Harriet Tubman Memorial Garden

The local community, joined by others across the nation, honors its native daughter Harriet Ross Tubman. Her memory endures through artistic expression in literature, music, sculpture, paint, photography, performance, and more. Descendants of enslaved and free blacks, as well as slave owners, continue to live and work in the area, including relatives of some who escaped to freedom and descendants of Tubman’s family. One Tubman relative, Charles E. T. Ross, designed and painted the park’s mural in honor of his ancestor. In early 2012, members of Harriet Tubman’s family gathered to unveil a wax figure of their ancestor at Madame Tussauds in Washington, DC. The likeness later traveled to Cambridge and was briefly displayed at the Harriet Tubman Organization, where Valery Ross Manokey, Tubman’s great-great-grand-niece and closest living relative, posed with the figure. In 1859, Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote that her tales of adventure were beyond anything in fiction, that her ingenuity and generalship were extraordinary, and that the slaves called her Moses.

Cambridge, Maryland · United States