Dorchester County occupies a central place in the story of the Underground Railroad, the secret network of stations and conductors that helped hundreds of enslaved African Americans reach freedom in the mid-1800s. Church Creek and nearby Madison were important shipbuilding centers where some enslaved people learned maritime skills that helped them use the creeks and rivers of the Chesapeake as passageways to freedom. Harriet Tubman lived and worked in this area; after escaping slavery in 1849, she risked her freedom repeatedly by making at least 13 trips back to the Eastern Shore and leading more than 70 enslaved people north to freedom. Late in 1854, she sent a letter to Jacob Jackson, a free black farmer living near Madison, asking him to tell her brothers to be ready when the good old ship Zion came along; although authorities intercepted the letter, Jackson said he did not understand its meaning and later alerted Tubman’s brothers that she was on her way. When the three brothers went to see their parents on Christmas Day in nearby Caroline County, they found Tubman waiting to lead them to freedom. Her father Ben Ross served as the head timber cutter for a slaveholder on a Madison-Woolford plantation, and her mother Rit Green belonged to the stepson of Ben’s owner, who moved her and her children to Bucktown in 1823. Though Tubman was separated from her father in her early years, she later returned to this area and worked with him in the woods and marshes, where she learned survival skills essential to her later success on the Underground Railroad.