Site
The Mitchell House is the small white cabin on the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum grounds. The cabin is open daily to Museum visitors. Admission may be purchased at the front gate ($20 /adult).
History
Two years older than Frederick, Eliza Bailey Mitchell was the closest sibling to Douglass. They maintained a lifelong relationship. The two of them had shared experiences under Thomas and Rowena Auld and, as Douglass later claimed, it was Eliza who taught him the art of survival in the face of hunger and abuse. Eliza and her two children were sold by Thomas Auld to her free husband, Peter Mitchell, in 1836 for $100 (a debt which they both worked for almost five years to repay). Peter Mitchell and his brother James were highly esteemed farm managers for the Hambleton family.
Eliza Mitchell was matriarch to many generations of the Mitchell family in St. Michaels and the surrounding area. Her great-grandson James E. Thomas became the first African-American elected to the town commission in St. Michaels and the first elected president of that body. The Mitchell home originally stood on Lee Street on land subdivided from Perry Cabin by the Hambletons. The house was slated for demolition and Commissioner Thomas was a leading force to save it by relocation to the Museum. While at the museum, be sure to see the log canoes and the Edna Lockwood, a 19th century bugeye under restoration. The canoe Frederick Douglass planned to take from William Hambleton would have resembled a cross between a modern racing log canoe and a bugeye.