On the recordDecember 8, 2014
In this Nation's great history, the life of Harriet Ross Tubman is certainly a life worth recognition by this Congress and this country. Harriet Tubman, born Araminta Ross in 1822, dedicated her life to the emancipation movement as a leader of the Underground Railroad that provided enslaved African Americans a pathway to freedom in the North. She served for the Union Army during the Civil War and as a caregiver for the elderly by establishing the Tubman Home for the Aged in Auburn, New York, where she lived out her life. She suffered from traumatic brain injury throughout her life after she was hit as a teenager with a heavy weight by a slave overseer who was trying to subdue another enslaved person. She was an advocate for women's rights and worked to get women the vote. After settling in Auburn, she dedicated much of her life and effort to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church there. In 2008, the National Park Service completed a special resource study to determine the most appropriate way to recognize the life of Harriet Tubman. The Park Service eventually came to the conclusion that a park should include two geographically separate units. One would be a tightly clustered set of buildings in Auburn, New York, and the other would include large sections of landscape that are evocative of Tubman's life both as a slave and as a conductor of the Underground Railroad on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.…
