Underground Railroad

KEY WEST, Fla. -- For love or money -- or a commitment to Fidel Castro's demise -- an unseemly mix of people have combined to bring Cuban refugees to the United States at a time when record numbers are fleeing their troubled homeland."

Anthony M. Cohen wants you to walk in the shoes of a slave -but only for a few days and for your own good. The executive director of the Menare Foundation in Montgomery County has a dream of "Underground Railroad immersion" experiences - played out on a restored plantation - which would propel people to overcome modern-day problems. His problem is finding a suitable plantation site. On the list: a 300-acre farm in Columbia that once housed slaves. First, Cohen has to sell his idea to a citizens committee pondering uses for the dozen buildings on the 19th-century Blandair estate, slated as a future regional park for Howard County.

Harriet Tubman 1820-1913 For her freedom was like heaven Harriet Tubman, born a slave on a plantation in Dorchester County, was 29 years old when she seized the opportunity to escape to freedom in the north. The year was 1849 and as she stood on a hill in Pennsylvania, a free woman for the first time in her life, her thoughts raced. "I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person," recalled the woman who came to be called the "Moses" of her people. "There was such a glory over everything.

At a glance, it seems fairly innocuous. A visitor conducts a children's program about quilts at the Savage library. She reads a story, discusses quilting patterns and helps youngsters make quilt blocks using colored paper and glue. She throws around pattern names with the deftness of Martha Stewart - the bear paw, the Ohio star, the nine patch. But you notice that her shirt is emblazoned with a National Security Agency logo. And as you listen to her discuss each pattern, you realize that, like the quilts themselves, there is more to this bee than meets the eye. Jennifer Wilcox, assistant curator of the NSA's National Cryptologic Museum, went to the Savage library last week to talk about the hidden meanings stitched into 19th-century quilts used by slaves to aid their escape via the Underground Railroad.

At a glance, it seems fairly innocuous. A visitor conducts a children's program about quilts at the Savage library. She reads a story, discusses quilting patterns and helps youngsters make quilt blocks using colored paper and glue. She throws around pattern names with the deftness of Martha Stewart - the bear paw, the Ohio star, the nine patch. But you notice that her shirt is emblazoned with a National Security Agency logo. And as you listen to her discuss each pattern, you realize that, like the quilts themselves, there is more to this bee than meets the eye. Jennifer Wilcox, assistant curator of the NSA's National Cryptologic Museum, went to the Savage library last week to talk about the hidden meanings stitched into 19th-century quilts used by slaves to aid their escape via the Underground Railroad.

It cannot be that I shall live and die a slave. I will take to the water. This very bay shall yet bear me into freedom. - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass He had always loved the Chesapeake Bay and enjoyed history, but for the longest time, when Vince Leggett tried to blend his twin passions, he was left with some haunting questions. "I'd read of all the shipbuilders, boat captains and shipping magnates who supposedly made bay history, most of them members of the majority community," says Leggett, a public historian and former schools administrator who lives in Annapolis.

It cannot be that I shall live and die a slave. I will take to the water. This very bay shall yet bear me into freedom. - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass H e had always loved the Chesapeake Bay and enjoyed history, but for the longest time, when Vince Leggett tried to blend his twin passions, he was left with some haunting questions. "I'd read of all the shipbuilders, boat captains and shipping magnates who supposedly made bay history, most of them members of the majority community," says Leggett, a public historian and former schools administrator who lives in Annapolis.

$100 REWARD -- Ran away from the subscriber on Saturday, 7th August [1858], a NEGRO WOMAN, called Emeline, aged about 31 years, dark color, 5 feet high. She took with her a female child aged 22 months. I will give the above reward if they are returned to me, or lodged in jail within the State so I can get them. Henry Devries Marriottsville, Carroll county, Md. In pre-Civil-War Baltimore, runaway slaves such as Emeline found aid, rest and direction with the largest population of free African-Americans in the United State and a small but dedicated band of abolitionists.

In song, drama and craft, a Westminster music-and-arts festival is retelling stories from the Underground Railroad, relying on oral history and scant information culled from letters, diaries and memoirs to describe treacherous flights to freedom. Common Ground on the Hill, which opened this week for its ninth season at McDaniel College, has organized several classes on the dangers of escape routes, the safe houses that dotted the countryside, the freedom seekers and those who aided them, including the well-known abolitionist John Brown.

Under the watchful eye of Underground Railroad "conductor" Harriet Tubman, more than 300 slaves were led to freedom on Chesapeake Bay waterways. It is one of many little-known facts about the bay's role in the Underground Railroad - the loose network of anti-slavery Northerners that illegally helped fugitive slaves reach safety in the free states or Canada before the Civil War. That piece of history is on display this month for another type of traveler....