By John Johnston / Enquirer staff writer

Drake Heuerman 7, of Blue Ash (red t-shirt), and Joey O'Brien 12, of Blue Ash, walk down the steps of The Rankin House in Ripley, OH. towards the Ohio River. The Enquirer/TONY JONES

M O R E   I N F O R M A T I O N OHIO • Cincinnati: Allen Temple. The oldest of Cincinnati's black churches dates to 1808, when it organized as the Mill Creek Church. Because its members helped fugitive slaves, pro-slavery gangs burned the church three times between 1812 and 1815. In 1824, members joined the African Methodist Episcopal denomination. The church moved several times over the years, continuing to house runaway slaves, some of whom became members. Services are currently held at 7030 Reading Road, Bond Hill. 531-7539. • Cincinnati: Union Baptist Church. Original documents from this church, founded in 1831, tell of runaway slaves coming to Cincinnati because family and friends within the church provided refuge. Services were first held in a house on Third Street, then in a small brick building on what is now Central Avenue. Although that building is gone, the congregation remains in the neighborhood, holding services at 405 W. Seventh St., downtown. 381-3858. • Cincinnati: Zion Baptist Church. Fugitive slaves often hid in the basement of this church, located for years on Third Street between Race and Elm streets. It was founded in 1842 by former members of Union Baptist. Black church deacon John Hatfield once orchestrated a mock funeral as cover for 28 escaping slaves, perhaps the largest single group to come through town. Services currently held at 630 Glenwood Ave., Avondale. 751-8608. • College Hill: Samuel and Sally Wilson House, 1502 Aster Place. The Wilsons were Presbyterian abolitionists who built their Greek Revival home in 1849. It served as an Underground Railroad station until at least 1852. In a letter from 1892, daughter Harriet Wilson described her family's efforts following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850: "The work had become too well known...it was deemed wiser to have it carried on by other less exposed routes..." The private residence is not open to the public. • Ripley: John Rankin House. Rankin, a Presbyterian minister, devoted much of his life to the antislavery movement. He and his wife, Jean, and their family helped perhaps 2,000 slaves escape from 1822 to 1865. A lighted candle in the Rankins' home, high atop the Ohio River, served as a beacon for runaways. The house is a National Historic Landmark. Open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday; noon-5 p.m. Sunday. After Labor Day, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Adults, $3; students, $1; under 5, free. (800) 752-2705. • Ripley: John P. Parker House, 330 Front St. Parker was a slave who bought his freedom in 1845at age 18. He moved to Ripley a few years later and established a successful foundryon the Ohio River. In the two decades before the Civil War, he risked his life countless times by crossing the river into Kentucky and leading slave parties across to safety. The National Historic Landmark is open 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday and 1-5 p.m. Sunday through the second weekend in December. Adults, $3; 17 and under, $1. (937) 392-4188 or (937) 392-4044. • Bethel: Homes of Dr. William Eberle Thompson. As a teen living at 137 S. Main St., Thompson became an Underground Railroad conductor, guiding fugitives from Bethel to the Elklick area near Williamsburg. Thompson, who lived to age 104 and practiced medicine in Bethel for 80 years, lived at 213 E. Plane St. as an adult. Both homes are part of the National Park Service Network to Freedom program. Neither is open to the public. • Williamsburg: Charles B. Huber home and Dr. Leavitt Thaxter Pease home. Huber, who lived at 160 Gay St., assisted several hundred fleeing slaves. One account says 17 fugitives found refuge there one night. He was assisted by his neighbor Pease, who lived at 180 Gay St.. Neither site is open to the public. • Springboro: Jonathan Wright House. This home, built about 1815 for the city's founder, is on the National Register of Historic Places. Wright was among a number of anti-slavery Quakers in Warren County. Today the home at 80 W. State St. is a bed and breakfast. Tours available; admission $5. Call (937) 748-0801 or (866) 748-0801. KENTUCKY • Augusta: Augusta College. From 1822 to 1849, the college, the first established by the Methodist church, was a hotbed of the antislavery movement in Kentucky. Its abolitionist teachings led the state legislature to repeal Augusta's charter. Among its trustees were abolitionists Arthur and James Thome and the Rev. John Fee. The college occupied an area between Bracken and Frankfort streets from Third Street to Riverside Drive. Buildings at 204 Bracken St. and 203-207 Frankfort St. were college dormitories. They are private residences closed to the public. • Augusta: Gen. John Payne home, corner of Riverside Drive and Ferry Street. Payne, who fought in the War of 1812, built this house around 1792. Newspaper accounts and oral histories tell of it being used by fugitive slaves who escaped across the Ohio River. The private residence is not open to the public. • Augusta: White Hall, 212 Elizabeth St. Home of Arthur Thome and his son, James, who in the 1830s urged his father to free their 15 slaves. James attended Cincinnati's Lane Seminary, an important school in the anti-slavery movement. Father and son were among Augusta's most vocal opponents of slavery. Accused of harboring fugitives, the Thomes eventually were banished from the town at gunpoint. The house, listed on the National Register of Historic Places and part of the National Park Service Network to Freedom program, is not open to the public. • Covington: Historical marker, Sixth and Main streets. On a snowy night in January 1856, at the foot of Main Street, 17 slaves fled across the frozen Ohio River. Among the group was Margaret Garner. When she was arrested in Ohio, she killed her daughter rather than see her returned to slavery. The capture helped fuel abolitionist sentiment. Garner's story became the basis for Toni Morrison's acclaimed book Beloved. • Chatham: Four miles southeast of Chatham on Kentucky 875, at 1509 Asbury Road, is a two-story brick home built by Samuel Shockey. There is a trap door in the front hall where, according to oral tradition, slaves were kept before being moved to a local Underground Railroad conductor. The private home is closed to the public. • Kentucky shore of Ohio River, opposite Ripley, Ohio: Legend has passed down several versions of how the term "Underground Railroad" came into existence, including this: In 1851 a runaway slave named Tice Davis reached the Ohio River across from Ripley, Ohio. With his owner in hot pursuit and seeking a skiff, Davis swam the river. Seeing no trace of the runaway, the owner speculated that he "must have gone on an underground road." The site of Davis' escape is a former ferry crossing at Kentucky 8 and Tuckahoe Road. INDIANA • Lancaster: Historic Eleutherian College. The college, founded in 1848 by the Rev. Thomas Craven of Oxford, Ohio, was the first in Indiana to admit students regardless of race or gender. The large stone building, atop the highest hill in the area, was completed in the mid-1850s. In 1856 there were 18 black students, 10 of whom were born slaves. The National Historic Landmark is at 6927 W. State Road 250. Open 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday-Saturday. Admission by donation. (812) 273-9434. Sources: Walker Gollar, Xavier University associate professor of church history; Caroline Miller, researcher and member of Kentucky Underground Railroad Advisory Council; National Park Service; Ohio Historical Society; Historic Eleutherian College Inc.

