Frederick Douglass, born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in 1818, spent the first six years of his life in the Tuckahoe area near this spot with his grandparents, Betsey and Isaac Bailey, and numerous cousins in a humble cabin. He recalled those early years with his beloved grandmother as spirited, joyous, uproarious, and happy, writing that the children played freely, fished and swam in the river, and explored Levi Lee's grist mill. He also came to understand that the cabin, his grandmother, his cousins, and he himself were enslaved to the frightful Old Master, and that once he was old enough he would be taken away to live and work on Edward Lloyd's plantation. Betsey Bailey was known for harvesting shad and herring from the river, cultivating a bountiful sweet potato crop, stitching prized fishing nets, and selling them in Hillsboro and Denton. Douglass fondly remembered the windowless, clay-floored cabin as the only home he ever had, and the surrounding Talbot County landscape of sparsely populated farmland, with corn and wheat fields near the Tuckahoe, remained important to him. When he returned to Tuckahoe in 1878, he sought the ground where his grandmother's cabin had stood and carried soil back to Cedar Hill, his Washington, D.C. home, as a sacred touchstone to his humble beginnings and formative years in what he often called his own dear native soil.