NARRATOR: Ben's Ten, Chattel Slavery on Maryland's Eastern Shore, is produced in cooperation with the Maryland Department of Transportation State Highway Administration.

This program is made possible in part through the support of the MPT Foundation New Initiatives Fund.

Established by Irene and Edward H. Kaplan.

♪ ♪ DALE GREEN: When it comes to the experiences that Harriet Tubman had as an Underground Railroad conductor, certainly it was Maryland's Eastern Shore and the built-in natural environment that shaped her particular Underground Railroad experience.

She understood that that place was not only the cause of the system and institution of slavery but she found it also to be a cure.

DR. JULIE SCHABLITSKY: Whether you're in Maryland or Virginia or other places across the United States, every person who was enslaved had a different unique experience and I think that one of the best things that archeology can do is kind of break down those barriers, and begin to diversify these experiences of people who lived this many years ago.

ANGELA CRENSHAW: This area was pivotal to young Tubman during her formative years.

So, it's very important to find that the homesite, and what they cooked here, and how they lived, just how she was so comfortable here on this landscape and knowing that she was enslaved here with her father and her family and friends is very, very important.

ERNESTINE WYATT: To be able to stand out there and just imagine; "Was she standing here?

Was she looking out there?

Is this someplace that she was going through or that grandfather went through?"

Her spiritual imprint is still there.

(theme music plays).

NARRATOR: Endless miles of coastal lowlands, dense forests, and swamp-like tidal marshes, stretch out across the Delmarva Peninsula east of the Chesapeake Bay.

Together they comprise Maryland's Eastern Shore.

But beneath the quaint fishing villages, bucolic farmland, and beautiful beaches, this land holds centuries of haunting secrets, untold stories only recently unearthed.

In November of 2020, state and federal agencies, including archeologists with the Maryland Department of Transportation, led by Dr. Julie Schablitsky, began excavating a site in Dorchester County.

The land was part of a 2300-acre tract purchased by the U.S.

Fishing and Wildlife Service to replace areas of Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge lost to sea-level rise.

But in the early 1800s, the property belonged to a slave-holding farmer named Anthony Thompson.

DR. KATE LARSON: The Anthony Thompson Plantation was 1,000 acres, it was a large plantation, uh.

Timbering was one of the major, um, economic drives on that plantation.

But they did raise food crops; corn, wheat, you know, other grains, greens.

So, it was a busy, busy landscape.

NARRATOR: It was on the Thompson property that Dr. Schablitsky and her team made an incredible discovery.

They found the home of Ben Ross, a formally enslaved laborer and the father of Araminta Ross.

Most of us know her as the abolitionist hero, Harriet Tubman.

The discovery of Ben Ross' home is a pivotal finding that could provide new insight into the early life of one of Maryland's most famous residents and revolutionaries.

DOUGLAS MITCHELL: My relationship to Ben Ross and Harriet Tubman, my father is Jarrell Stewart Mitchell, the son of Viola, Viola the daughter of Elijah, Elijah the son of Benjamin, Benjamin the brother of Harriet.

I'm able to physically, not only see and be in close proximity to the site, but I can actually touch, and smell, and hear, and sense, with all five of my senses much of what Ben Ross and his child Araminta Ross, later Harriet Tubman, saw, and felt, and touched, and smelled, and heard here in the local area.

So, to touch these bricks and to feel and smell the rich soil, that is directly connected, literally under the feet of my ancestors, brings me closer to them.

DR. KATE: Ben Ross was born in the late 1770s or early 1780s and he was enslaved by Anthony Thompson.

We do not know where Ben came from there were no records of purchase, um, by Anthony Thompson.

And when he came of age he worked on the farm and as a young man started cutting all that timber and it was old growth oak and pine that was down in that location that was, um, very important for shipbuilding in the Chesapeake region.

Harriet Tubman later gave interviews and she described her father as a timber foreman, that he sort of had this amazing skill to identify which trees were appropriate for the keel of a ship.

So, he could delegate; this tree goes over here, this, another tree that's, you know, better for the hull would go in a different way.

So, he had this great skill and he was greatly admired for it.

DR. JULIE: When Anthony Thompson was about ready to pass away, he wrote a will in 1836 that talked about giving Ben his freedom around 1840, but also giving him ten acres of land as well as the wood around him to cut and use as he needed.

Since that time, people have referred to this ten acres and Ben Ross' place as Ben's Ten.

So, the team of archeologists set out here about two years ago to find this homesite; where could it be in this swampy location?

AARON LEVINTHAL: What we're trying to do is figure out exactly what the Anthony Thompson Farm looked like, which there is not a single above-ground aspect of it remaining.

One thing that we do know, one thing that anchors all of our archeological results is Harrisville Road.

Today's Harrisville Road seems to align perfectly with, uh, Harrisville Road of around 1816 and we have a number of historic documents that talk about different aspects of the landscape in relation to that road and to a couple of the natural features on the landscape.

