Button Farm Living History Center seeks to present the real Harriet Tubman

BY ERIK ANDERSON Special to The News-Post

Harriet Tubman is a native Marylander best known for freeing dozens of people from slavery via the Underground Railroad in the years leading up to the Civil War. This Memorial Day Weekend, the staff of Button Farm Living History Center in Germantown wants to highlight another daring facet of her life: military service.

In a weekend full of living-history events that aim to honor the military contributions of African Americans from the Revolutionary War through World War II, visitors to the farm will learn all aspects of Tubman’s service record, which includes nursing, spying and combat leadership. The events are free of charge.

“We’re really hoping to familiarize the public with the real Harriet Tubman, not the mythological Tubman,” said Anthony Cohen, president of the Menare Foundation, the nonprofit group behind Button Farm. “Half of her story hasn’t been told.”

Cohen said Tubman was mythologized in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War due in part to an overzealous contemporary biographer and in part because of the secret nature of her wartime accomplishments. In an 1869 book, Sarah Bradford alleged Tubman made 19 trips to the South that freed over 300 people from slavery but had little to say about her time in the Union Army during the war. That view of Tubman persisted until her military pension records were discovered 25 to 30 years ago, Cohen said.

“Meticulous scholarship” since that time has revealed Tubman made only 13 rescue missions into the South and freed only 70 people, Cohen said, and all of them were her own friends and family.

“Instead of being this story of an Underground Railroad warrior, it’s really a story about family, faith and community,” Cohen said. “I think things like that really cast her in a different light.”

While her real contributions to the Underground Railroad were less ambitious and more personally focused than her legend would have it, her military exploits were more heroic and consequential than the public knew until recently, Cohen said.

“Tubman is now considered to be the first female non-commissioned solider to lead troops into battle during an American war,” Cohen said, because a

HARRIET TUBMAN: JOURNEY TO FREEDOM

When: 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily May 27 to 29

Where: Button Farm Living History Center, 16820 Black Rock Road, Germantown Tickets: Free

Info: buttonfarm.org itors set aside the mythological Tubman in favor of the historical Tubman.

The event will include food and live music.

On Saturday, Wesley Wofford, the statue’s sculptor, will give a talk at Button Farm about the statue’s creation and significance. This will be the last weekend the statue is viewable in Maryland for at least the remainder of 2023.

Sunday will feature a talk by Angela Crenshaw, the director of the Maryland Park Service, that will inform visitors about Tubman’s early life in in Dorchester County, her time on the Underground Railroad and her time as a suffragette. Crenshaw will also screen a new documentary on Tubman by Maryland Public Television.

On Monday, historical re-enactor Timothy Hodges will portray Robert Smalls, who at the age of 19 escaped from slavery in South Carolina by commandeering a Confederate boat and delivering it to the Union Navy. Smalls then recruited thousands of African Americans to fight in the war, piloted Union boats during key naval operations and served as a U.S. congressman after the war.

Union officer correctly suspected her knowledge of secret routes would be invaluable in raids against Confederate strongholds.

Brad Stone, a volunteer docent with the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, which is co-sponsoring the weekend events, said Tubman’s military service also highlights the Civil War as the entry point of African Americans into the formal medical profession.

“The Civil War was a time when Black people were making tremendous contributions to medicine and were being recognized for it for the first time in American history,” he said. “[Tubman] was not only a nurse, she was a matron or administrator of a hospital.”

During his demonstration of Civil War surgery throughout the Memorial Day weekend event, Stone will explain to vis- itors that the most important and lasting medical innovations of the war were organizational and administrative.

“The system for taking care of battlefield wounded, for quickly treating and triaging them, getting them to frontline medical care and then to long-term comprehensive care — that system was baked in and served the United States very well through the Second World War,” he said.

Cohen said one of the best educational tools about Tubman’s life that will be on hand this weekend is the large bronze statue of her called “The Journey to Freedom” that has been on a continuing tour of the country for the past four years. Except for the fact that it is 9 feet tall, the statue depicting Tubman leading a child to safety is extremely life-like. Cohen believes that realism will help vis-

Throughout the weekend, Gayle George, a descendant of the Weems family, who escaped slavery in Rockville via the Underground Railroad, will discuss her family’s legacy and her efforts to tell that story in a new documentary.

Deborah Scott, a descendant of a Buffalo Soldier, will talk about her efforts to open a national museum on the Eastern Shore where her ancestor once lived.

Stone said the weekend’s events will include a lot for kids to do and see. He said the historical presentations will be interactive and engaging for them, and that Button Farm is a real working farm with a barn and animals for children to visit.

Erik Anderson is a freelance writer in Frederick who cares about few things more than the history of his community. Email him at erikanderson07@gmail. com.