Hiram Hover reports on the sale of the house"once inhabited by Josiah Henson, the slave whose 1849 autobiography served as a model for Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin." There was also an opinion piece in the Baltimore Sun last weekend that spoke of another famous Maryland house. Apparently Donald Rumsfeld's weekend home is"Mount Misery," a red-brick house built by Edward Covey, the notorious"slave breaker" in Frederick Douglass's famous Narrative of his life.

I did not know this before, but I found it also mentioned in a reputable source and in a letter to the editor in the Post.

On the website of the Frederick Douglass Project, a group trying to raise funds to build a memorial to Douglass on the Eastern Shore, I also found this picture of"Mount Misery" viewed from a distance, taken from an appropriately ironic angle.

P Morris - 6/10/2006

That is Nettie Washington Douglass, Frederick Douglass' great-great granddaughter on her visit to Talbot County in 2004.