Easton: Talbot County and Frederick Douglass

Easton became the seat of Talbot County in the early seventeen hundreds, after the Maryland colonial assembly ordered a courthouse built at the headwaters of the Tred Avon River. The town grew around that courthouse.

But Talbot County's deepest history is inseparable from Frederick Douglass, who was born on Tuckahoe Creek in eighteen eighteen. Douglass spent his early years in and around this county. As a young man, after a failed attempt to escape slavery, he was caught and jailed right here in Easton.

He returned on his own terms in eighteen seventy-eight, delivered a lecture at that same courthouse, and walked the roads back to find his birthplace. A statue of Douglass now stands on the courthouse lawn, a few blocks from where he was once imprisoned.