“Eliza’s” River Run
1838
Clumps of white snow fell from the treetops along the Ohio River. In February 1838 the wet ice of the river was peppered with melting potholes. Given a coming thaw, the river moaned with thunderous cracks as the ice broke up.
In Dover, Kentucky, an anonymous slave mother overheard her master talking to a slave trader. Panic ran through her veins. Had she just heard right? Could it be that her master’s financial difficulties would prompt him to sell off her two-year-old child? Regardless of the reason, she was determined to make her escape across the Ohio River—that very night.
She had heard about an abolitionist family in Ripley, Ohio, who had built a redbrick house on the highest point above the river. It was clearly visible on a twenty-acre tract of open land. The house boldly displayed a bright lantern at night in defiance to slave owners across the river. Finding that light was the woman’s only chance to protect her child.
As soon as night fell, the woman bundled up her baby and ran out into the cold. The hillside on Kentucky’s side of the river was so steep that only sheep grazed among the thick tree growth. After a mile and a half, she made her way down to Stony Point, but the ice appeared to be breaking up. Not knowing what to do next, she neared a cabin and ventured to knock on the stranger’s door.
Luckily the old white man took her in. He warned her that it was not a good time to cross the river. With the thaw, nobody had dared to walk on the ice for days. Perhaps if she waited till the next night, the river might refreeze. However, that evening in the distance, they both heard the baying of bloodhounds, which could only mean slave catchers were in the area. If it was a choice between risking death on the river ice and being separated from her baby, she would risk death. The man understood. He provided her with a wooden plank from his fence to help her on her crossing. He was certain the ice would break and she would need something to hold on to.
With the hounds drawing close, the woman lurched desperately into the icy water. She leaped onto the nearest ice floe, clasping her baby to her breast with one arm and holding the wooden plank in the other. She crawled onto the unsteady sheet of ice. A bone-chilling wind blew across the half-frozen river, but she had to escape her pursuers who were closing in. She stepped from one ice cake to another. Even those pieces of ice that looked sturdy kept breaking apart beneath her, dropping her into the frigid Ohio River. With each plunge she pushed her baby onto the next frozen chunk and heaved herself up. In the distance, she saw a light high up on a hill.
Swimming, crawling, falling, she forced her frozen limbs forward. Mustering every ounce of her remaining strength, she finally waded through the last feet of frigid water and collapsed on the shore.
But her terrifying and courageous flight across the river hadn’t gone unnoticed. The notorious slave catcher Chancey Shaw had been watching from the Ohio side of the river near the mouth of Red Oak Creek. He had braved the cold February night air ever since the river had frozen. His efforts were well rewarded if he caught a runaway—upwards of $500 each. With the recent thaw only desperation would make a slave run the broken river, yet he had heard cries in the night. The moonlight revealed a figure in the dark carrying a screaming child.
As the woman approached the shore, Chancey Shaw saw the slave catchers on the Kentucky side give up and head back up the steep hillside. Shaw approached the woman on the ground and grabbed her arm, thinking only of the reward for capturing a runaway. The desperate woman looked up into his eyes; her baby let out a cry. Never known to have shown compassion to any fugitive, Chancey Shaw now had a change of heart. Maybe this poor woman and her child had earned their chance at freedom after all. He ushered the half-frozen, exhausted woman and hushed baby through town cautiously to avoid being detected. He pointed her to the house on the hill and then disappeared.
The woman looked up the steep hill, still trying to comprehend what had just happened. One hundred rickety steps could be seen in the moonlight, leading to the redbrick house. She saw the beaming lantern and tiredly climbed up. Though the Rankins’ dogs had been trained not to bark at runaways, she nervously opened the door to the kitchen. A woman sitting at a warm fire looked up, not at all surprised to see her.
The Rankin family welcomed the woman and her child, feeding them and giving them dry clothes. The slave woman gratefully rocked back and forth with the baby at her breast. As exhausted as the poor woman was, however, it was too dangerous for her and her baby to stay. They needed to be gone before the sun came up. The unnamed woman, though grateful to escape with her baby, shared that she had a grown daughter and grandchildren she was forced to leave behind. She vowed to come back for them someday.
Southerners by birth, abolitionists by inclination, the Reverend John Rankin and his wife, Jean, had moved from the slave states of Tennessee and Kentucky. Their first home in the early 1820s was on Front Street along the Ohio River. In 1829 they built a home overlooking the river. Theirs was one of Ohio’s earliest stations on the Underground Railroad, and with a clear view of the Kentucky shore across the river, their light could be seen for miles.
The Rankins had thirteen children and took in another nine. For nearly forty years they gave runaways food, clothing, money, and direction—despite the fact that Reverend Rankin had a $2,500 bounty on his head. Assisting fugitives in the dark of night came to be a way of life for the Rankin children.
Two of the Rankin boys took the fugitive slave woman and her baby to the town of Red Oak, four miles away, showing them to the home of Reverend James Gilliland. The following day they would be forwarded on to Decatur and Sardinia, Ohio. Eventually they would arrive in Newport, Indiana, at the home of Levi Coffin, the “President of the Underground Railroad.” From there they would be hurried in and out of various safe houses before finally reaching the safety of Chatham, Canada—more than three hundred miles from the Ohio River.
In 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Her legendary character, Eliza Harris, was based on this brave, nameless woman who had crossed Ohio’s nearly thawed river in 1838. For fear of incriminating the Rankin family—who could suffer fines, imprisonment, and loss of property if identified—the details of the story were changed. Stowe’s “Eliza” was a young, light-skinned woman with a four-year-old son, who was taken in by the owners of a white house in Ripley, Ohio. Her Eliza knew the man on shore who had apprehended her. She also had a husband and had buried two children before fleeing across the half-frozen Ohio River.
The Ripley First Presbyterian Church, where Reverend John Rankin once preached, maintains a vital congregation to this day. Rankin’s hilltop house, which operated from 1829 to 1865, was a safe haven for over two thousand runaway slaves. The home is now a National Historic Landmark. Visitors to the Rankin House in Ripley, Ohio, can climb the reconstructed hundred-step stairway to the top of Liberty Hill, the same steps that led so many slaves to freedom.