A runaway slave named Eliza fled on foot across the icy Ohio River, making her way to a safe house high on a hill overlooking the Ohio town of Ripley.

In Cincinnati, a black deacon of Zion Baptist Church named John Hatfield orchestrated a mock funeral to lead 28 runaways out of the city.

And in College Hill, escaping slaves hid in the cellar of Samuel and Sally Wilson's home.

Across the region, several dozen sites are documented Underground Railroad stations, places where slaves were helped in their flight from the pre-Civil War South. Some sites still stand, within just an hour's drive of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, whose grand opening is scheduled for Aug. 23.

"The entire Ohio River valley, and Cincinnati in particular, were extremely important in the history of what we now refer to as the Underground Railroad," says David Blight, a professor of American history and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University.

Cincinnati, he says, "developed an important and protective enclave of abolitionists and fugitive slaves."

The Freedom Center celebrates the Underground Railroad's role with artifacts, interactive exhibits and discussion space for helping people sort through the emotions and link up with others. An authentic slave pen that was moved to the riverfront center from Mason County, Ky., dominates the first floor. Oprah Winfrey narrates one of several films shown at the center, telling of slave escapes.

But tangible remnants of the slave trade and freedom flights also exist throughout the region. Although many buildings with ties to the Underground Railroad are gone, some still are open to the public.

The story of their significance begins with a question that gnawed at many slaves: Should they risk a flight to freedom, or remain in bondage?

"That was a lonely decision," says Dan Hurley, assistant vice president for history and research at the Cincinnati Museum Center. "In most cases they had no idea who they would look to for help."

