Where did Harriet Tubman grow up and live?

📍Harriet Tubman Home, 180 South Street, Auburn, New York, USA

1859 – 1913

“I was born into slavery on a plantation in Dorchester County, Maryland, around 1822, and I escaped north to freedom in 1849 — alone, on foot, following the North Star through swamps and forests for nearly ninety miles to Philadelphia. But I could not rest with my own freedom while my family remained enslaved, and so I went back. Thirteen times I returned to the South, guiding approximately seventy enslaved people to freedom through the Underground Railroad, and I never lost a single one. After the Civil War I settled in Auburn, New York, in a house that the abolitionist William Seward sold me on generous terms, and I lived there for the rest of my long life — caring for elderly African Americans, working for women's suffrage, and receiving the stream of visitors who came to honour what I had done. The house was modest but it was mine, owned and paid for, which was a thing I had once believed impossible.”

👍 LovedThe freedom of Auburn — the ability to come and go as I pleased, to own property, to speak my mind in public. The community of reformers and activists who gathered around me. The knowledge that I had brought others to this same freedom.

👎 DislikedThe poverty that followed me even into freedom — I was never adequately compensated for my service as a spy and nurse during the Civil War, and fought for my pension for decades. The physical pain from a childhood head injury that caused seizures throughout my life.

Map showing where Harriet Tubman lived — Harriet Tubman Home, 180 South Street, Auburn, New York, USA

🗺️ Approximate location today

Street view of Harriet Tubman's home at Harriet Tubman Home, 180 South Street, Auburn, New York, USA

📍 Street view today

Sources: Clinton, C. Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom (2004), Little, Brown; Larson, K. Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero (2004), Ballantine Books; Bradford, S. Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (1869)