“Sailing Away to Freedom”

Gilpin’s Point was one of the busiest wharves along the Choptank River in Caroline County, where steamboats and sailing vessels transported people, timber, agricultural products, and seafood. It stood just upriver from Dr. Anthony C. Thompson’s plantation, where Harriet Tubman’s parents lived and where Tubman herself conducted several of her most famous escapes. Joseph Cornish, a forty-year-old blacksmith and minister enslaved by Capt. Samuel W. LeCompte, USN, was married to a free woman and was the father of five children. After being worked very hard, he began his struggle for freedom on December 8, 1855, leaving Cambridge on foot for Gilpin’s Point, where he had heard a vessel was about to sail. Cornish worked his passage to Baltimore, reached Underground Railroad agent William Still in Philadelphia on Christmas Day, then was rushed to agent Sydney H. Gay in New York City, who forwarded him to St. Catherines, Ontario, Canada, where Harriet Tubman and many others from Maryland’s Eastern Shore were cherishing their newfound freedom.

Maryland · United States