There are a number of land transactions that occurred after Anthony Thompson died where they mention a road going past, uh, a man named John Parker who's the owner of the farm after Anthony Thompson, past Parker's fields down to Old Ben's by the Blackwater River.

There's, now we know based on the historic research that there's only one way to get down to the Blackwater River passing the limited area that could've been farm fields and the archeology showed us that there was only one place where artifacts came up out of the ground that dated to the period when Ben Ross would've lived on the place where we found them.

We found no early, late 18th, early 19th, mid-19th century artifacts anywhere along Harrisville Road except for where we believe that Ben Ross lived.

MAN: This is 89.

DR. JULIE: As archeologists in search of Ben Ross' homesite, what we wanted to ensure is that we could unequivocally, without a doubt, determine whether or not we had his place.

I thought it would be very challenging because there were so many people living here for so many years in this, in this swampy land.

How are we going to know for sure that we had his site?

Well, what we did is we created this high probability area, looking at old historic maps, an old deed, and descriptions of the property that even mention Old Ben's Place.

We had up to a dozen archeologists working in this swampy area for almost two weeks digging 1,000 shovel test pits, which are basically these holes that dig down a foot or so and we screen the soil and we pick out artifacts.

After two weeks of looking out in this swampy area for Ben Ross' homesite, we found one site that dated to the first half of the 19th century.

That was a time that Ben Ross would have been here.

Now, what we want to find in the future as we keep digging is the exact footprint.

Although we know this is a space that Ben's home was in, can we find a brick pier, can we find the outline of where he lived?

Stains of mortar, all these sorts of little clues will tell us how large the home was and how long it was occupied.

AARON: The Thompson Farm to me is probably one of the more fascinating landscapes, as a whole, that I've worked on.

Because you have significant percentages of it that have been removed.

Graded away and turned into, um, artificial wetlands for waterfowl hunting.

But somehow, by the grace of God, we have sections that are intact and those intact areas hold an enormous amount of information.

WOMAN: Wow.

WOMAN 2: Some sort of edgeware, blue.

ERNESTINE: Ben Ross, he is my, I guess four times great grandfather and Julie contacted me to let me know what was going on.

And so I was excited about that, you know, you know, finding artifacts; "Okay, what are you gonna find, you know?

And how much are you gonna find?

And, and what part of the story will that tell?"

I was surprised there were so many decorative accessories and that they were used by them.

Now, were they given to all of the enslaved on the plantation or on the farm?

I don't know, or if it was just them, uh.

Were they given hand-me-downs?

I don't know, uh.

That's the thing that, you know, we still need to, to find out.

LINDA COLE: They're giving us new history, a look into what really happened.

I think much of, of the books that we've, are published now have been speculative.

But with, uh, this dig, we're finding artifacts and really looking into the way that the enslaved people lived in a way that we would not have known before.

AARON: The thing that you're digging out is probably shaped like a basin.

WOMAN: Yeah.

AARON: It's probably pretty big.

It probably like stems out this way.

WOMAN: Okay.

AARON: And so, it's gonna start to slope.

DR. JULIE: A kind of exciting find also happened that was a discovery of a coin that dated to 1808.

1808s a very powerful year because that's the year that Ben Ross married Rit, his wife.

ERNESTINE: When they found the 1808 coin, uh, it was the year that, uh, Grandfather Ben and Grandmother Rit came together and married.

But they were, they lived on different plantations, but they married that year.

So, that signified the beginning of the family.

So, that opened up a whole new story.

I'm thinking, "Okay, well what happened there?

Did they, did it fall through the, uh, the cracks of the floor, you know?

Um, was it given to them as a gift, uh?

Or how did he get that money?

How was it earned?"

DR. JULIE: Popular bones that we're finding here, um... We've also discovered a lot of animal bones.

Animal bones are the, I think, most important clue to understanding how people lived and how their lifestyles differed from each other.

We can also tell whether someone was well off and, uh, privileged versus those who were impoverished.

Here what we're finding at the, the place where enslaved people lived, is animals that were, of course, domestic.

So, we have a lot of pork, we have cattle here.

But they're the lower and the more inexpensive cuts of meat, so the heads, the teeth, the lower limb bones, those are all being found.

And we can also begin to look at how desperate the people were and how hungry they were by what else is in that, that assemblage of faunal remains or animal bones.

So, what we have here is we also have, uh, wild cuts, so we have turtle, we have muskrat, we have all sorts of fish, we have clams, we have oysters.

All these sorts of animals are telling us that these people were going out into the swamp, they were going out to the rivers, and they were going out to the woods to catch animals to supplement their diet.

ERNESTINE: When I got to Ben's cabin, what they unearthed, uh, and I saw the, the brick steps that appeared to lead to the cabin site, because, you know, they had dug out the whole area there, um, and I felt like, "Oh my God.

I, I could tell their story."

So, I stepped on the bricks and I felt like I could, you know, I was saying, "Hi, Grandpa!

I'm coming to visit!"

You know?

