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“Ho for the Capes”
Last month I had the privilege of taking a weekend trip out to Cape May, New Jersey, with a dear friend. How we came upon that location for travel is beyond me, as the goal of the journey was less about where we ended up and more about honoring the bond of childhood friendship. And there is something poetic to say about that, but unfortunately that is not the intent of this letter. Our text thread read something along the lines of, “ Maybe we do a cute little 2-day trip to Cape May or Martha's Vineyard or something like that - a “cutesie” town.” “Cutesie”, meaning overtly adorable and charming. A place where the location made you nostalgic for a life you never lived, holding on to memories that were never yours through senses of place and environmental characteristics. Considering we are both extreme fans of Victorian architecture, we made our way from I-95 down to Exit 0 of the Garden State Parkway to America's Victorian Capital. “Welcome to Cape May!”
Having embarked on our journey without an itinerary, we began to look for interesting attractions in the area. Up came the Harriet Tubman Museum of New Jersey. “Strange,” I thought to myself, trying to understand Harriet Tubman's relevance to this whitewashed, Barbie Dreamhouse-kind-of town. But of course, as we all know, history is everywhere. Thus, the inspiration for this letter was born.
Cape May, New Jersey, was originally home to the Kechemeche Natives of the Lenni-Lenape Tribe. The first European residents acquired land from the Kechemeche (purchased or stolen, I don't know) in the mid-17th century, developing a fishing and whaling industry that was commercially connected to English colonists from Connecticut and Massachusetts. By the turn of the century, Cape May, then known as Cape Island, began to attract the elites of New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, and was well regarded for its beachfront hotels and seafood. Of course, one of the greatest topics of conversation among educated metropolitan elites was that of abolition. This created the perfect environment for someone like Harriet Tubman to establish a post.
Harriet Tubman found herself in Cape May, New Jersey, in the early 1850s. She was recorded to have worked as a cook and housekeeper for families and hotels in town to fund missions, in addition to other financial support from antislavery groups and well-known abolitionists like Stephen Smith. Because Cape May is set at the tip of a peninsula on the edge of the Delaware Bay, there was direct coastal access to routes that helped people move North. “A boat operated between Cape May and Lewes, Delaware, then, as it does currently. At night, local mariners operated a route across the Delaware Bay, ferrying slaves across.” Tubman likely directed many bondsmen across these routes into Cape May and then northward towards Canada.
Aside from its geographical virtue in facilitating the transition of the formerly enslaved, Cape May was home to the Banneker House – one of the best hotels for Free Blacks in the country (and in the first seaside resort town, nonetheless). The Banneker House, founded by abolitionist James Harding, was prepared and opened specifically for Black travelers. “Ho for the Capes,” Harding announced in Philadelphia newspapers in 1845. “The subscriber respectfully begs leave to inform his friends and the colored public generally, that he has opened a boarding house for their accommodation on Cape Island.” The Banneker House soon became a summer resort for those known to be part of the Black aristocracy.
By the end of our trip, it had almost felt shameful to me to have only considered Cape May to be worthy of our visit because of its curated, cutesie, granny-chic aesthetic and not because of its rich cultural history. On the other hand, this experience prompted further introspection on architecture's ability to draw people in, to conceal, in both the literal sense for the Underground Railroad and in the figurative sense concerning the history of place, and also to reveal. Perhaps Harriet Tubman too was a fan of Victorian architecture, or even met with friends to sit and talk on the beach. Perhaps she loved pastel colors and the reflective glistening of the sun on salt water. Perhaps Victorian architecture, in its own special way, can be symbolic for Black freedom and emancipation in the northeastern United States. History is everywhere, and Black history is in more places than you think.
Until next month,
stay BAD.d
Written by Keren Dillard