How Harriet Tubman Built Care into the Landscape of Auburn

Harriet Tubman's Auburn years are often described as the quiet conclusion to a life defined elsewhere—by Maryland, the Underground Railroad, and the Civil War. The land record tells a different story. In and around Auburn, Tubman turned a household and working farm into a widening system of family refuge, community care, and Black institution-building.

A 2008 National Park Service study places Tubman within Auburn's established Black community, including an area known as New Guinea. The study describes a closely connected community of relatives and friends whose lives reached back toward Maryland and Canada. In that setting, Tubman's commitments to freedom and women's suffrage existed alongside the daily work of caring for sick, elderly, and disabled people.

The physical base was a seven-acre farm outside Auburn that Tubman purchased from William H. Seward in 1859. According to the NPS study, it became a family home in the early 1860s. It also became a place where Tubman took in elderly and ill people before she created a formal institution. Home, farm, and care work were not separate chapters. They occupied the same ground.

That ground required labor. The NPS account says Tubman and her second husband, Nelson Davis, ran the farm during the 1870s and 1880s. Tubman also worked as a domestic. Yet the study describes her as living close to poverty, in part because her household extended beyond a small nuclear family. Family members, orphaned children, and people who were sick, disabled, or without homes all drew on the resources she worked to produce.

The limits of individual effort became clearer as Tubman grew older. In 1896 she acquired an adjoining 25 acres using borrowed money. Both the NPS Special Resource Study and the National Historic Landmark nomination describe the purchase as a determined attempt to create a permanent home for Black elders. The property included houses, barns, and outbuildings. It expanded the scale of the project—and its financial burden.

The National Historic Landmark nomination says Tubman spent the next seven years caring for people and trying to secure the institution's future. In 1903 she deeded the 25-acre property to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church under an arrangement for the church to continue operating the Home. The NPS records describe the church as assuming or paying a $1,575 mortgage.

That transfer was not the end of Tubman's idea. It changed the structure around it. A Board of Trustees and a Board of Lady Managers took responsibility for debt and organization, while church leadership and supporters raised money to renovate and equip the buildings. The Home formally opened in 1908.

The Special Resource Study places the institution within a broader Black response to exclusion. African Americans, it explains, were building community-based educational and social services while white establishments increasingly denied them access. Seen in that context, the Home was not simply a monument to one famous woman. It was part of a larger effort to create durable structures of care where existing systems failed.

Care also spread across several buildings. The NPS study identifies John Brown Hall, a brick structure farther back on the property, as another place where Tubman cared for ill relatives and friends. The building no longer survives above ground, but its recorded function enlarges the story beyond the one frame house most often associated with the institution.

The final turn is unusually direct. The institution Tubman struggled to establish eventually cared for its founder. The National Historic Landmark nomination records that declining health led her to enter the Home in 1911. She died there on March 10, 1913.

There is still a deeper archive to open. The NPS sources cite deeds, financial records, church history, local newspapers, interviews, biographies, and other materials that have not all been independently inspected for this release. Resident and caregiver histories remain especially important gaps. The strongest next research would follow the boards, mortgage, household, farm labor, and people who lived and worked within the institution.

What the surviving NPS record already shows is that Tubman's Auburn land was not a retreat from public work. It was another form of it. Property became shelter; farm labor supported a household; a personal undertaking became a church and community institution; and the person who built the system ultimately depended on its care.

Source note

The 1896 land purchase, 1903 transfer, board structure, 1908 opening, Tubman's 1911 entry, and her 1913 death appear on pages 12-13 of the National Park Service's National Historic Landmark nomination. Auburn's Black community context, the seven-acre farm and household, financial pressure, 25-acre purchase, A.M.E. Zion arrangement, wider Black social-service movement, and John Brown Hall appear on printed pages 2-22 through 2-24 and 2-36 through 2-38 of the NPS Harriet Tubman Special Resource Study, Chapter 2. This article uses original synthesis and paraphrase only and excludes NPS pages, photographs, maps, embedded quotations, current visitor information, and uninspected private records.