HARPER AT 200

HARPER’S ACTIVIST BEGINNINGS AND EARLY LIFE

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper lived in Baltimore in her youth. By the time Harper came of age in the 1840s, around 89,300 (approximately 20 percent) of Maryland’s population was enslaved. Baltimore, a port city, was not just a hub of trading goods but also of human trafficking. As the map below shows, Harper and the Watkins family lived in proximity of enslavers’ prison and auction buildings. Baltimore and its institutions that supported human bondage shaped Harper’s worldview. Use the map below to explore some of the places that Frances Ellen Watkins Harper would have seen or walked by in the city of Baltimore. The sites below existed before 1850 when Harper left for Ohio. Zoom out and click on the shaded borders to find out county demographics from 1840. 

In 1850, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper moved to Ohio, where she began her teaching career independently. She taught at Union Seminary at Columbus, the first school established by the African Methodist  Episcopal Church. A few years later, she moved to Pennsylvania for another teaching job. In the same year, she published her collection of poems, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects. One of Harper’s most famous poems, “The Slave Mother: A Tale of the Ohio,” is set in Ohio, a free state. The poem expresses the anguish of an enslaved mother who tries to spare her children a life of enslavement. In 1860 she married Fenton Harper and settled in a farm at Hamilton County, Ohio, with Fenton’s three children from previous marriages. Fenton Harper died four years later, leaving Frances Harper widowed with four children, one—Mary–being her only biological child.

Explore the following pages to learn more about Harper’s life in Maryland and Ohio.