Arnold Gragston’s Freedom Boat
1859
Fifteen-year-old Arnold Gragston slowly pushed the skiff away from shore, being careful not to let the bottom scrape on the beach. Even in the dark of night, Arnold and the girl he was with hunkered down low in the boat. He silently pulled the oars through the water, working against the current. Arnold’s arms trembled from the strain. He would have loved to have looked into the gorgeous brown eyes of his sweet passenger, but he settled instead for feeling her eyes upon him.
A life lived in slavery or in freedom could be decided by as little as which side of the river you were born on. A slave in Kentucky only needed to cross the Ohio River to reach Ohio’s free soil. Arnold Gragston had never considered daring to cross himself, but one night he was asked to do it for someone else. Just the thought of it terrified him.
Arnold Gragston lived on Walton Pike in Mason County, Kentucky. Born on Christmas Day in the early 1840s, he was one of ten slaves belonging to Colonel John “Jack” Tabb, whose farm was between Germantown and Minerva. Arnold found Master Tabb to be a “pretty good man,” as he gave relatively few beatings. He permitted his slaves to be taught to read, write, and figure, even though fellow farm owners looked down on educating slaves. Tabb also did what he could to see that husbands and wives either worked on the same farm or, at the very least, lived together at the end of the day.
Arnold was a quick learner and was often hired out by Colonel Tabb to other farms. Consequently, he had freedom to travel during the day, which made him familiar with the surrounding area. He was also allowed quite a bit of liberty at night, which meant that he could “go a-courtin’.” Little did Arnold know that his courting on one particular night would lead him to become part of a network that helped liberate slaves.
One evening in 1859 Arnold headed out to a nearby farm to call upon a pretty girl. Arnold was slight of build and not very tall, but he had spruced himself up to make a good impression. The old woman who answered the door, however, had plans other than accepting suitors. She explained to Arnold that she wanted him to row the girl across the river to Ohio.
Arnold was taken aback by the request, and his mind churned with the dangers inherent in such a mission. Too frightened to speak, he began to take his leave, but then the girl came to the door. She was “such a pretty little thing—brown-skinned and kinda rosy and looking as scared as I was feelin’.” The young Arnold Gragston was fixated and couldn’t help but listen as the old woman laid out the details of the escape. The young girl’s eyes betrayed how frightened she was.
No matter how smitten, Arnold just could not bring himself to take such a risk without first mulling it over. As hard as it was to believe, the grandmother claimed there were white folks in Ohio who actually helped slaves escape. He only needed to get the girl to the other side of the river. Arnold had no peace of mind that night as he envisioned himself undergoing the lash at the hands of an enraged master or, worse yet, being shot and killed for his part in a foiled escape attempt.
Tabb’s farm, where Arnold lived, was six miles directly south of Dover, Kentucky, a tobacco port on the Ohio River. Dover would be their point of departure. About a mile and a half east, across the river in Ripley, Ohio, the Reverend John Rankin, a Presbyterian minister, and his wife, Jean, would receive the girl and help move her on to the next station.
The Rankins’ house sat far above the Ohio River, visible in an open clearing of trees with a lantern shining brightly in a window for all to see. All Arnold had to do was row the girl across the river, look for the house with the light, and listen for a bell tinkling in the air. He was assured that the Rankins had people on the bank of the river waiting to direct fugitive slaves up the hill to safety.
The next evening Arnold Gragston found himself back at the old woman’s house, with the big-eyed, beautiful girl staring at him. The two teenagers made their way down the steep bank of the river, climbing into a waiting skiff and pushing away from the shore. Arnold glanced nervously around. Even a direct line across the Ohio River seemed a great distance. As he rowed in the stiff current, the night was so dark that their progress was hard to determine, and the minutes felt like hours. At last Arnold saw a light high on the hill, beckoning to them like a lighthouse guiding sailors to shore.
Arnold slid the skiff silently ashore. At that moment two men appeared and grabbed the girl, pulling her from the boat. Arnold trembled with fear and began to pray. Someone grabbed his own arm and said, “You hungry, boy?” The last thing he had expected was being offered something to eat.
The girl was in good hands now. Arnold turned around and rowed himself back to Kentucky, hoping he would make it home undetected. The pretty girl was gone forever. She was well on her way to freedom, and Arnold was headed home with plenty to think about. Arnold would later recall: “I don’t know how I ever rowed the boat across the river. The current was strong and I was trembling. I couldn’t see a thing there in the dark, but I felt that girl’s eyes. We didn’t dare to whisper. So I couldn’t tell her how sure I was that Mr. Tabb or some of the other owners would ‘tear me up’ when they found out what I had done. I just knew they would find out.”
Although it took a while for Arnold to recover from his terrifying first trip across the river, he eventually realized that he could do it again. It came to be a well-kept secret that he was willing to assist runaways across the river. Typically, he preferred to meet his passengers on the darkest nights when their features would be obscured and he would thus later have a hard time identifying them. As the forms came up to him, Arnold would whisper, “What you say?” and if the correct password was given—“menare”—he would take them across the river. Arnold never knew the word’s meaning but thought it might have been a biblical term, though no such word is known.
Arnold Gragston began making three or four trips a month across the Ohio River, rowing under the night skies. Sometimes he carried just a few people; other times his skiff was full. Sometimes Arnold risked hiding fugitive slaves in barns until the “black nights” of the moon arrived. Instead of gaining his own freedom, he helped others attain theirs. Over a four-year period from 1859 to 1863, he helped liberate close to three hundred slaves, and never did he ask for anything in return.
In 1863 after rowing twelve fugitives across the river, Arnold was nearly apprehended. To avoid being caught, he hid out for weeks, sleeping in fields and in the woods. His days of portaging passengers to freedom were over. He was married by this time, and when an opportunity finally presented itself, he took his wife Sallie as his last passenger across the Ohio River. It seemed like he was pulling the weight of the world in the boat that night, rowing them toward the familiar light up the bank.
Arnold and Sallie Gragston went on to Detroit, Michigan, for fear of being captured, coming back to Bracken County, Kentucky, to farm in the 1880s. They would have ten children and thirty-one grandchildren. Over the years Arnold would visit his family who lived on land that had once been the Tabb farm where Gragston had been enslaved. He would sit on the front porch, in a chair surrounded by his great-great-grandchildren, and retell the story of his first adventure across the Ohio River. Upon his death in 1938, well into his nineties, Arnold was fondly remembered as a wonderful storyteller. He would recount river crossings during storms, using leaky boats, and sometimes having to threaten passengers to silence so as not to alert the patrollers.
The Broadway Christian Church in Germantown, Kentucky, where Arnold Gragston was both a deacon and cofounder, still holds monthly services to this day. A historic marker in Germantown reminds everyone that Arnold Gragston’s story was one of courage and hope. This well-respected, daring oarsman was laid to rest in the Greenlawn Cemetery in Ripley, Ohio, where he had first rowed so many to freedom.