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: For centuries, hundreds of thousands of Africans and their descendants were forced into bondage in North America.

They played an integral role in the building and shaping of our nation.

Though slavery remained marginal in Maryland until the late 17th century, the plantation system that used Black enslaved labor to grow tobacco, rice, coffee, and sugar, had already revolutionized the Caribbean and other parts of the Atlantic world.

It wouldn't be long before that revolution reached the Eastern Shore.

By the late 1600s, Maryland was becoming a slave society and like the rest of the colony, the economy of the Eastern Shore would become dependent upon Black slave labor.

The Eastern Shore lies along the entire eastern side of the Chesapeake Bay.

Together, Dorchester and Talbot Counties have more than 2300 miles of shoreline.

By the 19th century, the lives of Marylanders revolved around the water; fishing, shipping, and for a while, slave trading, were all pillars of Maryland's economy that were dependent upon the Chesapeake and its tributaries.

VINVENT LEGGETT: Frederick Douglass referred to it as, "Waters of hope or waters of despair."

So often they experienced enslaved people coming through the Virginia capes onto the Chesapeake Bay and for them, it was a water of despair.

For others, they used the same body of water as a gateway to freedom.

All produce and products traveled on the waterways because the roads were so poor and sometimes that cargo included human cargo.

DR. KATE: The archeological work that's going on at the former Thompson Plantation in Dorchester County is incredibly important to sort of help us understand one aspect of slavery on the Eastern Shore and that is the life circumstances for enslaved people on a large plantation which was atypical for this area of the Eastern Shore.

Anthony Thompson enslaved about 40 people, he was one of the wealthiest men in the county.

So, his plantation is going to show us different things than the average farmer say in Bucktown who just had a farm and two or three enslaved people.

DR. JULIE: One of the biggest questions that we have of archeologists is understanding how the different communities interact with each other.

And it's so hard to get to that in historical records because it just seems so, literally, black and white.

And I think what archeology does is it begins to give us a peek into how we do have similarities and differences between people.

Of course, you can look at people who are enslaved and impoverished and look at how they're living.

What did they fill their cupboards and their shelves with, and put on their tables?

You can look at ceramics, the plates.

And so, here we're finding blue edge-wear, we're finding painted-wears.

And at first, you look at those ceramics and think, "Wow, these people were well off."

And no, they were not.

These items were given to them or they bought them out of necessity.

They needed plates, they needed bowls, they needed platters, all these things to eat food off of.

And so, when you find, as an archeologist, a lot of bowls, a lot of, um, kettles, a lot of ends of the cuts of meat, it's telling me that these people were eating a lot of soups and stews and that's happening right here in this part of the wetland.

WOMAN: We need to put that metal in here.

MAN: That's a piece of ceramics.

This is a nice piece of redware, with the molding at the top.

Would've been for like a big vessel or big jug.

DR. KATE: So, what these archeological digs are showing us that there was a large variety of, um, living circumstances for enslaved people and free people.

And so, there, there sort of isn't like a one, one typical slave cabin, if you want to use that phrase, or a free person's, um, cabin or cottage.

And what they had inside that cabin could vary greatly.

On some plantations the, the, um, plantation owners, the enslavers, were cruel and they gave very little to their enslaved people.

So, they struggled with very little and so that evidence is there on the ground, there's very little to find.

Bones from a little food and shellfish, um, and very few pieces of pottery.

And in some plantations, people had a little bit more, they were allowed to work on Sundays outside the plantation, they could bring a little money in so they could acquire some dishes or something extra.

So, you see that, you know, buttons for the clothing or instead of just relying on the clothing or the fabric that was given once a year for the clothes to be made by the women in the house, um, they could buy a little bit of extra clothing.

MARK LEONE: Now the larger issue in this case, uh, is to provide context and, uh, context in archeology means; what do the broken dishes look like?

How expensive were they?

In the case of African America, bowls and cups should predominate as opposed to big flat plates.

And there will be some glass but not a lot.

AARON: The material remains are important because more often than not, they represent items that are more familiar to everyday people, you know.

Historic record talks about feat, great feats and tragedies, and things that are important but the everyday person has a hard time relating to the character that did those things, um.

So, when we're finding fragments of tablewares like, tea cups, you know, saucers, dinner plates, chamber pots, um, and someone can hold that in their hand and they can sort of come to grips with the heroin and the heroes in the story as people.

DALE: What the archeology, in the respect of artifacts, have now enabled us to collectively learn is how the life and legacy of someone like Ben Ross, uh, was during that time period.

We knew that he was certainly a very valuable timberer, um, but it's items like the artifact that was retrieved, namely the Lady Liberty coin, that begins to put real life and texture to his life as well as his wife, um, Harriet "Rit" Green.

They were married in the same year in which the 1808 Liberty coin, uh, came, uh, to fruition.

And so, uh, in one artifact you begin to have the symbolism of freedom through Lady Liberty, but at the same time, you get the story of uniting of the Ross and the Green family through the 1808 marriage of, uh, Ben Ross and Harriet "Rit" Green.

