Harriet Tubman in Auburn, The Safe House at the End of the Road

After her last mission south, Harriet Tubman came to Auburn, New York. She purchased a seven-acre property there, a house and outbuildings on the edge of town, from the estate of William Henry Seward, the abolitionist senator who would later serve as Lincoln's Secretary of State. The price was twelve hundred dollars. She paid it in installments.

Tubman had been born into slavery in Dorchester County, Maryland, around eighteen twenty-two, though the exact year was never recorded. She had escaped north in eighteen forty-nine, alone, without a guide, following the North Star and the network of free Black churches and Quaker farms that formed the Underground Railroad. Then she had gone back. Again and again, she had gone back south to lead others out. The Moses of her people, they called her. She said she never lost a passenger.

In Auburn she settled permanently, living on the seven-acre property for more than fifty years until her death in nineteen thirteen. She planted gardens. She raised pigs. She took in the sick and the elderly who had no one else. In nineteen oh eight she formally opened a home for elderly African Americans on the property. She marched with suffragists and knew Susan B. Anthony, whose house was roughly sixty miles west in Rochester.

The Auburn home is not a monument built to honor her. It is the house she chose, bought, maintained, and filled with the people she refused to leave behind. The story of the Underground Railroad's most celebrated conductor does not end in flight or in triumph. It ends in a garden, in a town in central New York, with an old woman feeding chickens and sitting with the dying, which is its own kind of freedom.