Harriet Tubman House

Harriet Tubman spent the decade after her escape in motion — thirteen returns to Maryland, seventy family and friends brought north, the most famous conductor on the Railroad with no fixed home of her own. In 1859, with war coming, she bought a seven-acre farm outside Auburn, New York, from Frances Seward — the senator's wife — for $1,200, with $25 down. It became the haven: her parents, brothers, nieces and nephews sheltered there among the free Black community called New Guinea, in a landscape that felt like Maryland without its laws.

The farm was never just hers — Tubman ran it as an open door, taking in orphans, the disabled, the old, anyone who had suffered under slavery and war and had nowhere else. When the community built her a brick house in 1881–82 on the old foundation, she filled it the same way. At seventy-four she bought twenty-five adjoining acres at auction to found the Tubman Home for Aged and Indigent Negroes — and when she couldn't raise the funds, she deeded it to the AME Zion Church in exchange for their promise to run it.

The home opened in 1908; Tubman herself became its patient, living in John Brown Hall — the infirmary named for the man she had been planning to join at Harpers Ferry — until her death in 1913. The woman the bounty hunters couldn't catch spent her last years in the institution she had built for the people nobody else was caring for.

Harriet Tubman's Auburn home is the archive's Moses file — the farm the most wanted conductor in America bought for $25 down, the house she filled with the vulnerable, and the home for the aged where she died in the building named for John Brown.