Freedom Town

At first glance, Ripley appeared just another pleasant old river town, a place to dine and shop for antiques in the colorful historic storefronts, or stroll along the banks of the Ohio River and take in the tree-shaded 19th century homes.

It was fitting, I thought, that a closer look should be necessary to uncover what was great about Ripley, since the events of its finest hour were hidden even in their own time: In the decades before the Civil War, the town--downriver from Cincinnati just above the Kentucky border--was a key station of the underground railroad, and scene of some of the greatest dramas of organized resistance America has ever known.

The underground railroad was a code name for a secret network of churches, communities and individuals dedicated to resisting slavery by helping slaves escape to Canada. Activists fed, clothed, hid and conducted escapees from station to station along this network until they crossed the Canadian border into southern Ontario--the only place they were legally safe from recapture.

Historians estimate that as many as 10% of the fugitives from slavery who managed to reach freedom in Canada were helped in Ripley--partly because of its central location on the Ohio River, the dividing line between slave and free states.

But more important was the character of a few strong individuals in the town, particularly the Rev. John Rankin, a Presbyterian minister who had been driven out of neighboring Kentucky for his antislavery views, and the African American businessman and inventor John Parker. Parker, who was born a slave in Virginia, after numerous escape attempts finally persuaded the widow who was his master to let him work in a foundry and save a portion of his salary toward purchase of his freedom. While Rankin concentrated on organizing Ohio’s underground station network and building antislavery sentiment nationally, the freed slave Parker traveled into Kentucky at night to persuade slaves to flee, and personally led more than 1,000 away.

*

Unlike more urban centers of the underground, where many important stations were demolished long ago and old networks are impossible to trace, most of Ripley’s important sites still stand and a number are open to the public. Records of the activists and fugitives who passed through them are preserved in unusual detail in the 1996 book, “His Promised Land: The Autobiography of John P. Parker, Former Slave and Conductor on the Underground Railroad” (W.W. Norton & Co., $20). Although Parker died in 1900, historian Stuart Seely Sprague edited the book from a newspaper reporter’s interview with Parker that had been preserved since the 1880s in the Duke University Archive.

Last year, I packed Parker’s book in my car and headed out to retrace the paths of the fugitives he described.

To me, the most haunting ordeal Parker describes was the escape of Eliza, who fled from Kentucky on a winter night when her owner arranged to sell her only child. Many historic references point to this real-life story as inspiration for the flight of a similar Eliza in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Not the least of these references is Stowe’s 1853 book, “Key to ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ ” in which she discusses her sources.

Eliza had been forced to flee suddenly, without warning or preparation, making her way to the Ohio River near Ripley with her child in her arms, hoping to find the river frozen enough to cross on the ice. Reaching the bank at dawn, she found instead that there had been a thaw and the ice was dangerously softened.

Eliza ventured to a house nearby where she was taken in and allowed to warm her child. But slave catchers approached, and hearing the baying of their dogs, she determined to cross or die.

She started out across the water just as her pursuers came down the riverbank behind her. The ice was so thin that not even the dogs would go out on it, but the slave catchers began firing pistols and the sound of the bullets drove her on. The ice only got thinner the farther she went. Then, far from shore, out over the deepest part of the river, she walked onto a weak spot and went down into the water.

She managed to throw her child away from her onto solid ice as she was falling through, and catching hold of a fence rail she carried, was able to pull herself back up on the ice. She got a little farther before the ice gave way beneath her again; then she was plunged into the river for a third time. She was wet to the shoulders with ice water and had lost both her shoes and her feet were bleeding in the snow. But she said later that as she kept making her way, she felt that the Lord was protecting her.

Chance Shaw, an Ohio patrolman, was standing on the riverbank in Ripley watching Eliza’s struggle, and as she reached the Ohio shore near the mouth of Red Oak Creek, she found him waiting for her. But instead of arresting her, the patrolman directed her to Rev. Rankin’s house with the words: “Woman, you have won your freedom.”