DOUGLAS: What I've learned new are some of the details, and the texture, and the grit, and the blood, sweat, and tears that made up the life of Harriet Tubman.

To actually see broken shards of window glass and brick and some of the remnants, the manifestations of her life and her father's life here at the, uh, Ben Ross home is quite gratifying.

ERNESTINE: When you know how you were able to survive, you get inspired and able to be able to take that information that your ancestors, uh, what, what happened to them and how they lived and use it, uh, as information that you can use for your own life.

When we know all those things about each other, and about our DNA, and what, what, what is a part of our lives from back, way back, you know, it just helps us to, to, to, to be more successful now.

And know that, you know, that we do come from something and someone that is even greater at having been able to, uh, work through different situations in their lives.

DR. JULIE: Only by looking at these individual stories and, and these experiences, can we really get beyond where we are today to help to heal.

So, this is indeed a very traumatic history and it's only by involving archeologists, historians, descendant communities, can we get beyond that.

I think one of the most important things that we've been able to learn about when we do this as archeologists, is the importance of having descendants next, next to us, digging next to us, walking where we're walking, walking where their ancestors walked.

By them being part of this gives us meaning and tells us that what we're doing is important.

WILLIAM JARMON: I was born here in Cambridge, Maryland 1943.

It's just so quiet, we call it, "God's Country," we call it, "The heart of the Chesapeake Bay."

During the late 1800s and 1900s, because of the Choptank River, it becomes a very important place.

You have a community where you have a large concentration of enslaved people, you also had, uh, free Black people, you also had the Native American population, and you had this population of Caucasians who not only came from England but were from Ireland, from Germany and, and etcetera.

And we, as citizens of Dorchester County, we've had to learn to live, uh, together.

We had to learn to live together spiritually, uh, uh, during recreational times, and the educating of our young people, and etcetera.

So, it, it hasn't been an easy task, but it is one that gets better each and every day.

DR. JULIE: The Chesapeake has a very robust and diverse history of slavery.

It's been going on from the 1600s all the way up until Emancipation in Maryland in 1864.

But what's unique about Maryland specifically is how diverse the landscape was.

They used people in different ways.

When you look at western Maryland and northern Maryland, they had a lot of industries, so think of iron furnaces, think of milling of grain crops.

In the south we had a lot of tobacco plantations.

Here on the Eastern Shore, we had forests.

ANGELA: When people think of slavery, they think of, "Gone With the Wind," a massive, uh, palatial house with winding staircases and pillars and hundreds of people working in the backyard.

But here in Maryland, it was much smaller, five, six, maybe even ten enslaved people in one household, uh, doing small bits of household labor as well as working in the timber fields and with corn, and the sorghum, and the wheat.

So, it was a much smaller operation which also made it much more intimate.

You knew your enslaver, you knew your enslaver's wife, you knew their children, uh, your children grew up together.

So, it was much more intimate, much more close, and in that way, it made it a little bit more vicious, in my opinion.

DR. KATE: Different areas of Maryland had different engagement with slavery.

Some areas of Maryland had very large farms and plantations and they had many enslaved people.

On the Eastern Shore, generally, they were much smaller farms and a very small, uh, slave ownership and the average enslaver on the Eastern Shore, uh, owned maybe five to eight enslaved people.

DALE: On that property, uh, where Harriet Tubman was, at the highest, at one point there was, uh, nearly 50 persons.

And then in the case of, uh, Frederick Douglass at the Wye House Plantation in Talbot County, which was one of the more larger, uh, plantations throughout the entirety of the Eastern Shore, you know, they were in upwards of 100, you know, plus, um, slaves on that, um, on that society.

But if you go deeper south, you know, 40, 50 slaves means nothing, 100 to 100 plus, you know, means nothing where you have, you know, 1,000 plus, you know, slave oriented, um, uh, sort of properties and plantations proper in those particular communities.

ANGELA: Farming in this area was very seasonal.

So, if you didn't have crops coming in, if you didn't have anything to be collected and maintained, enslaved people were rented out and rented to other places and possibly sold for extra money.

So, it broke up families but it also allowed Tubman to rent herself out for $60 per year and save the rest of her money, um.

In some ways, she was a very astute businesswoman because of the seasonal nature of the work that she did.

MAN: "For hire, a negro boy, 13 years old, who has been accustomed to housework.

Gardener Bailey, March 27th."

WOMAN: "Will be sold at public sale, on six months credit, on Friday the 22nd of April next.

A negro girl, about 20 years of age, and her male child, Aleck, about 18 months old."

WILLIAM: Enslavement meant you were taught multiple skills.

So, here we have enslaved people and free Blacks working side by side.

The only difference is that the free Blacks got paid for their work.

And that would be in shipbuilding, it'd be in ironwork, brick making, caulking.

