The daring escape of a woman who was enslaved in D.C. is now being commemorated with a wayside marker in an Adams Morgan park.

The new marker was installed at Kalorama Park in mid-November, commemorating the 1861 escape of 20-year-old slave Hortense Prout from her owner, John Little, who lived in a manor house that occupied a portion of what was then a sprawling 56-acre estate. Little, a butcher, was said to have owned 17 slaves.

Prout’s escape was noted in the June 17, 1861 edition of the Evening Star:

A FUGITIVE. – A slave woman belonging to Mr. John Little having eloped, Mr. Little made diligent search and ascertained that she was in one of the Ohio camps. He made a visit to the camp and told the colonel commanding what he wanted, and the reply was, ‘You shall have her, if she is here.’ Search was made, and the fugitive was found, completely rigged out in male attire. She was immediately turned over to the custody of Mr. Little, and was taken to jail. Every opportunity is afforded loyal citizens of loyal States to recover their fugitive slaves.

Prout was eventually freed when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Compensated Emancipation Act, which ended slavery in D.C. on April 16, 1862. The act came almost nine months before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which applied to Confederate states. Little received just over $500 in compensation for Prout.

The effort to recognize Prout started in 2008, when local residents successfully petitioned the National Park Service to add Kalorama Park to National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, a series of 600 sites nationwide that commemorate the effort to free slaves. There are 18 sites in D.C. and dozens more in Maryland, which was a Union state but did not abolish slavery until 1864.

The new wayside marker includes information about Prout in both English and Spanish.

This story was originally published on WAMU.