At the Josiah Henson Museum and Park, visitors can feel the weight of the past. Interpretive exhibits based on Henson’s writing reveal details of everyday life on a plantation, while a log kitchen offers an immersion into an enslaved cook’s experience. The venue is one of many African American heritage sites throughout Montgomery County, Md., which played a key role in the Underground Railroad.
Almost 80 percent of American tourists participate in cultural heritage activities during their travels, and more of them are seeking out opportunities closer to home. Travelers from the D.C. area can find a rare combination of heritage sites and outdoor experiences in nearby Montgomery County. Home to one of Maryland’s largest collections of African American history, the area has links to heroic abolitionists like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, and offers heritage sites that range from hiking trails evoking the Underground Railroad to living history centers that depict 19th-century plantation life.
Along with the Josiah Henson Museum and Park, African American heritage sites such as Woodlawn Manor Cultural Park & Underground Railroad Experience Trail, Button Farm Living History Center and Oakley Cabin African American Museum and Park give visitors to Montgomery County a deeper appreciation for the efforts of freedom seekers.
“We live in a time where all folks are waking up to other histories,” said Sarah Rogers, the executive director of Heritage Montgomery. “If you learn, you care, and if you care, you want to preserve this place.”
Heritage sites that evoke life before emancipation
Being close to the free North and having access to several bodies of water made Maryland an important location for the Underground Railroad. The Potomac River, C&O Canal and Seneca Creek, for instance, made it more feasible for enslaved African Americans to reach cities like Baltimore and D.C., both of which had large free Black communities. Montgomery County in particular became a gathering point for freedom seekers, largely because of its geography. The county is close to the Mason Dixon line separating the North and South, as well as Pennsylvania, offering easier access to the Ohio Valley and up to and across the Great Lakes into Canada.
The Reverend Josiah Henson, for example, escaped enslavement on the Issac Riley plantation by fleeing to Canada in 1830. Henson then became a conductor on the Underground Railroad, helping 118 enslaved people escape to Canada, and later published an autobiography that included vivid depictions of his enslavement. That autobiography, “The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada,” heavily influenced Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which became an inspiration for the abolitionist movement.
That history comes alive at the new Josiah Henson Museum and Park. “Josiah Henson’s narrative provides direct insight into the remarkable events he endured, and the freedom he eventually secured for himself, his family and numerous others who were enslaved,” said Cassandra Michaud, the senior archaeologist for Montgomery Parks. Michaud led archaeological investigations that uncovered more than 50,000 artifacts at the Josiah Henson site, largely from kitchen fireplace sweepings, and was a member of the design and construction team for the museum. Visitors can learn context around Henson’s story at the log kitchen, where audio recordings feature formerly enslaved people describing their work experiences. Another exhibit showcases Henson’s direct quotes alongside illustrations created specifically for the museum.
“This site is unusual in that the visitor is learning about the history from the viewpoint of someone enslaved,” Michaud said.
For a more active immersion, visitors can head to the Woodlawn Manor Cultural Park & Underground Railroad Experience Trail. The four-mile route is scenic, but poses challenges meant to evoke an enslaved person’s attempt to escape. “It’s really exploring what it would be like if you decided to run. And it’s quite eye-opening,” said Rogers. Hikers can go it alone or follow a guided trek that provides historical context along the way. Nighttime hikes are also available and can give visitors a deeper sense of what the search for freedom often required.
Afterwards, visitors can explore Woodlawn’s stone barn interpretive center, where exhibits unpack the lives of enslaved people, as well as local communities that were founded by newly emancipated people.
“One of the biggest points that’s examined is the relationship that the Society of Friends, also known as the Quakers, had with slavery. They really started to reflect [on enslavement] and ask hard questions in the early 1800s,” said Rogers.
Experiences that help communicate “the deeper story of slavery”
The story of the Quaker communities in Montgomery County offers a solid jumping off point for a visit to The Oakley Cabin African American Museum and Park. The property, on the site of what used to be an African American roadside community, was once home to three nearly identical log cabins. One of the cabins, known as Oakley Cabin, has been preserved and turned into a living museum. Inside, historical artifacts depict how a formerly enslaved person would have lived after being newly freed. Tours are available that describe life for the area’s African American families during the Reconstruction Era in the 1800s, but the outside of the property is also open to visitors, including surrounding trails and a picnic area.
Anthony Cohen, a historian and the president of Button Farm Living History Center, wants visitors to Montgomery County to think about the “after-effects” of slavery, from Reconstruction to the Jim Crow era to our present legal and justice systems. After leading a walking group through Underground Railroad towns from Maryland to Canada in 1996, Cohen was tapped to help Oprah Winfrey prepare for her role in the film “Beloved.” He created an immersive experience of what plantation life for an enslaved person would have been like, from menial labor to an overnight escape attempt.
The experience inspired Cohen to establish Button Farm Living History Center, where visitors and school groups can participate in “hands-on, tactile” educational programs that interpret plantation life in Maryland and the story of the Underground Railroad.
“All of the experience is in real time, true to life, and we use that as a point of engagement to talk about and communicate the deeper story of slavery that you don’t find in history books,” Cohen said.
On hour-long Button Farm Almanac tours, visitors can go behind the scenes of how the property operates. That could mean encountering cotton plants in the museum garden, where more than 75 varieties of heirloom vegetables and herbs that appeared in Montgomery County’s earliest agricultural records are grown. Children might be prompted to consider what a historical artifact, like a clam shell, would have been used for on the plantation. From those hands-on activities, visitors “get an insight into how enslaved Montgomery Countians lived,” Cohen said.
Those learning experiences also tend to prompt discussions about connections that can be drawn from slavery to today, because Cohen makes it a point to ask visitors thoughtful questions.
“We always ask them, ‘What are the modern parallels? What are the correlations? What is unjust today in similar ways that slavery was unjust then?’ We want them thinking about those issues,” Cohen said.
Learn more about visiting Montgomery County’s African American Heritage Sites