DR. KATE: After the American Revolution, there were White people in Maryland, colonists who fought for freedom, who, uh, took the Declaration of Independence to heart and they decided to liberate their enslaved people.

And you can see them in the records at the Maryland State Archives and in court houses around Maryland, people going in after the Revolution and stating that they believed in liberty and equality and freedom for all, all men should be free, and they would liberate their people.

So, that created a foundation of a very vibrant free community that was tied to the enslaved community because often families had some free people and some enslaved people.

So, this makes Maryland quite unique in the South.

DALE: It's important to understand that, um, Maryland was a border state and as such north of Maryland there was a, you know, free state where many of Maryland, uh, enslaved individuals would seek their freedom, um, and thus below Maryland was considered the South.

And oftentimes, of course, Maryland if it was squarely, you know, situated within one of those categories, it was called a southern state, if not the border state.

And so, um, in Maryland there were enslaved members of society who would, um, come into contact regularly, uh, with those that, um, were also free.

WOMAN: "To the Clerk of Circuit Court for Kent County, this is to certify that Isaac Wright, who is now present and applying for a certificate of freedom was freeborn and raised in Kent County."

MAN: "Upon the oath of Deborah Jones of Caroline County, the said negro woman named Kitty Byers, for whom the certificate is made, was freeborn."

DALE: And so, there was a large free Black population in Maryland as a result of this sort of, uh, border state category or classification that Maryland would find itself in.

And as a result, it created a very tumultuous environment for the African-American race.

MAN: "Whereas great mischiefs have arisen from slaves coming into possessions of the certificates of free negroes, by running away and posing as free, under the faith of such certificates."

DALE: You could have in one family unit a, a, a free member of the family and an enslaved member of the family and the children that, uh, would be born, based on the slave status of the mother would find themselves to be enslaved or, uh, different members of that same family would be separated and rented out on another farm.

ANGELA: Here in Dorchester County, during Tubman's time, half the African Americans were free and half were enslaved.

You could be manumitted or freed by your owner.

MAN: "Form of certificate when manumitted to a negro.

Negro Sylvia, five feet six and three-quarters inches high, copper color, a scar on the left side of her chin, raised by Robert Griffith of Dorchester County and manumitted by Eliza Griffith, his widow, on the 14th day of February 1800."

ANGELA: You could also purchase your freedom if you saved up enough money and you worked out an arrangement.

But usually, if you were born to an enslaved mother, you were given her title.

So, Harriet Tubman married John Tubman, who was a free man, so I can't imagine the difficulty, knowing that your wife and any children that you have would be enslaved, even though John Tubman was free.

DR. KATE: So, the free laborers tied to the community, they accept low wages because they want to be near their loved ones and it, and slavery keeps enslaved family members from running away too because they don't want to leave their loved ones.

The cost of getting caught could mean being sold to the Deep South and then, you know, you're considered dead after that.

DR. JULIE: Whether you're in the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Southern Maryland, Western Maryland, or in the center, that these groups of people had different experiences, and that these experiences should each be looked at, and be told, and be shared, because it really talks about the complicated history we have as Marylanders and as, as Americans.

MARK: One of the things you see in the Maryland narratives from the 1930s is that slavery was every bit as wicked here as it was in Mississippi and Alabama, um.

It wasn't a whit nicer, kinder, gentler, more forgiving, it was every bit as awful.

NARRATOR: Complied by the Federal Writers' Project in the 1930s, the Maryland slave narratives are autobiographical accounts of the formerly enslaved.

These narratives are significant because they provide a firsthand account of the harsh realities of slavery in the state.

DENNIS SIMMS: We all hated what they called, "The 9-99," usually a flogging until fellows were unconscious or begged for mercy.

RICHARD MACKS: He ran away, was caught by the constable, returned to his owner, melted sealing wax was poured over his back on the wounds inflicted by him, when whipping.

ERNESTINE: Slavery was bad, no matter what you had, no matter what you were given, no matter how decorative the items that you used, or how much you were given.

As long as you were in bondage, it was bad.

As Aunt Harriet said in one of her quotes, she said, "Slavery was the next thing to hell."

DR. KATE: This archeological work, on the Thompson Plantation in particular, despite the fact that it is an atypical site for enslaved people to live because it was so large, it's very exciting because this is where Harriet Tubman was born.

And while we can imagine so much of her life, I think seeing the artifacts from that earth will really help us imagine that interior life with her family, um.

We have so little evidence of it and I think we need that to round out her life and to see it.

ANGELA: These digs on this property are so important because this is where Harriet Tubman learned the skills she needed to become a successful conductor on the Underground Railroad.

How to forage for food, how to read the night sky, how to be comfortable in this landscape.

Thus leading her people and her family and her friends to freedom.

DALE: She was very unique in being able to play off of her father's role, and abilities, and skills, and, um, we could argue and call her a navigator, a chief navigator, you know, of that type of landscape because she learned how to use the areas that persons traditionally would not use.

Like swamps, and marshes, and even to move through the night, and to understand astronomy at a level before we really understood what astronomy was.

