Maryland roads include more than 700 historical markers commemorating famous battles and buildings. Some, like the one introducing Kent Island to motorists, hark back to the years before Catholic settlers even founded the colony in 1634. Others, like the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory that was dedicated on Solomons Island in 1925, are more recent.
What they share is that many fail to convey the whole story. They’re not supposed to; at 70 words apiece, the idea is to whet an appetite to learn more. Yet a motorist might well learn the wrong information.
Some signs are in the wrong place. Others honor a site but neglect another one of significance at the same location, often an African-American or Indigenous one. Many use language considered taboo today. And some honor odious actors in our history that we would rather forget, leaving out the horrors of their deeds in favor of sanitized shorthand.
For decades, the State Roads Commission and various historical societies managed the sign program before the Maryland Historic Trust took it over. But about a year ago, the trust turned the program over to the much larger Maryland Department of Transportation, where it landed with Julie Schablitsky, chief of cultural resources for the agency.
Schablitsky has a Ph.D. in archaeology and supervises a team with expertise in history, anthropology and archaeology. The rationale was that the larger agency was better equipped to monitor the program, remove problematic markers, and help with the state’s goal of including overlooked Black and Indigenous sites.
“Anything that goes along our highways has to be historically factual,” Schablitsky said. “Many of these were written in the 1930s. Today, if we would go to that place and mark it, we would write it so it would be inclusive.”
The state has a website at which motorists can complain that a sign is damaged or inaccurate, or nominate a site for a new one. Twice a year, MDOT considers applications, selecting seven to 10 each year. Each marker costs $5,000 to install.
One common issue is calling a property a manor, estate or mansion, often to obscure that it was actually a plantation where enslaved peoples were imprisoned. Other typical problems that Schablitsky encounters include using the word “Indian” or “hostile Indian” instead of “Indigenous” or naming the individual, and the word “slaves” instead of “enslaved peoples” or identifying enslaved individuals.
The Battle of the Ice Mound marker near Taylor’s Island honors the “African American Cook Becca,” without providing her last name. Negro Mountain never names the Black frontiersman whom it purports to honor, even after the agency took down the “Negro Mountain” signs and markers due to complaints four years ago. It reinstalled a marker with a more complete sign last month, but historians still do not know the man’s name.
Lack of names is far from the only issue with the Gorsuch Tavern marker 19 miles from downtown Baltimore in the Monkton area. The sign sits in front of a building that was once a tavern that was “the meeting place of the Baltimore Countians who went to Pennsylvania to reclaim their slaves, thus bringing on the Christiana Riot of 1851.”
Baltimore County historian Deborah Harner says historians no longer refer to the 1851 event as a riot — uprising or insurrection is more appropriate. And the sign makes no mention that the enslaved men refused to go with Gorsuch and ended up killing him in a fight for their lives, an event that Harner and many other historians believe led to the end of the Fugitive Slave Act and the beginning of the Civil War. It does not even name William Parker, the formerly enslaved leader of the group whom Frederick Douglass would later praise as a catalyst for Black liberation.
“If someone is going to do the ultimate act of resistance by choosing freedom, we should reflect that in our words,” said Harner, a historian and archivist at Goucher College.
At Bethlehem Methodist Episcopal Church on Taylor’s Island, a state sign notes that it was the oldest Methodist Episcopal Church in Dorchester County. Left unsaid is any mention of the church that stood behind Bethlehem for decades, until it burned down, nor the Black cemetery still there. Fortunately, the Grace Foundation, which manages the site, has placed a sign detailing the Lane Church Cemetery’s history.
Carroll Meekins, who grew up attending Lane Church and has family in the cemetery, said he wishes the state’s historical marker would acknowledge that history.
“Why is there a Black cemetery behind a white church?” he asked, adding that a marker could explain that to passersby.
Then there are the signs that contradict each other. At the Brodess Farm, where Harriet Tubman spent portions of her life, the state historical marker says Harriet Tubman freed 300 enslaved people. The Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Scenic Byway said it was 70. The 70 figure is in the new museum and visitors center as well as in historian Kate Clifford Larson’s book; it’s the correct number, with Larson documenting 13 rescues in total. Larson said she’s tried to have the marker removed, but it’s still there.
It’s not the only incorrect information people are gleaning from signs. Mary Dennard-Turner, an interpretive ranger at the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitors Center, bristles at the byway literature’s description of the Brodess Farm as Tubman’s childhood home.
“Harriet Tubman never had a residence here. She was enslaved here. She didn’t live here. She didn’t live until she got to New York,” she said, referring to the Auburn, New York, where Tubman spent many of her free years.
Earlier this year, MDOT workers did remove one of the most egregious markers. A sign marked the home of Patty Cannon, a notorious murderer and kidnapper who trafficked enslaved and free Black children and their parents. The sign didn’t say what Cannon did; it quoted a novel Schablitsky said is widely regarded as racist; and it was not in the right place.
The Southern Delaware Alliance for Racial Justice asked the state to remove it. The team considered reinterpreting the sign to explain what scholars call the “reverse underground railroad,” a system that operated throughout Maryland, Delaware and Pennsylvania. Cannon and those affiliated with her gang kidnapped free Black citizens from the streets of Philadelphia, Baltimore and Wilmington, and sold them south to be enslaved on cotton plantations. It was, Schablitsky said, “basically human trafficking. She kidnapped people.”
“We decided it really didn’t rise to state significance,” she said of the Cannon marker. “And it was traumatizing for people. So we said, ‘Yeah, this one can be taken down.’ ”
Rona Kobell is the editor-in-chief of the Environmental Justice Journalism Initiative. Reach her at firstname.lastname@example.org.