Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park

Harriet Tubman

James A Bowley

As we celebrate Juneteenth, it is equally important to recognize the role that the enslaved had in their own emancipation. The National Park Service has the honor of protecting sacred places and histories for the American people, many of which explore enslavement, emancipation, and the fight for equality that are integral to the American experience.

The Designing the Parks program is not your typical internship. Each year since 2013, this program at the Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation has introduced a cohort of college students and recent graduates to NPS design and planning professions through projects related to cultural landscape stewardship. In the internships, made possible by partner organizations, participants focus on an in-depth project that directly engages with a national park unit.

Learn how historians determined Harriet Tubman's birth month as March, 1822. Photo Courtesy of Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The National Park Service strives to make its parks, monuments, and historic sites available to all. Programs, services, and products, such as Braille alternatives of print material, sign language interpretation of tours, accessible camping sites and trails, ramps and elevators make parks more accessible. These are essential to allowing the public to fully enjoy NPS resources.

The National Park Service and the Maryland Park Service jointly dedicated and opened the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center in Church Creek, Maryland on March 10-12. The facility serves as the joint visitor center for the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park and the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park.

In 1849 Harriet Tubman took her fate into her own hands and escaped slavery. Over approximately a decade, Tubman returned to Maryland to rescue about 70 more enslaved people including her family and friends.

The Jacob Jackson home site is a landscape associated with Harriet Tubman's youth on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. In 1854, Jacob Jackson a free black man and friend of Harriet Tubman helped her to free her brothers from slavery. Jacob and Harriet were part of the White Marsh community of free and enslaved black families, many of whom worked to resist, in their own ways, entrenched systems of slavery and discrimination.

Today considered a national hero, Tubman is best known for her role in assisting approximately 70 enslaved African Americans escape to freedom as a leading “conductor” of the Underground Railroad – a resistance movement based on self-liberation and flight. The Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park memorializes this legacy not through physical structures, but by instead through the landscape in Tubman’s native Dorchester County, Maryland.