793. Cambridge, Dorchester County (MD13)

Dorchester County turned out to be an experiment in mistaken choices. My first thought was to go to the county courthouse, but I accidentally went instead to the district courthouse. What’s the difference? To be perfectly honest, I’m not entirely sure. I had always assumed that the county courthouse was the courthouse for county matters, while a district courthouse represented a state or possibly federal subdivision. To be terribly honest, I also run into superior courthouses from time to time. I should ask one of my legal professional friends, but there might be differences and distinctions between the East Coast and Texas or the surrounding states. And yes, I could just consult Wikipedia, the font of all basic knowledge, but where’s the fun in that? Luckily, in smaller towns, this is usually not a problem. Any courthouse is generally going to be within a block or two of the others unless it’s some far-flung annex office. My tricks for determining the front of a courthouse (flag poles, monuments, etc.) served me well. And quite a monument there was in Dorchester. You see, Dorchester County turned out to be the birthplace of (and please excuse my language for a moment) …

… Ms. Harriet (motherflippin’) Tubman. I’m tempted to joke that she, Douglass, and Brown form some kind of antislavery Trinity, but she ain’t no joke. I certainly respect her as much as the two of them, if not more. What more could I say about her? In fact, I think what Douglass says to her in an 1868 letter says it all better than I ever could:

Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day—you in the night…. The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism. Excepting John Brown—of sacred memory—I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have.

We drove to the edge of the Choptank River, the same river we had looked out at in Denton, for a cache. We came to a lighthouse and began our search, but to no avail. As the cache was not rated that hard, the fellowship quickly realized it must have gone missing. But we had made allowance for that. Within walking distance was an EarthCache, and once it dawned on us that we needed it, I got walking. It was devoted to the effects of erosion and atmospheric chemicals on stone (specifically marble). I observed sugaring on a WWI monument, answered some questions, and Robert was your mother’s brother. Having found our cache for the county, we all mounted up again. The sun would soon start getting low, and we still had much to do, continuing the day in…