Harriet Tubman was born Araminta Ross around March 1822, the middle child of nine enslaved siblings in Dorchester County. Her parents struggled against enormous odds to keep their family together. Taken from her mother and hired out at age six, she endured years of physical and mental abuse. At the Bucktown Village Store, an overseer hurled an iron weight at another enslaved person and struck Araminta in the head instead, an injury that caused seizures, severe headaches, and narcoleptic episodes for the rest of her life. She later described these episodes as visions from God. The marshlands of the Eastern Shore shaped her in ways no enslaver could undo. She learned the waterways, the tides, the stands of timber where a person could disappear. She learned to read the North Star. In 1849, at twenty-seven, she crossed out of Maryland and into freedom in Philadelphia, but she did not stay free for long. She kept coming back.

Between 1850 and 1860, Tubman returned to Dorchester and Caroline counties an estimated thirteen times, guiding family members, friends, and strangers along the Underground Railroad to the North. She traveled at night, in winter, when the long darkness provided cover and frozen ground muffled footsteps. She used the network of safe houses, river crossings, and sympathetic contacts that defined the Underground Railroad, but she also relied on her intimate knowledge of the local terrain -- the same creeks, woods, and marshes preserved in the national historical park today. She never lost a passenger. During the Civil War, she served the Union Army in South Carolina as a nurse, cook, scout, and spy. In 1863, she led the Combahee River Raid, becoming the first African American woman to command an armed military raid, liberating more than seven hundred enslaved people in a single operation.

The path to honoring Tubman on her home ground took decades. The Conservation Fund donated 480 acres of land known as the Jacob Jackson Home site to the federal government, and on March 25, 2013, President Barack Obama designated the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument under the Antiquities Act. The following year, the Carl Levin and Howard P. "Buck" McKeon National Defense Authorization Act redesignated the National Park Service portion as a National Historical Park, authorizing acquisition of an additional 4,207 acres across Dorchester, Caroline, and Talbot counties. The remainder of the monument is managed by the Fish and Wildlife Service as part of the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge. A sister park, the Harriet Tubman National Historical Park, was established in Auburn and Fleming, New York, on January 10, 2017, near where Tubman spent her later years.

The fifteen-thousand-square-foot visitor center, jointly managed by the National Park Service and Maryland Park Service, opened on March 10, 2017, drawing more than five thousand visitors during its opening weekend. Its design is deliberate. A memorial garden contains three zones: closely mowed lawn, meadows of knee-high grass, and woodland of waist-high grass, shrubs, and trees. The progression mimics the concealment options Tubman and her passengers faced -- exposed ground where capture was nearly certain, and dense cover where a person could vanish. Two paths wind through the garden, just as those fleeing enslavement often had to choose which route to take. Walking trails extend three-quarters of a mile into the surrounding landscape of the Blackwater refuge. With few structures surviving from Tubman's era, the park invites visitors to look outward rather than at artifacts. The tidal marshes, the pine forests, the wide Choptank River horizon -- these are the artifacts. Tubman read this land like a map, and the park asks you to see it through her eyes.