Hornpoint/Harriet Tubman excursion
April 18th 2026, Hornpoint Laboratory (cambridge, Maryland), and Dorchester County, Maryland
This excursion was to the Horn Point Laboratory and the Harriet Tubman Museum. Like any other trip, it started early in the morning (8:AM this time) and we all boarded the bus. The bus ride was uneventful, but I was expecting something similar to the previous excursion, a research center with various projects focused on animal or environmental conservation.
This is a side tangent, but I had read "The White Ship," the story provided as a preface to the trip. The quote reads: "But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of the ocean." What I got from the short story is that a person can dream and live their life in a way that pushes them into a specific metaphorical environment. The entire plot follows a lighthouse keeper who dreams and goes on an adventure to various places that embody different feelings or life paths. Most of them are quite dark, such as the land of knowledge where you constantly search for answers that drive you mad. However, I think the concept of a metaphorical space, a mental space, is reflected in the environment, and vice versa: the environment you keep yourself in affects your mind, and your mind affects the environment you keep yourself in. Aside from all the language in the short story about the environment and the various beauties of the natural world, I think that message about the link between environment and mental state is especially important in the context of conservation. It speaks to a kind of mental well-being on the part of people, a motivation to keep the spaces around them clean and healthy rather than abused or poorly maintained.
Anyway, the bus ride had me occupied with the metaphorical musings of the H.P. Lovecraft short story. At about 10:00 a.m., we arrived at the Horn Point Laboratory. We were first taken through a presentation that gave us an overview of why the Horn Point Laboratory exists, that it is a conservation space, a research base dedicated to doing science in service of the natural world and the greater estuary it sits on.
After that introductory presentation, we were guided to an engineering workshop where we were shown various drones and measuring devices capable of recording water salinity, the direction and strength of currents, and water temperature. These devices were particularly concerned with how climate change and anthropogenic factors such as pollution affect water quality. Water qualities like salinity are critical for maintaining certain organisms. If water falls outside the temperature range a species can survive in, it is simply eliminated from that environment. It was exciting to see that engineers had designed products to autonomously monitor those measurements through drones.
Overall I really enjoyed this excursion as it was an opportunity to both relax in nature trying things such as hiking and seining (excluded for brevity) and learn more about the connections between ecological conservation and science.
The next thing we saw were the efforts to recycle oyster shells. This seemed like the most community oriented program at the research laboratory. Through cooperation with organizations that reached out to public venues such as restaurants, oyster shells were recycled and used as seed material for oyster castles where oysters could be grown in the natural environment. This program focuses on restoring overharvested oyster populations in the local estuary. Decades of overharvesting, as oysters became an increasingly popular and luxurious food, led to severe population decline. By gathering old oyster shells as seed material, the laboratory is able to attempt to restore those populations. The number of successfully growing oysters has been measured year by year over time. In person, it was impressive to see the mountains and metric tons of shells they had collected. It was a powerful moment to see how community efforts can have such a huge impact and generate so much material that can then be used to benefit the environment.
A final project that stood out as very memorable was the cultivation of algae. Through computer programming, water sensors, and complex algorithms that help determine the dietary needs of oysters, algae was grown almost entirely autonomously, from small cultures in jars to huge vats outside, to help sustain the growing oyster population spawned in house. Seeing all those jars and scientific equipment in a lab environment honestly reminded me of The Martian. It felt like such a remarkable moment to see how scientists are able to adapt through engineering and create systems that aren't commercially available. It made me think about how in science, especially in noncommercial projects where there isn't an endless stream of funding, everyone's contributions are needed and valued.
Finally, after being guided through all these areas, we were taken to a cliff's edge overlooking the actual estuary. It was honestly one of the most serene moments of my life, staring out over the vast estuary, the water relatively calm and brackish, shallow enough that there were barely any ripples on the surface. It was simply a beautiful, peaceful moment.
After our time at the Horn Point Laboratory, we headed straight to the Harriet Tubman Museum, after a brief stop at a strip mall (they seem to grow like barnacles in the rural DMV area). We went on a guided tour through various sites of Dorchester County, learning the story of Harriet Tubman along the way. At the various plantations where she grew up and worked, our tour guide, who was a fantastic person by the way, taught us that slavery in Maryland centered largely around the lumber industry. This gave enslaved people like Harriet Tubman a degree of freedom that plantation slaves wouldn't have had, as they were given the autonomy to go out into the forest, harvest lumber, and haul it to cities. All that navigation gave Harriet Tubman the skills to move through Dorchester County and the surrounding area, skills that would eventually help her free enslaved people from the region.
As we moved closer to the coast and to the site associated with her father, we learned that sea level rise will eventually cause saltwater to encroach upon these historical sites. This was reinforced by the presence of ghost trees. Further along the tour, we saw stands of ghost trees, trees killed by saltwater flooding. We learned that eventually, rising sea levels will completely flood all of the sites connected to Harriet Tubman's life, eliminating any possibility of further study or documentation.
Afterward, we visited the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center, which, like the museum, contained artifacts and artwork depicting Harriet Tubman and telling the story of her life. It is a wonderful site and tourist destination, beautifully situated in Dorchester County, though the visitor center too will eventually be threatened by flooding, adding another aspect to how sea level rise could erase the physical record of the Underground Railroad.
We then took a guided tour through the ghost forests on a nearby natural site, which was very beautiful. We also visited the courthouse in the town that Harriet Tubman would travel to in order to carry and sell goods. We finally ended the tour back at the museum, closing out the full day's experience with a phenomenal meal of catfish, chicken, green beans, and mac and cheese. I still remember that food, it was heavenly, just like the vista at the end of the Hornpoint tour. The trip carried some similar sense of impending dread, from climate change this time instead of mysterious islands like in the story. It also carried the same ethereal beauty and hope, the chicken was that good.