Mural Damaged in Break-In at Harriet Tubman Museum
The recently renovated Maryland museum also said its donation box was taken in last weekend’s burglary.
The Harriet Tubman Museum and Educational Center in Cambridge, Maryland, reported a break-in that resulted in damage to a mural over the weekend. The involved party, which remains at large, broke into the building only a month after it reopened to the public following an extensive renovation.
“It really is a violation,” said Linda Harris, the museum's director of events and programming, in a brief call with Hyperallergic.
Located in the abolitionist's home county, the small, volunteer-run free museum was established in the mid 1980s in an effort to preserve and celebrate her life and legacy through exhibits, events, lectures, and guided tours of the city, which was among the inaugural “stops” along Tubman's Underground Railroad route to Philadelphia. The museum, which has operated out of its current location since 1992, became more widely known in recent years because of local artist Michael Rosato's “Take My Hand” (2019) — an outdoor trompe l'oeil mural depicting a larger-than-life Tubman stepping over a broken brick wall and reaching her hand out to take viewers on their journey to freedom.
The site was hit with severe flooding last May, forcing the museum to close down and embark on a yearlong renovation to remediate serious water damage. Rosato was invited to turn its interiors into an immersive experience to tell Tubman's story pictorially, from her time of enslavement to her meeting with Frederick Douglas and her guidance throughout the 1863 Combahee Ferry Raid, which liberated over 750 enslaved African Americans.
The museum welcomed the public to its renovated space on Saturday, June 13, to much fanfare from the local community. However, the celebrations were short-lived as the museum sustained damage from last weekend's break-in. The museum's back door, which was a part of one of Rosato's detailed interior murals, was torn off and damaged during the burglary.
Local reports indicate that the perpetrator knew exactly what they were looking for and beelined to the donation box, suggesting that they had familiarized themselves with the museum's layout during a prior visit. Though nothing else was damaged or stolen, the museum is free to the public and relies on donations to function. Harris told local media outlets that the box held around $3,000 when she recently emptied it, but she didn't know how much money was there when it was stolen.
"We just raised money to redo our museum,” she lamented to WBOC. “Now we've got to raise more money. So, I'm very sad. This place has been here since 1992. It's an institution. It conveys the story of a person born here in Cambridge. And for someone to vandalize it, it's pretty sad.”
Harris predicts that replacing the door, having the mural fixed, and installing a security system with cameras will cost the museum between $10,000 to $20,000, with a turnaround time of up to two weeks. She and the rest of the volunteer staff underscored that digital donations can be made through the museum's website to help facilitate the repairs and reopen again to serve the public.
