John Rankin House

At a glance

Overview

The John Rankin House is a one-and-a-half-story brick house built in 1828 on the crest of the hill behind the village of Ripley, looking across the Ohio River to Mason County, Kentucky. It was the home of the Presbyterian minister John Rankin, his wife Jean Lowry Rankin and their thirteen children, who from the 1820s until the end of the Civil War sheltered fugitives from slavery who had crossed the river, sending them north toward Canada. Rankin's Letters on Slavery (1826) was among the first antislavery books printed west of the Appalachians, and the story he told the Beecher family of a woman who crossed the frozen river with her child became the Eliza episode of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Ripley itself, with conductors such as the African American ironworker John P. Parker and the Front Street families, was one of Ohio's busiest Underground Railroad crossings. The State of Ohio bought the house in 1938, renovated it and dedicated it as a state memorial in 1948; it became a National Historic Landmark in 1997 and is operated by the Ohio History Connection.

The name

The house is named for its builder, Rev. John Rankin. The town was incorporated as Staunton in 1812 and renamed on February 23, 1816, for Brig. Gen. Eleazar Wheelock Ripley of the War of 1812. The hill's name, 'Liberty Hill,' and the 'Liberty Stairway' are later patriotic names: the National Historic Landmark nomination found them used as early as the 1912 Ripley centennial but not in general use until after the state bought the site in 1938; a 1913 article still called the stairway simply the '100 steps.' (source)

Native American history

The 1883 History of Brown County found no record of a permanent historic Indian village inside the county and described its ancient remains as mounds, enclosures and stone cists, the two largest mounds standing near the Ohio not far from Aberdeen, a few miles upriver from Ripley; that book's claim that the land was simply unpeopled reflects 19th-century thinking and not modern archaeology. It records that the Miami and then the Shawnee claimed the region, that the boundary between Shawnee and Miami hunting grounds was thought to pass through Brown County, and that after Kentucky's settlement began the Shawnee held the whole region north of the river. Indian parties often camped and hunted in the county and crossed the Ohio near the sites of Aberdeen and Ripley to raid Kentucky settlements; about 1785 the young Tecumseh took part in an attack on boats on the Ohio near Aberdeen. The same history states that Indian title to Brown County's land was extinguished by the treaties of Fort McIntosh (1785), Fort Harmar (1789) and Greenville (1795). The land at Ripley then passed into the Virginia Military District, reserved to pay Virginia's Revolutionary War veterans. Nothing specific to the Rankin hilltop itself is recorded.

• Mounds near Aberdeen: mound, Near the Ohio River not far from Aberdeen, Brown County (upriver from Ripley), Prehistoric (the 1883 history does not assign a culture)
• Ohio River crossings at Aberdeen and Ripley: trail, Ohio River at the present sites of Aberdeen and Ripley, 18th century
• Treaties of Fort McIntosh, Fort Harmar and Greenville: treaty, Covered the lands of Brown County, 1785, 1789, 1795

Stories

The real Eliza

The best-known story tied to the house is that of a young enslaved woman who crossed the Ohio River to Ripley on the ice with her child in her arms. The 1883 county history says Stowe drew on events at this place for Eliza's flight in Uncle Tom's Cabin. In 1883 Rankin's son, Capt. Richard C. Rankin, gave the county historian a plainer account: the river had been frozen for some time and people were walking across it. The woman came down to the Kentucky bank through the snow at Stony Point, opposite the mouth of Red Oak Creek, stepped onto the slushy ice and crossed safely to Crosby's Point, where she dropped the child's petticoat. The weather then turned warm, and when her pursuers arrived the next day the ice was gone and they believed she had gone into the river. (source)

