Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman was born a slave around 1820 in Dorchester County, Maryland. As a slave she worked in the fields-the most grueling kind of work a slave could do. She married John Tubman, a free man, and escaped from slavery at the age of twenty-five. She went on to be a conductor of the Underground Railroad. Her first trip back to the south as a conductor was to rescue her siblings who were about to be sold south. When she was twelve years old, she was hit over the head with metal weight by her overseer, and so she suffered reccuring blackouts, and her passengers always waited for her until she woke up again. She made ninteen trips south after that, helping about three hundred slaves escape. She was the railroad's most famous conductor, as she never lost a passenger. She was never captured by bounty hunters, who searched for escaped slaves, despite the fact that there was a $40,000 reward for her capture.
She served as a laundress, spy and nurse during the Civil War, but was never payed for her service by the government. After the war, she moved to Auburn, New York, and established a home for the aged and needy there. The Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged is now a national landmark. She died in 1913, when she was ninety-three years old.