change is making a lot of what would have been dry land all waterlogged, boggy and swampy, and you can’t effectively dig holes on those sorts of soils and find anything,” said Schablitsky, who heads the department’s cultural resources division. “We are in a situation where we can’t dig much more, so we are worried about that. It’s just too wet.”

University of Maryland scientists predict the sea level in Maryland will rise approximately 1 to 2 feet by 2050 and the rise may exceed 4 feet by 2100. Dorchester County’s waters are rising even faster. Using sea-level-rise data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Ming Li, an expert in geophysical fluid dynamics, has shown that more than half of Dorchester County could be underwater in the next 50 years. NOAA’s sea-level-rise tracker shows an even more dire prediction for the Peter’s Neck area – it’s likely to be inundated by 2030.

University of Maryland agroecologist Kate Tully has documented an increase in salt patches on Dorchester County farmland. The salt water is killing many of the trees, further destabilizing the land. These are called ghost forests, and they are an indication of a changing landscape that will never return to what it was.

“The further we drive out there each year, we’re seeing more water,” she said. “We’ve seen this church steeple fall; we’ve seen that beach erode; we’ve seen boats in the marsh. We know there’s so much that we’re never going to be able to recover.”

Two years ago, the MDOT team found a rare coin from around the 1840s. It led them to the general area of Ross’ cabin, a modest log structure where historians believe young Araminta Ross spent time with her father before she took her mother’s first name, Harriet, and married John Tubman.

Tubman’s teen years with Ben Ross taught her survival skills she would rely on as she led more than 70 freedom seekers north on 13 journeys, part of what would become known as the Underground Railroad.

“Who taught her to walk in the woods and not make a noise? How did she see in the woods when there’s no light? How did she learn to trust her eyes and ears, traveling through the woods?” asked historian Kate Clifford Larson, author of the Tubman biography “Bound for the Promised Land.”

“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,” Larson added.

Charles E.T. Ross, a third-generation descendant of Harriet Tubman, agreed that her tutelage under her father was instrumental to Tubman establishing communication networks with Black mariners, known as Black Jacks.

“She worked as hard as a man, so I guess he taught her everything that he knew. She would ask questions when ships came in. To the captains, it might have been just a question, but to her it may have been a changing point in her life to learn this particular information,” Ross said.

An Underground Railroad conductor himself, Ben Ross eventually relied on his daughter for his own escape as the slaveowners became suspicious of him. Tubman escaped in 1849; in 1857, she led Ross and her mother, Rit, to Canada. They later settled in New York state. near their daughter.

The MDOT team wrapped up its fall dig Nov. 17. Working in grids from where they believed the cabin to be, the archaeologists found pottery shards, glassware pieces and a pipe stem. The artifacts indicate that Ross was a person of some means who operated somewhat independently.

Anthony Thompson owned Ross and many other enslaved Dorchester County residents in the 1800s. According to Thompson’s will, Ben Ross was to be freed five years after Thompson’s death, with 10 acres provided to him in Peter’s Neck. Ross received the land in the early 1840s. Even then, the land would have been low, remote and without some of its best timber.

Larson, who consults on various Harriet Tubman projects for the state and federal governments, walked Peter’s Neck with local residents in 2008. She recalled their feet sinking into the marsh and the phragmites — tall, invasive plants ubiquitous on the Shore — blocking their path. At that time, they accessed the site with special permission, because the land was private.

In 2020, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service bought 2,600 acres of marshland, including the Peter’s Neck property, to add to the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, some 100 miles southeast of downtown Baltimore. With permission to access the property, and a guiding deed that Larson found describing the cabin’s general location, the MDOT team found the coin and other artifacts. But, in the years between Larson’s walk and the MDOT’s team first visit, the land had become even wetter.

Aaron Levinthal, MDOT’s senior archaeologist, has searched for the landing that would have been near the cabin. Known as Indian Landing, the site would have been where the woodsman helped float the logs to Baltimore. When Levinthal began, he could walk to the river easily. This time, though, invasive plants obscured the path; boots stuck into the ground. Even walking on fallen logs wasn’t enough. Everything was wet.

“We have dug hundreds of holes down there, and we have not found where the landing is,” Levinthal said. “You would expect to find chains, horseshoes, industrial things, and we have not found any of that. With sea level rising and the land sinking, it may be out in the river.”

MDOT’s findings are bittersweet for Charles Ross, whose ancestors fought hard for Tubman to be recognized in the county of her birth. Now that she is, with two museums, a scenic byway and several murals ― including one that Ross himself painted — he’s worried time is running out just as interest is at its highest in his famous relative.

As children, he said, he and other family members didn’t know much about Tubman or Ross. But, as the sites have proliferated, so have the interest and the energy among his younger cousins. He’s hoping the team can dig deeper and find more.

“A seed was planted when we were young, and then it was dormant,” Ross said. “But now we have a new generation of kids in our family who have taken over. Their pride level is higher. And they want to know more information.”

Rona Kobell is a visiting fellow at the SNF AGORA Institute at the Johns Hopkins University and the editor-in-chief of the Environmental Justice Journalism Initiative. Reach her at rona@ejji.org.