Frederick Douglass's Talbot County: A Driving Tour of His Maryland Beginnings

To mark International Underground Railroad Month in 2022, the National Park Service's Network to Freedom program invited member sites to take over its social media for a day under #TakeoverTheNetwork. On September 3 it was Talbot County, Maryland, whose programmes important to local and national history first joined the Network to Freedom in 2008, featuring its Frederick Douglass Driving Tour.

Where Douglass began

Douglass himself wrote that "it is always a fact of some importance to know where a man is born, if, indeed, it be important to know anything about him." He was born Frederick Bailey in 1818 on Tuckahoe Creek in Talbot County, on Maryland's Eastern Shore, and endured the cruelties of a slave system that broke up families and crushed the spirit.

September 3, 1838

The takeover fell on the anniversary of his escape: on September 3, 1838, aged 20, he fled Maryland and took the name by which the world came to know him.

The driving tour

Tuckahoe Creek looks much as it did in his day and is now Frederick Douglass Park on the Tuckahoe. It and other places important to his early life are stops on the Frederick Douglass Driving Tour of Talbot County.

The county's posts also recalled Douglass's reflection that a battle is easily described and understood, but the moral growth of a great nation takes reflection as well as observation to appreciate.

More from the series: #TakeoverTheNetwork · next, Oldham County History Center.

Sources

• National Park Service, Network to Freedom, "Frederick Douglass Driving Tour of Talbot County #TakeovertheNetwork." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/frederick-douglass-driving-tour-of-talbot-county-takeoverthenetwork.htm
• Two graphics from the county's posts, with photographs not credited to the Park Service, are not reproduced here.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.