Make pilgrimage on Underground Railroad

RIPLEY, Ohio — A candle in the window of the preacher's house high on a hill overlooking the Ohio River meant the coast was clear, that runaway slaves could find temporary refuge on their flight from the South.

For many — an estimated 3,000 — it was the first stop on the route to freedom that became known as the Underground Railroad, a series of safe houses where abolitionists, Quakers, free blacks and others hid fleeing slaves from bounty hunters.

This was the home of the Rev. John Rankin, a Presbyterian minister who is reputed to have told Harriet Beecher Stowe the story of a runaway slave and her child who crossed the frozen Ohio River, a tale that Stowe recounted later in "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

Rankin House was typical of hundreds of secret meeting places, churches and homes of well-known abolitionists that were used as safe houses in nearly two dozen states. As one of the few still in existence and open to the public, it is a good starting point to recreate the Underground Railroad experience.

"I tell you what was stunning — chilling — was seeing the Rankin House up on that hill because I knew that history, and not much has changed as far as what it looks like," said Joan Southgate, who walked 519 miles across Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York three years ago visiting Underground Railroad sites.

"That brought back to me what it must have been like to people on the Kentucky side to look at that beacon of hope," she said.

More than 500 routes are believed to go through Ohio alone, but from the early 1800s until the Civil War, runaways fled to freedom all along the line separating North from South. Some of those routes have been documented but were not general knowledge at the time.

"As with any illegal activity, you didn't run around telling everybody what you were doing," said Betty Campbell, spokeswoman for Rankin House. "And you probably didn't take the same route all the time."

Some of the safe houses, with their secret panels and attic and basement hiding places, are part of travel itineraries available from the National Park Service www.cr.nps.gov/nr/travel/underground/.

Although "underground" was a euphemism for secretive travel, some hiding places were, indeed, under ground — caves, root cellars and the like. Southgate's walk took her to a cellar hide-out at a log house in southwest Ohio's Warren County and to a cave in Ashtabula — across Lake Erie from Canada — where even her 4-foot-9 body felt cramped.