The Underground Railroad in Ohio: the river, the towpath and the lake
Ohio sat between a slave state and Canada, and its geography became its role — a river to cross, a canal to follow north, and a lake to cross at the end.
Ohio’s part in the Underground Railroad was decided by its map. To the south, across the Ohio River, lay Kentucky, a slave state. To the north lay Lake Erie, and beyond it Canada. Anyone travelling between the two had to cross Ohio.
The crossing itself is remembered at Ripley, in Brown County, where the Presbyterian minister John Rankin kept a house on a hill three hundred feet above the river. Ohio History Connection records that Rankin would signal with a lantern to people waiting on the Kentucky shore to tell them when it was safe to cross, and estimates that over two thousand people seeking freedom stayed with the Rankins, sometimes twelve at a time.
Once across, the routes multiplied. A pro-slavery writer in 1842 claimed there were eighteen or nineteen organised routes across Ohio; after the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 there were said to be more than twenty general routes, each with its own deviations.
One of those routes was the canal. The National Park Service records that “Ohio’s canals were used to transport cargo, a common code word for enslaved people”, and that “Some freedom seekers might have walked or run under cover of night along the canal’s towpath — north to Cleveland.” The 308-mile Ohio & Erie Canal ran from the Ohio River to Lake Erie, which the Park Service notes “clearly presented advantages to anyone trying to cross Ohio”.
Cleveland had its own code name. In the Park Service’s account, “From Cleveland, or Hope, they would take the final step to freedom by crossing Lake Erie into Canada.”
The people involved were not all in hiding. The Park Service names John Malvin, 1795 to 1880, “a free Black abolitionist and canal boat captain”, described as considered by some the founder of the civil rights movement in Cleveland. It also records Lewis G. Clarke, who gained his freedom by buying a boat ticket from Portsmouth to Cleveland.
The Rankin House at Ripley is open to visitors as an Ohio History Connection site. Check its own page for current opening arrangements.
Read the Park Service account: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/cuyahoga-valleys-ties-to-underground-railroad.htm
Visit the John Rankin House: https://www.ohiohistory.org/visit/browse-historical-sites/john-rankin-house/