ANGELA: Harriet Tubman ultimately freed between 70 and 80 people, they were her family and friends.

When she got to freedom, she said she was lonely.

Her father and mother, and sister and brothers were down in Maryland, and if she was free, uh, then the Lord meant them to be free as well.

DR. JULIE: Ben was also a father who taught her not only how to navigate the stars and understand what sort of weather was coming, but he also taught her how to cross creeks, how to live off the fat of the land, if you will, how to use plants and animals to survive.

All these survival skills helped her to survive as well as take so many people to freedom.

LINDA: She, from very young, had been rented out between various plantations, and her father, uh, Ben Ross, worked the waterways and knew the land.

So, she was always very watchful and, and knew where to go.

She knew people that were part of the Underground Railroad.

DR. KATE: So, the Underground Railroad, it's sort of a misnomer, but it was many networks and systems of paths and people and transportation that helped enslaved people escape.

And it was vast and sometimes successful and it was a very risky business to be involved in.

LINDA: The Underground Railroad was a system of locations, people, and code songs.

So, she knew because she had navigated the areas around the Eastern Shore, from Dorchester to Caroline County, into Delaware.

She knew the areas.

She knew the people, the station managers.

Her first night out in 1849, she walks 11 miles to the Leverton house.

Hannah Leverton was a Quaker woman, a very, very important stop along the Underground Railroad.

From there, she was told where to go.

So, she knew who she would meet in this area between here and the Dorchester County into Philadelphia.

There are 45 stops along the Underground Railroad.

So, they were stops, there, there were houses, farms, and there were station managers and abolitionists that were there at these various locations to aid the enslaved people to freedom.

DR. KATE: You know, there are a lot of myths about the Underground Railroad, about quilt codes, and lanterns, and, and, you know, symbols and signs, and those were all 20th-century manufactured lore.

They never happened back then, um.

And, and the Underground Railroad depended on oral, you know, communication, people talked to each other and said, you know, "Go down the street, or go down the road, when you see that tree, turn left and, and then go to the next house that you see."

It wasn't like carving signs, and symbols and, you know, cemetery stones, and, and trees.

It didn't happen that way.

It was people talked to each other and, and trusted each other.

The only real artifacts are, you know, historic houses that still exist.

There are very few that have been identified, structures that still exist in the south, uh.

Once you get into Delaware and into Pennsylvania, certainly you find homes that had, they have a secret room or an attic space that's well documented that people hid there.

Harriet Tubman used the hoot of an owl to signal people that she was ready from them to come out of hiding.

She also had a, a couple of spiritual songs that she would sing and she told interviewers later in her life that she would change the tempo of the songs and they would know, the people that were hiding, that it was safe to come out or not safe to come out.

And sometimes she'd change the words, but she would tell them ahead of time what she would do.

One was called, "Oh Hail, Ye Happy Spirits," and another one is, "Bound for the Promise Land."

LINDA: Those code songs, old spirituals, we might refer them, were, "Go Down Moses."

♪ Go down Moses, way down in Egypt land ♪ ♪ Tell old Pharaoh to let my people go ♪♪ Harriet Tubman was referred to as the Moses of her people.

So, as they're singing those songs in the fields, I imagine the enslavers thought, "Well, you know, they're just out there singing."

But they're getting ready, they're getting ready to find freedom.

♪ Let my people go ♪♪ ANGELA: The geography of the Eastern Shore was very important and pivotal to the Underground Railroad and escaping to freedom.

During the summer when it's marshier and wet, you could lose your footing and you could be all of the sudden in a river.

If you show up to a city and you're soaking wet and you're covered in mud, you look exactly like a runaway.

So, a lot of Tubman's escapes were done in the winter, when the nights were longest and the days were shorter and the ground was frozen.

DR. KATE: We have discovered that enslaved people that lived close to waterways like, close to the Choptank River, they were able to flee at much higher rates than people who lived in much more interior locations.

And so, like in the years 1800 to 1860, on the Eastern Shore, in Dorchester County, hundreds of people fled during those 60 years, from about a mile from the Choptank River.

But when you go to a place like Bucktown, maybe 20 people over the 60 years fled from there.

So, the water is the big Underground Railroad story on the Eastern Shore, actually all of Maryland.

From the earliest times, forward.

And Black sailors, the Black Jacks, the famous Black Jacks of the Chesapeake, they were the conduit to freedom.

They brought the information, they told everybody where, which vessels were safe to hide on, which ones were not, where to go, who to trust.

And they were also sort of the, the mail carriers of the Black world because they were able to be in contact with Black communities all over the place; in the north, in Baltimore.

So, those families that were separated, they could send communications back and forth via these amazing Black watermen.

VINCENT: There are at least eight major rivers that, uh, feed into the Chesapeake Bay and hundreds of other streams and tributaries, and so, the waterways became a route to escape.

During the period of enslavement, they built boats, they sailed boats, they acted as pilots.

