The American Guide Series, produced by the Federal Writers’ Project, is one of the most well-known WPA projects. Written as a collection of travel guides, the series included suggested tour routes as well as essays on the history and culture of each U.S. state and territory. Major U.S. cities and several regions were also given their own separate guidebooks.
The state guides give a fascinating snapshot of American life in the 1930s. Written in a lively and approachable style, they detail and celebrate the rich diversity that our country displayed at that time. The writers’ enthusiasm is infectious and their guide is as much fun to read today as it must have been for travelers in the 1930s.
Several historians have written about the American Guide Series over the past 80 years, but no one, to my knowledge, has used them as current-day travel guides. That is just what I set out to do. I am an American historian, art photographer, and enthusiastic traveler. I have read each of these guides. I love them for their wonderful enthusiasm and their curiosity about every aspect of regional life—from food, to linguistics, to folklore, to statistics, to geography, to environment, to history—and especially for their liberal attitudes and respect for diversity. In this series, I will be posting photo essays and articles based upon tours recommended in the guides.
Fern L. Nesson
Dorchester County on the Eastern Shore of Maryand was the birthplace of Harriet Tubman. The Maryland Guide noted that slavery and post-Civil war Jim Crow were particularly harsh on the Eastern Shore.
“In the counties of Maryland particularly on the Eastern Shore and in southern Maryland, the Negro lives under much the same conditions as his ancestors knew. Oyster shucking, crab-picking, truck farming, work in canneries — these are chief means of earning meager livelihood, dependent largely upon a white employer or landowner ….
Of the sixteen recorded lynchings in Maryland since 1885, eleven have occurred in southern Maryland or on the Eastern Shore.*”
Maryland State Guide , p.60
[FN* It is almost impossible to determine who wrote the sections of any of the State Guides but I did some serious research and was able to trace the origin of this quote to Earle Moses, a professor of sociology at Morgan State College, one of Maryland’s historically Black colleges. Professor Moses’s contribution to the Guide’s sections on history, race and education were forthright and invaluable.]Harriet Tubman was born into slavery at the southern tip of Maryland’s Eastern Shore — a low-lying marshy environment. This was a hellish place in which to be enslaved— hot, humid, mosquito-ridden, malarial — and, for the same reason, the marsh’s thick growth and unhealthy conditions provided a possible avenue of escape by making recapture more difficult. If a slave could hide in the marsh, he might make a successful escape. Tubman knew this country well and, after she herself escaped, she risk her life by returning to help her fellow slaves escape from the area.
The Guide recognizes Tubman’s heroic efforts:
“Harriet Tubman, variously called the ‘heroine of the Underground Railroad’ and the “Moses of Her People,” escaped from her Eastern Shore master into Pennsylvania [in 1844] when she was about twenty-five. She first returned to assist members of her own family to freedom and later so extended her activities that between three and four hundred liberations are credited to her. She so infuriated the slave-owners that a price of $40,000 was set on her head.”
Guide p. 56.
In 1931, the federal government created The Blackwater Migratory Bird Refuge in Dorchester County, an 8000-acres of marsh along the Big and Little Blackwater Rivers. Included in thr Refuge was the former slave plantation of Tubman’s master. The Refuge is now called The Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge and it is a beautiful place to visit. There are wooden boardwalk trails through the marsh and spectacular vistas across the Chesapeake Bay at every turn.
| Adjacent to the Marsh is Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park and Museum, created in 2014. The Museum traces the history of the Underground Railroad and features Harriet Tubman’s role in aiding escaping slaves. |
Since 2014, archaeologists had been searching for the site of Tubman’s cabin. Unable to locate the site they speculated that it was located just outside the Refuge, on land still privately owned. Then, in 2020, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service purchase the 2600 acre private parcel and incorporated it into the Refuge.
Just one week after my visit in April, 2021, the site of the Tubman cabin was definitively identified. This excerpt from an article in the New York Times by Sarah Barr details the find:
“Julie M. Schablitsky, the chief archaeologist at the Maryland Department of Transportation State Highway Administration, led an excavation of the swampy terrain on Maryland’s Eastern Shore beginning last fall. “We couldn’t understand why we weren’t finding anything. It was like, ‘Where is this place?’”
Then, on a whim, Schablitsky swept a metal detector along the side of an abandoned road, closer to the river. And she found a coin from 1808 — the same year that Tubman’s parents, Ben Ross and Harriet Green, known as Rit, were married. And, not far away, she found ceramic shards that dated to the 1820s to 1840s.
It was then that she knew: She had located the cabin of Benjamin Ross, the father of Harriet Tubman, the Underground Railroad conductor. She had lived there roughly between the ages of 17 and 22, from 1839 to 1844. ‘We could tell from the glaze that the time period coincided perfectly with the Ross cabin,’ she said of the ceramic pieces. ‘I was like, ‘OK, this has to be it.’
Her discovery made waves among historians when it was announced by state and federal officials at a news conference at the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center in Church Creek, Md., on Tuesday morning. ‘We knew it was out there,’ she said. ‘We just had to find it.'”
Timing is not everything, however. I missed seeing the cabin but the Museum was rewarding the in and of itself. The exhibits are both informative and moving, especially punctuated as they are with quotes from Tubman. One very special exhibit is a list of the names of the escaped slaves that she assisted. The Guide recommended a visit to the Refuge for its natural beauty and its historical connection to Harriet Tubman. The addition of this wonderful museum makes the trip even more worthwhile.
November, 2021
