Maryland historians plan to begin excavations later this summer at a remote Eastern Shore site they believe could shed new light on Jacob Jackson, a free Black farmer who helped Harriet Tubman’s brothers escape slavery and was part of a broader free African American community in Dorchester County.
Matt McKnight, chief archaeologist for the Maryland Historical Trust, said the work stems from a year-and-a-half-long cooperative agreement with the National Park Service aimed at pinpointing the likely location of Jackson’s homestead.
“With any public archaeology project, there’s a lot of local stories that haven’t been told that maybe the community knows about, and they’re very proud of their history, but getting that out to a broader audience can sometimes be difficult,” McKnight said. “And archaeology can be a good venue for that – especially public archaeology.”
He pointed to a project a few years ago in Old Town in western Maryland, that dealt with frontiersman Thomas Cresap.
“There’s streets named after the guy, there’s, towns named after the guy. But it’s a story that I think the larger part of Maryland doesn’t necessarily know about,” McKnight said.
“This is very similar – this is a story that certainly Black historians and African American historians have been telling for a number of years, but I don’t know how much white America has been listening. And he played a very important role in the Underground Railroad and did take a risk in doing what he was doing,” he added.
The partnership began after Park Service officials identified possible resources tied to Jackson through historic maps and limited metal-detecting surveys.
The goal, McKnight said, is to move beyond legend and better ground Tubman’s story in the physical landscape and community that supported her work.
The site itself is heavily wooded, marshy and difficult to access. Early attempts to use ground-penetrating radar were hampered by wet conditions and a high water table common to the area.
Since then, the Maryland Historical Trust has conducted additional radar and metal-detecting surveys, mapping areas of soil disturbance and concentrations of metal that could signal former structures. Rather than dig immediately, archaeologists have focused on identifying the most promising locations for excavation.
Any digging will require continued coordination and permitting with the National Park Service, but officials say they are hopeful excavation can begin later this summer.
In addition to two areas believed to be associated with the Jackson homestead, researchers are documenting nearby cultural resources, including a former blacksmith shop site and a historic family cemetery that is slowly being encroached upon by marsh — a reminder of how vulnerable some of the Shore’s historic landscapes have become.
Together, McKnight said, the work is about reconstructing what the landscape looked like roughly 150 years ago — and understanding what daily life was like in the community that helped Tubman carry out acts of resistance that would later become part of American mythology.
Part of what makes the site significant, McKnight said, is Jackson’s documented role in aiding Tubman’s brothers during one of her early rescue missions. McKnight said Tubman had to send a coded letter to Jackson because they knew their mail was being monitored by the government.
“They didn’t trust the free Black community that was living in Dorchester County at the time, because they have this enslaved population that they’re worried about rising up or escaping or all kinds of paranoid things. And she said she had to send a coded letter,” McKnight said. “And so, there’s all these sort of camouflaging going on to try and keep white society from realizing what was taking place here, but Jacob Jackson knew the coded language, and he knew to let her brothers, know what was gonna happen and to be ready.”
As the project develops and advances toward an archeological dig hopefully this summer, McKnight said he hopes to bring on more local historical groups to aid in the search and add important details and context.
“We were trying to get this initial wave of information,” he said. “We’re trying to just identify the sites of interest at this stage. Now that I think we’ve identified a couple of those, that outreach will probably be starting over the summer. And hopefully, we will have some good contacts there by the time we’re actually ready to be in the field doing the excavation part of it.
“With part of his cooperative agreement, there’s also some resources for hiring a historian to assist us, and that’s another step of this process that hasn’t happened yet, but we’re gonna try to get someone with a good knowledge of the local history that can help find some of the documentary resources to help tell this story,” he added.
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