The John P. Parker House, fronting the Ohio River, in a photograph from 1910. The John P. Parker Historical Society is seeking to restore this historic home to its nineteenth-century condition. (Ohio Historical Society)
Pages 49 and 50 of Frank Gregg’s interview with John Parker. (The Special Collections Library, Duke University)
1846 engraving of Ripley, showing John Rankin’s house high on the hill. The building can still be seen for miles from across the Ohio River, though the open fields have become woods. ( Historical Collections of Ohio)
Detail from map of Ripley, Ohio, 1876. (D. J. Lake’s Atlas of Brown Country, Ohio, 1876)
1884 map showing the layout of Parker’s Phoenix Foundry. (Sanborn Insurance Company)
Patent for Parker’s soil pulverizer. Parker’s Phoenix Foundry also produced his patented tobacco press, one of which is on display at the National Underground Railroad Museum in Maysville, Kentucky. Parker was one of only fifty-five African Americans to receive patents before 1901.
Gasworks, alley, Phoenix Foundry, and Parker’s house (left to right) in a photograph taken between 1865 and 1890. (Ohio Historical Society)
Thomas Collins’s house, built circa 1820, photographed in 1910. Collins, a cabinet and coffin maker, was the man to whom Parker often turned when running into difficulty forwarding his fugitive slaves on from Ripley. (Ohio Historical Society)
John Rankin’s grave. Rankin (1793–1886) was an active abolitionist and conductor on the Underground Railroad. (Photograph by Stuart Sprague)
Eliza’s crossing. The character Eliza in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is believed to have been based on a woman who crossed a thawing Ohio River to this point from Kentucky, carrying her baby in her arms. She then found refuge in John Rankin’s house. (Photograph by Stuart Sprague)
Hale Giddings Parker (1851–1925), John Parker’s second-born son, graduated from Oberlin College in 1873 and was the first of the family to settle in St. Louis, Missouri. Active in politics, he was an alternate at large to the Chicago World’s Fair Commission, and in 1894 moved to Chicago where he practiced law. His daughters became Chicago school teachers. (St. Paul Appeal, 1891)
Hortense Parker Gilliam (1859–1938), one of John Parker’s three daughters, graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1883, one of the first African Americans to do so. Musically talented, after giving piano lessons in a number of cities, she followed her brother Hale to St. Louis. In 1913, she married Marcus James Gilliam, Cornell Class of 1901. He spent most of his career as a principal in the St. Louis schools. (Mount Holyoke College Archives, circa 19305)
Slaves who escaped to Canada. Wilbur H. Siebert, the pioneering historian of the Underground Railroad, interviewed a number of former fugitive slaves in Ontario between July 30 and August 3, 1895. It is reasonable that this photograph, which appeared in Siebert’s The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom, was taken at that time. After the I850 Fugitive Slave Act was passed, even slaves who had escaped to Michigan and northern Ohio fled to Canada. (By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University (US5278 3625))
Ripley today from the Kentucky side of the Ohio River. Despite the raising of the river by a system of dams, the integrity of nineteenth-century Ripley remains intact and is being preserved by the creation of the Ripley Historic District. (Photograph by Stuart Sprague)