Douglass was proud to be an Eastern Shoreman. He wrote that it's important to know about a person's place of birth "if, indeed, it be important to know anything about him". Although Douglass at one time wrote an unflattering description of his birthplace, he later told an audience in Baltimore, "I am an Eastern Shoreman, with all that name implies. Eastern Shore corn and Eastern Shore pork gave me my muscle. I love Maryland and the Eastern Shore!" When he visited the former slave plantation on the banks of the Tuckahoe River in Talbot County, where he was born, he scooped soil from the spot into his hands and later told an audience that he would carry back to Cedar Hill, his home in Washington D.C. "some of the very soil on which I first trod."

Douglass wrote that he was born in "Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough". But there is no town by that name. Instead, Tuckahoe is an area along the Tuckahoe River in Talbot County. Modern-day Hillsboro is located on the Caroline County side of the Tuckahoe River, across from Queen Anne (Talbot County), just south of Md. Route 404, seven miles east of U.S. Route 50.

Douglass visited here in 1878 when he came looking for the cabin where he was born. The location of Tapper's Corner is described in a footnote of a Douglass biography.

Meets Md. Route 303 at Tapper's Corner, close to the true birthplace, and runs south, almost to the misplaced historical marker. Biographer Dickson J. Preston mistakenly calls this Kingston Landing Road. But that road is miles from the Douglass birthplace. It runs south from Md. Route 328 southeast to the Choptank River.

Douglass's master was named Aaron Anthony. Besides owning his own farm and slaves, he was an overseer for Colonel Lloyd of Wye Mills, where Anthony lived. Anthony's farm on the Tuckahoe River was called Holme Hill back then. If you stand at Tapper's Corner facing east, where Lewistown Rd. meets Md. Route 303, you're looking at farm fields that were once part of Aaron Anthony's Holme Hill farm, where Douglass' mother and grandmother were slaves. Now it's called No-No Acres.

Formed the north boundary of Aaron Anthony's Holme Hill farm. Douglass often visited Lee's grist mill when he was a slave boy and fished in the mill pond. It was later a sawmill.

Louis Freeman pointed out a plot of land and referred to it as "Aunt Bettie's Lot" when he and Douglass visited Douglass's birthplace in 1878. "Aunt Bettie" was his grandmother, Betsey Bailey. She was married to a free black named Isaac Bailey. Their daughter, Harriet Bailey, was Frederick's mother. Frederick was named Frederick Augustus Bailey when he was born. Douglass believed that "Aunt Bettie's Lot" was where his grandmother's cabin once stood, where he was born and lived as a child.

When Douglass visited his birthplace with Louis Freeman, he recalled playing near a large cedar tree which was near the cabin. Douglass found this cedar tree and claimed that he had found his birthplace. The cedar tree was located near the edge of a ravine called Kentucky, and it was in the woods near "Aunt Bettie's Lot".

Betsy Bailey fished for shad and herring along the Tuckahoe River near a place Douglass remembered as Muddy Shore. She fished with nets that she made herself and even sold to people as far away as Denton. Muddy Shore was located at the foot of a ravine called Kentucky.

Aunt Bettie's lot was at the head of a ravine called Kentucky, along with the cedar tree. Muddy Shore was at the foot of this ravine. Kentucky was about 40 acres of wild, untillable land - a deep gully that runs from the farm fields to the Tuckahoe River.

. . . About Us

My dad is Don Barker. He likes to garden, make furniture, work on finishing our timberframe house (someday), write articles for magazines about raising 5 kids, go on dates with my mom, make and paddle kayaks, and talk about making a sailboat someday. You can write to him, too, at dbarker@bluecrab.org

© 1996 Amanda Barker and Don Barker