Letters to a brother, and a burned warehouse

Soon after arriving in Ripley, Rankin learned that his brother Thomas, a merchant at Middlebrook, Virginia, had bought slaves. Over nine months he wrote him a series of letters against slavery and, instead of mailing them, printed them in The Castigator, a new Ripley paper, starting August 17, 1824; 'the arguments were all my own, for I had no books on the subject,' he later wrote. To pay for a book edition of 1,000 copies he let the paper's publisher, David Ammen, rent a third of his Front Street house for $50 a year. Letters on Slavery came out in 1826, and early one summer morning that year the Maysville, Kentucky, warehouse holding the 500 unbound copies was set on fire and burned. The book spread anyway: Garrison reprinted it in The Liberator, the American Anti-Slavery Society issued later editions, and Garrison wrote he would not give a dozen of Rankin's letters for a hundred copies of William Ellery Channing's essay on slavery. (source)

The light on the hill

Stories of a light at the Rankin house go back to the 19th century. John P. Parker, the Black ironworker and conductor who lived below on Front Street, told a journalist in the 1880s that a lighted candle stood as a beacon 'like the north star' and that Rankin and his sons beat back masters who attacked the house. The Landmark nomination treats the lantern-in-the-window account as unproven but plausible, since Parker said other Ripley abolitionists kept a candle lit and a door ajar. The nomination repeats the story 'whether myth or fact'; little beyond the family's and friends' reminiscences survives to document Rankin's Underground Railroad work. (source)

A station with no organization

Rankin's house was an overnight stop. Fugitives were hidden in the house, barn or nearby buildings and then moved on, at first some 21 miles north to John B. Mahan's at Sardinia and later only four miles to Rev. James Gilliland's Red Oak Presbyterian Church. A western route ran through Russellville and Sardinia to Lynchburg, Hillsboro and Greenfield or Wilmington; an eastern route went through Red Oak and Decatur to Winchester in Adams County. Rankin said he had sheltered 'as many as twelve at a time,' whole families among them, and marveled that the network had no secret society, no oaths and no promised secrecy, 'and yet there were no betrayals.' He explained the name by saying that those who took passage on the road disappeared from view as if they had gone into the ground. Kentucky slaveholders posted rewards for Ripley's conductors, and Rankin wrote that men more than once lay around his house at night to kill him. (source)

John P. Parker, conductor and ironmaster

Ripley's Underground Railroad was not only the Rankins. John P. Parker, born enslaved in Norfolk, Virginia, about 1827 and sold at eight to a Mobile, Alabama, physician, bought his freedom for $1,800 in 1845, married Miranda Boulden in Cincinnati in 1848 and moved to Ripley. For about fifteen years he crossed into Kentucky to bring people out, with a $1,000 bounty on his head. After the war he ran the Ripley Foundry and Machine Company, patented a tobacco press and a harrow in 1884 and 1885, and in 1890 built the Phoenix Foundry. His recollections, taken down by a journalist in the 1880s, were found at Duke University and published in 1996; his Front Street house became a National Historic Landmark in 1997. (source)

