‘Preservation is also making the history’: Inspired by Harriet Tubman, two Eastern Shore aunties are determined to be the elders their community needs

In the brilliant July sun of this Monday afternoon in Preston, a family of five bald eagles soars overhead. Their wings are the only image interrupting the bare blue sky as they circle above the creeks of the Choptank river and the 111 acres of farmland known as Mt. Pleasant Acres Farms. Here on the Eastern Shore, decorated community leaders Donna Dear and Paulette Greene steward this land, its soil connecting their own childhoods, the life of ancestor-abolitionist Harriet Tubman, and the wisdom of its original caretakers, the Choptank people.

As I take in the spread of the low fields and the clarity of the air, Ms. Greene and Ms. Dear emerge one after the other from the lone building at the farm’s entrance. The two-story federal style house was built in 1860 by enslaver Anthony C. Thompson on his “Poplar Neck” plantation. The duo, affectionately known by their community as “the Aunties,” don sun hats and matching black shirts that declare “We will be elders.” on one side and “Auntie Harriet says so.”  on the other. We meet under the shade of the pecan tree in front of their home, and the statement on their chest seems both like defiance against the legacy of enslavement in the land and a truth of Black American living: that we must claim and create life bravely over generations. 

It’s in the same way, they tell me, that our ancestors had secretly turned the 2,167 acres of Thompson’s plantation into a waystation for the Underground Railroad, where people escaping enslavement could receive critical supplies and guidance from allies, including Tubman’s father, Ben Ross. 

From my seat, I can see the sassafras soil and grass fields stretch south to a forest of native trees, and I can imagine how the families of free-ranging tulip poplars and oaks supported our own families’ freedom as well.

Aunt Paulette stands over our gathering at the head of the table, and with Aunt Donna seated to her right, she begins to help us envision the farm when it was both Thompson’s plantation and home to Tubman’s parents and brothers until she led them out of bondage. 

“During that time, it was nothing but trees here. There was no agriculture,” Ms. Greene says. In place of the cultivated orchard and long grasses before us, her voice conjures the wooded lands of the Eastern Shore that Tubman’s father knew and logged as an expert lumberman.

“This last little bridge you cross coming here,” she nods west beyond the farm towards the Dover Bridge on Route 331, “that’s the Choptank River, and so all of the logs and whatever came from Caroline County went right at the foot of that bridge. And they were put on boats, and the wood went to Baltimore.”

Ms. Greene first grounds our conversation in the history of connections made possible by this land and our people because to steward Mt. Pleasant Acres Farms, she tells me, is to be “the stewards of preserving what’s here.” At the heart of this for the Aunties is an understanding that “what’s here” means more than solely the attractive expanse of fruit trees and native grasses. In their daily life, “what’s here” extends to the memories and knowledge that rest within the land they take care of, knowledge that they have been rediscovering together since they bought the farm’s land over 30 years ago. 

As the Aunties tell their story, I watch them finish each other’s sentences freely, and they share laughter as they welcome me into the beginning of their partnership. Ms. Dear, an Ohio-born retired Army sergeant major, and Ms. Greene, a lifelong educator, founded Mt. Pleasant Acres Farms in 1994, but the partners in life first met 20 years prior in New York, when Ms. Greene hosted a “do-drop-in”-style New Year’s Party at her home uptown. Ms. Dear looks toward me from behind her sunglasses and a quiet swagger that Ms. Greene attributes to her being a “military woman,” and she tells me that mutual friends had been urging her to meet Ms. Greene for some time beforehand.

“But it never would happen,” Ms. Dear says. “So, on January the 1st, 1974, I went by, and she was in the kitchen as usual cooking. And I looked at her, and Paulette looked at me. And then we started talking, and I said, ‘Well, yeah, this sounds like it’d be a nice fit. So, I didn’t stay all the evening, but we became friends.”

“You stayed,” Ms. Greene interjects. “Even though you were not physically there. You stayed from the time that you came into the house. You stayed. Okay, and that was that.”

“And it broke up everybody’s relationships,” she adds slyly.

In the years after they met, the pair traveled across the world for Ms. Dear’s military assignments. Yet, their journey eventually brought them back to the Eastern Shore on land that Ms. Greene once spent much of her childhood learning to tend with her family.

Born in the Bronx, Ms. Greene moved at four years old to live on her great-grandparents’ farmland “right next door,” she says, to where we sit. For the next six years before moving back to New York, she spent her time eating tomatoes out of the fields, playing with garden snakes, and taking care of the land she and Ms. Dear would return to. 

Ms. Dear calls their purchase of their land “divine intervention,” as she describes the ice storm in Preston 30 years ago that made them travel back to check on their family. As they arrived, the Aunties saw the owner of the land adjacent to Ms. Greene’s great-grandparents’ preparing to stake a “for sale” sign in the ground.  

“We said ‘No, don’t even bother,’ we’ll take it,” Ms. Greene says. 

For Ms. Dear, the land of the Eastern Shore reminded her of the 300-acre farm she grew up on with her family outside of Columbus. Her mother embraced their farm as a resource for community empowerment, Ms. Dear said, a legacy that she says Ms. Greene encouraged her to continue after retiring from 27 years of active service. A Vietnam War veteran, Ms. Dear was one of the first 45 women to go to Vietnam. In her retirement, she became the first female commander of the Eastern Shore’s American Legion Blake-Blackston Post 77, a historically Black post of the veteran’s organization.

“My mother was into community. She was a community person, activist,” Ms. Dear says. “She donated some land and was able to put up a senior center in the community … She was always involved in social activities and social groups.” 