*

My journey began about 50 miles from Ripley, in Kentucky near the old “Paris Pike”--now U.S. 68--from Lexington to Maysville, a trail first cut by migrating buffalo and later a well-used escape route of fugitive slaves. The Revolutionary War, the restless Daniel Boone, and the Civil War all passed through here and their paths and struggles are commemorated along the road in a series of historical markers and state parks.

I made the Route 68 town of Washington, Ky., the starting point of my trip because it is the town where in 1833 Harriet Beecher Stowe witnessed the slave auction that fed her growing anguish over slavery. I walked past the house where Stowe stayed as a guest of a local landowner, politician and businessman, the abolitionist Marshall Key. (The house is now handsomely restored and open to the public.) Down the street from the Key house, almost buried in the lawn of the old courthouse green, I came upon the limestone slab that once served as the slave auction block, and found myself shrinking back from it as if from a new grave.

Rankin family manuscripts record that Eliza escaped from the Thomas Davis farm near Germantown, about eight hilly, wooded miles from the river. I veered west on Kentucky 9 and north on Kentucky 1235 to Dover in order to pass through the country she must have traversed, heading to the river to find the spot where she must have crossed. It had been late September, the season, Parker wrote, when fugitives tried to time their escapes because the ripe corn in the fields provided food for their journey. I went over an old covered bridge and suddenly noticed a gap in the hills and trees ahead that could only be the river, then the road descended rapidly, and I knew that the hilltops in front of me had to be Ohio.

*

Suddenly my journey was no longer a visiting but a kind of revisiting, as if to places important in my own past. I drove down to the water at Dover and the river looked wide, deep, fast and uncrossable. There were no bridges across the river in the early 19th century; people depended on ferries and rowboats--neither available to escaping slaves. I’d always wondered why fugitives didn’t just swim it, but now I knew.

Kentucky 8 out of Dover runs closely alongside the river to Maysville, a once-important river port with a well-preserved historic district and the look of New Orleans. The only bridge over the river for 123 miles is here, and I crossed it as two huge barges were going by bearing loads of stone and coal. On the Ohio side of the river I headed back west on U.S. 52 to Ripley, and as I came to the bridge over Red Oak Creek on the edge of town, realized that this was where Eliza came ashore.

I followed the signs through town from Second Street to Rev. Rankin’s small red-brick house, surprisingly small for such a large and noble goal.

From Rankin’s front yard the river looked like a broad, shining promise of freedom. The house is open to the public, and Mrs. Frost, the volunteer on duty, told me that Rankin chose this site both for its privacy from the town and for its visibility to fugitives from the Kentucky shore. In antebellum times there was a secret room under the house entered by way of loose floor boards on the porch, used on more than one occasion when armed slave catchers showed up at the house. Rankin’s barn was set afire and his children were shot at, but a Bible inside the house is open to Psalm 62, Rankin’s favorite, with its passage, “He is my defense, I shall not be moved,” and the line that was his motto: “Trust in Him at all times.”

I made my way back through town and headed down the river to find John Parker’s house. At the end of Front Street, just past an old warehouse and off by itself, there it was, the red-brick house he described with such pride in his autobiography.

It was a poignant sight, broken down, with missing windows and pigeons roosting on the sills, and I couldn’t help contrasting Rankin’s handsomely restored home with this poor relic of a black hero. But in front of the house a sign read, “being restored by the John P. Parker Historical Society,” and I took consolation from my later telephone conversation with Betty Campbell, president of the group, which has been struggling for years to raise money to preserve the site. They won National Landmark status for the house this year, and sufficient funds from the state to permit exterior restoration to begin this spring.

As I gazed at the house, I remembered a passage from Parker’s autobiography about an incident that took place there. It was sometime between 1854 and 1856. Parker had just admitted two fugitives to his home and hidden them in the attic when an armed crowd from across the river forced its way in his front door to search for runaways.