Most runaways relied on their wits and bravery when navigating through Southern slave-holding states such as Kentucky. The closer they came to "free" Northern states such as Ohio, the more likely they were to link up with the informal network of free blacks and white abolitionists who operated the Underground Railroad.

Cincinnati played a vital role in that network, in part because of geography. Only a ribbon of water separated slave state from free.

"Just by being there, a large port city on the river, in some ways it represented hope (of freedom) to fugitive slaves, as much as reality," Blight says.

It helped, too, that the city had a sizable black population, which had reached several thousand by 1829.

Escaping slaves "ran to where they might more readily establish social bonds, such as in the significant black communities of Cincinnati, which centered on three churches," says Walker Gollar, a Xavier University history professor who has extensively researched the Underground Railroad. Allen Temple, Union Baptist Church and Zion Baptist Church all harbored fugitives.

Gollar says a Zion Baptist member, black riverman William Casey, reportedly told his wife to tell her enslaved friends that "if they can get to Cincinnati, they can get to liberty, and the colored men in boats will whisper in their ears where to find abolitionists."

White abolitionists and free blacks also operated in nearby towns along the Ohio River, such as Ripley, about 45 miles east. John Parker, a former slave, and the Rev. John Rankin were among Ripley's most notable Underground Railroad conductors. Rankin aided runaways from his home perched high above the town with a sweeping view of the river.

Rankin and Parker knew well that crossing the Ohio to the North did not guarantee runaways' safety. In fact, passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 - which put the federal government in the business of returning runaways - made the North more dangerous for blacks sought by aggressive slave catchers. Many, therefore, set their sights on Canada.

Most slaves, though, feared the risks were too high, and they didn't try to escape. Of those who made the attempt, many failed.

"But if a Kentucky slave could get into Cincinnati and find safe haven for a few days in the black community," Blight says, "there were farms, there was a network of safe havens up into Ohio through many different routes, eventually (leading) to Canada."

And freedom.

In mid-1800's, Cincinnati< offered many opportunities/b>

In the decades leading to the Civil War, Cincinnati was more than a major hub for Underground Railroad activity. It was a city whose breathtaking growth gave it every reason to swagger.

"Cincinnati's reputation for generating jobs and opening opportunities reached starving potato farmers in rural Ireland, ambitious craftsmen in German villages, as well as slaves and slave owners on plantations and farms throughout the South," historian Daniel Hurley says in "Cincinnati and the Underground Railroad," a 1997 research paper he wrote for the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

Hurley, now assistant vice president for history and research at the Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal, notes that for nearly two decades after 1835, Cincinnati grew faster than any U.S. city. By 1850 it was the nation's sixth-largest city, with 115,435 residents, and soon became the country's third-largest manufacturing center.

The poet Longfellow, recognizing the town's rising stature, immortalized Cincinnati as the "Queen City of the West."

The city earned another nickname, Porkopolis, because of its bustling hog-butchering industry, tops in the world. During the 1850s, some 300,000 hogs a year were slaughtered here.

Goods were transported via the Ohio River, the city's lifeblood. By the mid-1850s, steamboats were carrying 3 million people a year up and down the waterway.

With steamboats often stacked three and four deep along the Public Landing, this bustling gateway to the city typically teemed with sailors, merchants, arriving and departing passengers, as well as barrels and bales of goods. Visitors didn't have to venture far to catch the foul odors emanating from the hillsides where slaughterhouses disposed of pig remains. Nearby Over-the-Rhine offered a frothy respite, with its breweries and beer gardens.

But amid the prosperity, blacks endured an uneasy existence. In the years before the Civil War, "individual Cincinnati blacks, even those born free who had never been enslaved, lived in constant fear of slave catchers crossing over from Kentucky," Hurley writes.

Still, blacks managed to develop a vital society. Between 1840 and 1860, the city's black population grew from 2,258 to 3,731.

Most blacks lived in pockets near the riverfront. One such area on the eastern edge of the basin, just below the hillsides where slaughterhouses dumped discarded intestines, became known as Bucktown.

Home to many black churches, schools and civic organizations, Bucktown became the center of black life in Cincinnati, Hurley says. And it was the black community, he adds, that became the backbone of local Underground Railroad efforts.

E-mail jjohnston@enquirer.com