Harriet Tubman

Araminta Ross was born in Dorchester County, Maryland, around March 1822, the granddaughter of an enslaved African brought from the Ashanti coast. She escaped to Philadelphia in 1849 at the age of approximately twenty-seven, walking ninety miles by night with the help of the Underground Railroad.

Over the next eleven years she returned thirteen times to the Eastern Shore of Maryland and rescued approximately seventy enslaved people — family members first, then strangers — across more than a hundred miles to safety in the free states and Canada. She never lost a passenger. The Maryland slaveholders offered a forty-thousand-dollar bounty for her capture; she never was captured.

During the American Civil War she served as a scout, spy, and military commander for the Union Army. On the second of June 1863 she led the Combahee River Raid in South Carolina — the only Civil War military action planned and commanded by a woman — which freed approximately seven hundred and fifty enslaved people and destroyed Confederate supply infrastructure across the South Carolina low country.

After the war she settled in Auburn, New York, where she ran a home for the elderly and indigent and was active in the women's suffrage movement. The federal government refused to pay her a pension for her Civil War service until 1899, when she was approximately seventy-seven, and then only as the widow of a Union soldier — not for her own combat service.

She died in Auburn on the tenth of March 1913, age approximately ninety-one.

She is honored here as the conductor who never lost a passenger.