Another exciting development - this time in Maryland. The Dorchester County Department of Tourism, in coordination with the Heart of the Chesapeake Country Heritage Area, the Caroline County Dept. of Tourism, and the Chesapeake Bay Gateways Network, has just published a brand new URR driving tour called "Finding a Way to Freedom Driving Tour: The Underground Railroad in Dorchester and Caroline Counties in the 1850s." This four hour plus driving tour includes nearly 40 sites - featuring buildings, landscapes, and sites of memory in the African American community. Many of the sites are directly related to Harriet Tubman, but the brochure is remarkable in that this is the very first time anything has been published by the two counties celebrating the broader and more inclusive story of Harriet Tubman's life in the area, the African American community, the Underground Railroad, and a broader, more informative historical context.

No longer just a trip to Bucktown, Harriet Tubman's childhood home, the tour takes visitors from the Dorchester County Courthouse, the site of slave auctions, where Tubman's neice Kessiah and her two children were rescued by Kessiah's free husband John Bowley, on to western Dorchester, past Church Creek and Tubman's birthsite near Madison, to Joseph Stewart's Canal, which was built by slave labor. The tour takes visitors by the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, and on to Bucktown, where Tubman spent portions of her childhood on Edward Brodess's farm and other neighboring farms, to the Bucktown Village Store where Tubman experienced a near fatal head injury. The tour visits many sites throughout Dorchester and Caroline counties that are associated with freedom seekers who feld with Tubman or independent of her, the locations of Underground Railroad stations, such as Jonah Kelley's home, and the Leverton and Hubbard farms, and on to Poplar Neck in Caroline County, where Tubman's parents lived and operated an URR station and was the site of the famous 1854 Christmas flight of Tubman's three brothers.

For information about the tour and to receive a brochure, contact the Dorchester County Dept. of Tourism, 2 Rose Hill Place Cambridge, MD 21613. Tel: 410.228.1000 fax:410.221.6545