People knew the winds, and the waves and the tides of the rivers to move products apart.

And so, they used that same knowledge of the waterways to seek freedom.

(birds chirping).

DR. JULIE: The interesting thing about this location is we were, we were not only interested in just finding the home of Ben Ross, but we wanted to know how the landscape was used.

So, we found old roads, we found Ben Ross' homesite.

But we also found another site, a site that we're kind of perplexed about because it's a place that has a brick foundation, it has a fireplace, and that's all fascinating.

But who lived here?

Was it enslaved people?

And why do the artifacts speak of an impoverished group of people?

What does that mean?

AARON: So, what we have at one of the sites on the Thompson Farm is a building that's kind of a little bit of a mystery, what its roots, what its beginnings were.

We do know that towards the end of its life, it was occupied by an enslaved family and it may have been the Manokey family, um.

Jerry Manokey was a contemporary with Ben Ross.

And so, where this house is located, it's pretty far from the big house, from Anthony Thompson's home.

Because it was at such a distance, it afforded, inside the house and in certain yards, personal space and a level of independence.

It's a, the, inside the house and in some of the yards that are out of view, these are places where, where passive and active resistance occur.

So, in the cellar we found group of artifacts in the corner of one of our excavation units that may be a spiritual bundle, which is made up of a number of items, each having strong symbolism.

And so, you can think of this bundle as kind of like a house blessing.

MARK: So, in a case like this, of something that probably dates to the 19th century, but may date a little bit into the late 18th, 18th century, one always looks, these days, certainly for the last 15 years, for any evidence of the use of spirit bundles, uh.

That's usually associated with Conjure or Hoodoo.

In other words, majority of those buried below the hearth in a northeast corner, or under a door, or under a window.

So, what we have here is archeology, which produces, at its best, an understanding of a very misunderstood and barely understood series of African practices that are religious.

Often called spirit practices or spirit bundles, but it's much bigger than that.

It provides space, it provides depth; in other words, chronological depth, and it understands family relationships.

And what archeology does is take that ruined land, and digs it up, finds people's history.

And the African American archeologists understand full well that underneath the ground, ancestors live.

And once those people are brought to life in the form of what Theophus Smith, a Black theologian, calls Conjure, and as Du Bois is made to say, by Theophus Smith; it's a kind of magic, it's a kind of Conjure, where you get the ancestors to speak and tell the past.

So, that's why all of this is so important.

It isn't an occasional artifact, it isn't a threadbare ruin, it is a rewriting of Maryland history.

DALE: Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman were both enslaved on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, both born into slavery.

Harriet Tubman in Dorchester County and Frederick Douglass in Talbot County, uh.

Frederick Douglass was born at the Tuckahoe, as he says, and then he was walked into slavery at the Wye House Plantation by his grandmother.

And there at the Wye House Plantation, he initially was enslaved as a young child and was enslaved to do some work around the interior of the, the buildings, and then was quickly moved to do field labor and worked very laboriously in the field.

NARRATOR: The Wye Plantation in Talbot County, was once one of the largest farms on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

Owned by the Lloyd family since 1660.

At its height, in the early 19th century, it spanned across 42,000 acres and was home to more than 1,000 enslaved laborers.

From 2005 to 2014, Mark Leone and his team of archeologists from the University of Maryland excavated and analyzed materials found there.

Including artifacts found in the quarters where the enslaved lived and in an 18th-century greenhouse where they worked.

MARK: We dug the slave quarters at Wye House and there were, there were many of them, but we dug either six or seven.

We, for example, excavated bone remains and we excavated them from the big house, from the quarters, and then we discovered a cookbook.

So that four African American women, who were enslaved, and four Lloyd women, the Lloyds owned the house, um, and the people, are cooking together in the great kitchen and they were inventing a kind of Southern cooking.

Okay, so they're inventing cooking with vegetables, sugar, and bourbon.

And so somebody is gonna ask, "Well, everybody has always done that."

But that is not true.

It replaced the cookbooks, um, that were English, that featured heads, whole heads roasted and then put on the table and picked apart.

Well, that's all gone and what's in its place now is Southern cooking.

So, we, we wrote about that and we demonstrated, not just that these folks were cooking together, but that the same recipes were being used in the quarters as at the big table, but the cuts were different, obviously, they were inferior.

Then we dug the gardens and we dug the great greenhouse and we discovered the pollen from the medicinal herbs that African Americans are using for all their pharmacopeia, fancy way of saying, "The drug store."

But, um, in the pharmacopeia, there are a good 100 plants produced in this greenhouse, a large number of them having chemical properties that were known, both by African Americans and Native American community, for the various cures.

And although, at the turn of the century, or maybe by 1850, the growing medical establishment in this country wanted to trash all that stuff.

We know perfectly well it is herbs, um, that modern pharmaceutical companies use to get new medicines.

So, there is an entire history of what we call a native pharmacopeia, um, in the quarters.

So, this is growing, this is not some sort of gift, this is a use of the local environment for curing.

