Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge-Taking Refuge from Slavery

For years, more fugitives escaped from slavery in Maryland than from any other state, with the 1850 census recording 259 runaways. Location played a critical role, as networks of black and white abolitionists helped fugitives cross borders into adjacent free states, and local terrain also aided escape. In the 1840s and 1850s, places like Blackwater offered refuge to Rit Geen Ross, Harriet Tubman’s mother, when she successfully hid her son Moses in Greenbriar Swamp so that he could not be sold to a Georgia slave trader. For enslaved people fleeing the area, knowledge of the rivers, marshes, fields, and forests meant the difference between freedom, perishing, or a return to slavery.

Maryland · United States