After Quakers sold their meetinghouse to the local black community in 1849, the new owners established Mt. Pleasant Methodist Episcopal Church. The original church building later burned, but the modern-day congregation still uses the cemetery. Laws restricted blacks from meeting in groups, and a gathering of slaves in a home or in the woods might arouse suspicion, but they did gather at cemeteries, a rare respite amid the constant oversight of nineteenth-century slave societies. One escapee testified that Harriet Tubman used a cemetery for a nighttime rendezvous away from the suspicious eyes of plantation masters and overseers. This evidence suggests that some freedom seekers took their first secretive step on the Underground Railroad surrounded by silent ancestors. In 1857, Tubman raced to the area to rescue her free parents, Ben and Rit Ross, who lived nearby, as Ben was about to be arrested for helping the Dover Eight, a group of freedom seekers who had fled Dorchester County.