DR. JULIE: The types of artifacts we're finding include everything from glass bottles, to, uh, buttons, to toys, to dishes, and this is a bottle, a medicine bottle and it's from a pharmaceutical company in Cambridge.

And the interesting thing is, is that we know that Alexander Hamilton Bayly was a doctor.

So, you can imagine Dr, um, Bayly going down and ordering these sorts of pharmaceutical, um, and these medicines, patent medicines.

NARRATOR: Dr. Schablitsky brought her team of archeologists together again.

Not on the marshlands near the Shore, but this time in the town of Cambridge, to excavate on a property owned in the mid-19th century by Dr. Alexander Bayly.

AARON: With the State Highway Administration, we did a project at the Bayly House in, in town in Cambridge.

Which was an interesting study of the house and yards in the city.

CATHERINE MORRISON: This sitting here for all this time is an unusual circumstance that might provide us with a lot of information about, not just the people that lived in the main house, but the people who worked, and toiled, and lived in the back part of the property.

Down at the wharf is where slaves were brought in for auction and across the street is the courthouse where slaves were auctioned.

So, it's all connected and the Harriet Tubman Byway is all throughout this community.

NARRATOR: After removing the floorboards and digging through multiple layers of soil, a trove of artifacts were uncovered.

DR. JULIE: It's so important that we're here excavating this cabin because what it does is it begins to rebuild the history of the people who lived here.

Not just the Bayly family, but the people who they enslaved.

So much of African American history is silent because these people who were enslaved didn't have an outlet for their words, for their, for their families, and so sometimes the only time that we can really get into that history is through the things they left behind.

And so, in this case, it's important that we find what they left behind so we can tell their story.

NARRATOR: The story of slavery on Maryland's Eastern Shore, is the story of the often overlooked, an untold experience of the enslaved African American.

Despite their bondage and the inhumanity suffered, these are a people who maintained hope and had the self-determination, not only to survive but to resist.

Through various courses of covert and overt action, many courageously pursued the ideal that their young country espoused in its early founding documents; freedom.

As Dr. Julie Schablitsky and her team continue to dig, more stories of the enslaved are unearthed.

With every new discovery and archeological find, we move closer to the truth and gain a clearer understanding of our collective history.

Only then will we be able to appreciate the continued struggle for freedom, the complexities of slavery, and the many issues that stem from its legacy.

DR. KATE: What is really exciting about these archeological digs is what they're finding helps us see the interior lives of enslaved people because we know so little about that.

And to give them some dignity and show that they had, um, love and life inside that cabin, in their private spaces.

That they were not watched by the enslaver constantly.

That they had their moments with their family or, or people in the community.

And that evidence in the ground is showing us that texture and it helps us imagine that, and so that we can write about it, and we can talk about it, and we can talk about the people that were there, and we can name them, and, um, restore some of the dignity that has been taken away in the past few hundred years.

WILLIAM: Our young folks, it will give them the opportunity to explore, research together.

they will actually have the site.

And we also want them to be able to go and touch it.

It just brings us closer to someone we didn't know physically, but spiritually, is a part of us.

ERNESTINE: The closer you get to showing someone the site, the actual site, the objects, and all those things coming together, the more of the truth you're going to get.

It's so important to be able to, be able to, at some point, open up these sites for other people to see it in its context.

It's important so they can inform you about what was done, why it was done, and how it was done, so that you don't repeat the same thing over, and over, and over again.

CATHERINE: I don't think that we're really taught in school or just comfortable talking within our communities about what that life and experience was.

We know more about how the Royal family lives than we know about people that lived and toiled in our own communities.

And the more I learn, the more painful it is to understand.

It, it was a very difficult life.

AARON: If we find artifacts in a context where we can definitely tie the site to enslaved people, that's great.

If that site is accessible to the public and we get a decent amount of visitation and we're able to make connections, especially with kids, and you can see in their eyes that they're understanding, that kind of thing, that's the most valuable to me.

LINDA: Finding artifacts and you're finding and understanding more of the conditions that the enslaved people lived under, then it gives you a better sense of who you are.

We came here part of a middle passage, uh, brought, taken from a land, our homeland, to a place that we didn't know and a language we couldn't speak, and we had to exist in that environment.

And knowing exactly how, through these digs, to the extent that we can is very, very important in us understanding who we are as a people.

DOUGLAS: The discoveries being made here and the discovery of new information, enlarges and enhances my understanding, my awareness of my history, both my family history and the larger history of Harriet Tubman and, and the movement that she had.

So, uh, it, it means a great deal and, uh, it, it deepens my awareness and my appreciation for where I come from, where we all come from, and where we may be going.

(music plays through credits) WOMAN: Ben's Ten, Chattel Slavery on Maryland's Eastern Shore was produced in cooperation with the Maryland Department of Transportation State Highway Administration.

This program was made possible in part through the support of the MPT Foundation New Initiatives Fund.

Established by Irene and Edward H. Kaplan.

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