Dorchester County stood at the center of the Underground Railroad, the secret network of stations and conductors that sheltered and guided hundreds of enslaved African Americans to freedom in the mid-1800s. At this courthouse site, two famous Underground Railroad trials took place, and an earlier courthouse here was the scene of a dramatic escape engineered by Harriet Tubman, a Dorchester native. In December 1850, Kessiah Bowley and her two young children were placed on the slave auction block here, where John Bowley, a free black ship carpenter, outbid everyone to buy his wife and children; before payment was made, the family disappeared, emerged from hiding that night, and sailed up the Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore, where Kessiah's aunt Harriet Tubman had prepared for their arrival and then led them farther north to freedom. In April 1857, the county sheriff raided the East New Market home of Reverend Samuel Green, a free black Methodist minister suspected of Underground Railroad activity, found a copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Green was convicted here and sentenced to 10 years in prison under a law making possession of antislavery publications a felony before being pardoned in 1862. In 1858, a group of enslaved people fleeing Dorchester County with conductor Hugh Hazlett was arrested in neighboring Caroline County; Hazlett, a 27-year-old immigrant laborer from Ireland, escaped from the county jail, was recaptured, tried here, and sentenced to 44 years, six months, and nine days in prison before being pardoned in 1864 after Maryland freed its slaves.