Relying on the book’s description of events, I followed the route Parker and the two fugitives took with the mob on their heels: down Front Street to the home of fellow abolitionist Tom Collins, about a block away on the corner of Front Street and Mulberry; to the carpentry shop in Collins’ backyard; to the home of merchant Tom McCague, beside the river where the citizens of Ripley now have pontoon boats tied up peacefully along the shore.

McCague got the two men on their way to Canada, Parker wrote with understandable relief, “with someone else as guide.”

*

Other houses I passed were familiar from Parker’s book, including the home of Dr. Alfred Beasley, who provided medical care to severely weakened fugitive slaves. Beasley’s house, like Collins’, still stands on Front Street.

From Ripley, fugitives were conducted to underground railroad stations in Red Oak, Russellville or Sardinia, and on from station to station across Ohio. Eliza was conducted to the home of Levi Coffin, now a State Historic Site on U.S. 27 in Fountain City just inside the Indiana state line. An exhibit there explains how Coffin began aiding runaways as a child after seeing a group of slaves in chains.

From Coffin’s house, Eliza was sent on with her child to Sandusky, from which they crossed Lake Erie with a friendly boat captain to Canada. In his memoirs, “Reminiscences” (Arno Press), Levi Coffin wrote that he saw Eliza once more, in 1854, during a visit he made with his wife to former fugitives in Ontario. Eliza came up to them, reminded them of who she was and took them to her comfortable home.

From Jackson Street Pier in historic downtown Sandusky, I caught the last ferry of the season across the lake to Leamington, Ontario, near the town of Amherstburg, where Eliza landed. In the hope of finding some last trace of her, I headed to Amherstburg and the North American Black Historical Museum and Cultural Center on King Street.

Because of its rich land, Amherstburg was an important settlement for former slaves, most of whom, after all, were experienced farmers. Exhibits at the museum show how the new arrivals settled this then-forested land, now a fertile patchwork of orchards, vineyards and tomato fields.

There is an old photograph in the museum of a little clapboard house, with a caption below it that reads “Eliza’s Cottage.” I stopped when I saw it, thunderstruck. No further information was available from the volunteer on duty to authenticate the claim, but still I was gripped by the photograph, grateful for this physical sign, however unverified, that she had actually made it.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

GUIDEBOOK

On Freedom’s Trail

Getting there: Nonstop service, LAX-Cincinnati, on Delta Airlines; connecting service on Delta, US Airways, Northwest, American and TWA. Fares begin at $246 round trip. Ripley is 50 miles east of Cincinnati on scenic U.S. 52.

Where to stay: In Ripley: Baird House, 201 N. 2nd St.; telephone (937) 392-4918. Rates: $85-$125.

Misty River Bed and Breakfast, 206 N. Front St.; tel. (937) 392-1556. Rates: $75, including breakfast.

Maysville, Ky., offers larger chain motels such as Best Western (U.S. 68; tel. [606] 759-5696; $53) and Ramada Inn (484 Moody Drive; tel. [606] 564-6793; $57).

Historic sites: For guided tours of old Washington, Ky., and the Marshall Key House; tel. (606) 759-7411. Admission: $5.

Rankin House, off 2nd Street (U.S. 52) just west of Ripley; tel. (937) 392-1627. $2.

John P. Parker House, 300 Front St., Ripley; tel. (937) 392-4044.

The Levi Coffin House, U.S. 27, Fountain City, Ind.; tel. (765) 847-2432. $2 adults, $1 children.

North American Black Historical Museum, 277 King St., Amherstburg, Ontario, Canada; tel. (519) 736-5433. $4.50 adults, $3.50 kids.

For more information: Ohio Division of Travel and Tourism, P.O. Box 1001, Columbus, OH 43216; tel. (800) 282-5393, fax (614) 466-6744.