In shaping the vision of the farm, the Aunties channeled both their ancestry on the Eastern Shore and lineages of community work into their stewardship of the land. Ms. Greene calls the feeling of returning here “absolutely dynamic.” Yet, she notes that as the farm’s practice deepened, she saw that aspects of the farm’s history, like Tubman leading her family out of enslavement on the land, had been absent from her education. 

“We didn’t know anything,” she says. “We didn’t know it in the segregated schools or anything. Our families never talked about it. You know they talked a little bit about slavery but not so much about, you know, Harriet Tubman and this land.”

That gap in their knowledge underscores why the Aunties approach their stewardship as an act of preservation that has only become increasingly critical. Over their lives, they have seen white supremacy consistently obscure the truth of institutional slavery, and as the federal government intensifies censorship in schools and public life, the Aunties are turning into their home and the land as vessels for interpreting history.

“Preservation is actually saving the history, and preservation is also making the history,” Ms. Greene says. 

“What we’re doing now is we are preserving what’s going on today, which means that, 100 years from now, we can speak about this in the first person, as opposed to somebody else talking and trying to put together what happened during this time. We can do that ourselves.”

For the Aunties, the orientation of the farm as a space for agricultural, historical, and spiritual learning bridges both meanings of the word — saving a history that, in their lives, had often gone unspoken, and making a new history of Black people’s presence on their land. As part of their growing season, the Aunties create intentional spaces on their farm for generations of Black folks to gather, whether for land stewardship, spiritual traditions, or conversations like our own.

Accordingly, 2,000 of the native trees enclosing the open fields where we sit grow here because of an initiative organized by the Aunties in 2021. In partnership with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, they brought together dozens of people and families to plant the saplings that now stand above us. The many trees that come from their life at the farm reflect the many lives touched by their practice, particularly the community of young people that they have come to know as family. 

“We have so many young people that we are interacting with,” says Ms. Greene. “A whole lot of nieces and nephews.” 

The week before our gathering, the Aunties hosted a group of high schoolers from Washington, D.C., for a visit to the farm. During their time on the land, the Aunties invited them to reflect on their relationship to its history. 

“We asked them about how they felt about slavery then, and what do they see their positions as now in terms of slavery? They said, ‘Well, we’re not enslaved anymore,’” Ms. Greene says flatly. For her, this statement from the youth in front of her betrayed a misunderstanding of the depth of slavery as a systemic practice. 

“They don’t have a clue, which is the reason why society-wise we are still enslaved. We are still enslaved because you can’t get out of something until you know what it is,” Ms. Greene’s voice rises. “You have to understand what slavery is. It has to be dissected. You have to talk about it. There are layers and layers and layers, and it’s called institutional slavery.”

This misunderstanding, she explains, is an intentional result when white supremacy controls the narrative of history. 

“The history has become skewed, and it’s skewed in the sense that somebody else is always telling it. And many times when someone else tells it, they tell it according to what it is that they want to get across,” she says. “It’s still going on. It’s just being manifested in a different manner.” 

That conversation affirmed both the necessary intervention that Mt. Pleasant Acres Farms presented for those young people and the stakes of the ongoing work that the Aunties are building. At the moment, the Aunties are deepening the farm’s preservation practice by looking into their home as a site for storytelling. 

Mt. Pleasant Heritage Preservation Inc., the farm’s associated nonprofit, recently received a grant from the state’s African American Heritage Preservation Program to support the restoration of the Aunties’ 19th-century home and its transformation into an interpretation center for the farm’s history in the Underground Railroad. For the Aunties, the support from the program administered by the Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture and Maryland Historical Trust represents a kind of full circle moment. Since their return to the Eastern Shore in the early ’90s, Ms. Greene has helped shepherd the growth of organizations like Stories of the Chesapeake Heritage Area and MCAAHC, and after decades of advocacy and community work, she saw the commission’s preservation program launch in 2010. 

The restoration of the historic building will allow the Aunties to depict stories of the waystation inside the house and invite others in as a corrective history. The intention of furthering their ways of interpretation is to continue to foster in our communities an “expansion of mind and vision,” as Ms. Greene puts it. 

“When you’re in this kind of environment and space, you can think, and envision things, that may be germane to your whole being. A lot of the young people come here, particularly from New York, and they cannot imagine this,” she says. “So, it gives them an opportunity, in my opinion, to expand themselves and to see what can be for themselves. And if they don’t have that exposure, I think that’s a problem with a lot of the young Black children today. They cannot have an environment where they can imagine.”

In some ways, the imagination the Aunties are working to cultivate is the same imagination that inspired our ancestors to turn the plantation into a waystation. The imagination that brought those escaping to pray together at the land’s tallest tulip poplar tree — whose canopy I see still stretching above the treeline. 

Known as the “Witness Tree,” the preservation of the more than 400-year-old elder has been stewarded by the land’s Indigenous peoples, enslaved ancestors, and now the Aunties and their community. After our conversation, we will go to the base of the tree and pray where our people, many led by Tubman herself, came to begin their journey. 

In many ways, the Aunties’ life at Mt. Pleasant Acres Farms embodies the essence of the waystation. How they gather, nurture, and lead our spirits further out of enslavement seeks to actively honor the life of our collective ancestor “Auntie Harriet,” who Aunt Donna carefully reminds me not to misunderstand. 

“You always hear the words, ‘Harriet Tubman took them to freedom.’ No she didn’t,” Ms. Dear shakes her head. “Number one, you’re born free when you come out of your mother’s stomach … The white folks quote ‘enslaved’ our people. They enslaved us, and so that’s the basic difference. I’m saying she didn’t take them to freedom, she took them out of slavery.”

“They were already free,” she affirms.