Timeline

• c. 1785: The young Shawnee Tecumseh took part in an attack on boats on the Ohio River near the site of Aberdeen, a few miles above Ripley. (source)
• 1795: The Treaty of Greenville, following those of Fort McIntosh (1785) and Fort Harmar (1789), completed the extinguishing of Indian title to the land of Brown County. (source)
• 1793: John Rankin was born on February 4 in Jefferson County, Tennessee, to Richard and Jane Steele Rankin. (source)
• 1804: Col. James Poage of Staunton, Virginia, said to oppose slavery, settled on his 1,000-acre Virginia Military District survey No. 418, where Ripley would grow. (source)
• 1812: The village was incorporated as Staunton. (source)
• 1816: On February 23 Staunton was renamed Ripley for Brig. Gen. Eleazar Wheelock Ripley. (source)
• 1817: Rankin, newly licensed to preach and unwelcome for his antislavery sermons, left Tennessee and spent nearly four years as pastor of Concord Presbyterian Church near Paris, Kentucky. (source)
• 1822: On New Year's Day Rankin crossed the icy Ohio into Ripley, a river town of just over 400 people, and was installed as pastor of the Ripley Presbyterian Church. (source)
• 1824: On August 17 the Ripley newspaper The Castigator printed the first of Rankin's 21 antislavery letters to his brother Thomas, a Virginia merchant who had bought slaves. (source)
• 1826: The letters appeared as the book Letters on Slavery; that summer the Maysville, Kentucky, warehouse holding 500 unbound copies was set on fire and burned. (source)
• 1828: Rankin bought 65.5 acres of timbered hillside behind Ripley, living first in a log stable, and built the brick house on the crest. (source)
• 1828: A college was founded at Ripley with Rankin as president; it ran to 1832, the cholera year in which professor Nathaniel Brockway died. (source)
• 1832: William Lloyd Garrison printed Rankin's letters in The Liberator, and later called Rankin his 'anti-slavery father.' (source)
• 1834: Rankin attended the February slavery debates at Lane Seminary in Cincinnati, and in November Theodore Weld began his Ohio lecture tour at Rankin's Ripley church. (source)
• 1835: Rankin was a founding member of the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society at its first convention at Putnam (Zanesville). (source)
• 1836: Rankin took leave from his church to serve as one of the American Anti-Slavery Society's 'Seventy' lecturers, working southwestern Ohio for six months until illness sent him home. (source)
• 1838: An antislavery meeting at Sardinia reported that rewards of $500 to $2,500 had been offered for the abduction or killing of 'railroad' men in Sardinia, Ripley, Russellville and Adams County. (source)
• 1838: During a meeting of the Cincinnati synod at Ripley, the Rankins told their guests Lyman Beecher, Calvin Stowe and Harriet Beecher Stowe the story of the woman who crossed the ice with her child. (source)
• 1838: Ulysses S. Grant, from nearby Georgetown, attended Rankin's Presbyterian academy in Ripley in the fall before entering West Point in 1839. (source)
• 1841: Rankin and his sons fought off attackers who came at night to burn the house and barn. (source)
• 1847: After failing to have slaveholders excluded from the Presbyterian Church, Rankin led the founding of the Free Presbyterian Church of America, which barred slaveholders from membership (the 1883 county history dates his new Ripley congregation to 1845). (source)
• 1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom's Cabin, whose Eliza Harris escapes across the Ohio ice to refuge with a family modeled on the Rankins. (source)
• 1866: Rankin, past seventy, left his Ripley pulpit and moved to New Richmond, Ohio, for two years, then to Illinois and Kansas, returning to Ohio in the winter of 1881-82. (source)
• 1886: John Rankin died in Ironton, Ohio, at 93; he and Jean (died 1878) are buried in Ripley's Maplewood Cemetery. (source)
• 1892: In May the 'Freedom's Heroes' monument to John and Jean Rankin was dedicated at Maplewood Cemetery. (source)
• 1912: Ripley's centennial week put up monuments to its abolitionists, including the Liberty Monument at the foot of Main Street naming Rankin, Poage, John Parker and others. (source)
• 1936: On November 20 the Historic American Buildings Survey photographed the house and drew plans showing it before restoration. (source)
• 1938: The State of Ohio bought the Rankin house; the old barn was taken down in 1940 or 1941. (source)
• 1948: On June 13 the renovated house was dedicated as a state memorial and museum, after its bedroom wing and Italianate front porch were removed and a Greek Revival portico added. (source)
• 1970: The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on November 10. (source)
• 1997: The house was designated a National Historic Landmark on February 18. (source)

Sources

• npgallery.nps.gov: 70000485 text
• archive.org: bub gb udUyAQAAMAAJ djvu.txt
• en.wikipedia.org: John Rankin House (Ripley, Ohio)
• en.wikipedia.org: John Rankin (abolitionist)
• en.wikipedia.org: Ripley, Ohio
• en.wikipedia.org: John Parker (abolitionist)
• ohiohistory.org: john rankin house
• ohiohistorycentral.org: John Rankin
• nps.gov: oh3
• commons.wikimedia.org: File:Historic American Buildings Survey, E.F. Schrand, A. Hofmann, Photographers Novemb
• commons.wikimedia.org: File:Rankin House, Ripley, Ohio, first station on underground railway of Uncle Tom's Ca