Our feature OKI Wanna Know dives into a lot of the area's history. This week, we look at an American story of freedom, determination and shame.
Roxanne Baker wrote in to ask when the first people escaping slavery arrived in the Cincinnati area.
The President of Historic New Richmond says slavery has been around as long as people have. Greg Roberts says so has the desire to be free.
"The earliest escapes were probably before there was a lot of white people settled in the Ohio River Valley."
Roberts says there's a lot of research showing many freedom seekers got help from Indigenous peoples.
Northern Kentucky University history professor Brian Hackett says before people were brought from Africa in 1619, there were attempts to enslave members of those tribes.
"But that didn't work out, because they could just disappear into the population," Hackett says. "The same could also be said of African Americans; they could slip into the native population and be hidden away from slave catchers."
The first permanent white settlements along the Ohio River weren't until 1788.
Even using Cincinnati's founding that year as our starting point, historians say pinpointing the first escape is really hard to nail down. Gary Knepp is the honorary historian for Clermont County and says a lot of stories from enslaved people aren't written.
"Slaves were not taught to read. It was against the law to teach them to read and write."
Also, escaping was illegal. As Brian Hackett points out, keeping written records of a crime is just asking for a conviction.
"You don't document things that the world thinks is illegal," Hackett says. "There's a story about John Parker, in Ripley, where he kept a diary of all the people that he helped. But then he decided that could be trouble and so he burned it. And there was a thousand names in there."
The Underground Railroad didn't start until the middle of the 19th century, and even then, it didn't just pop into existence. It evolved from earlier efforts to help people escape slavery.
"A little line in a Clermont County history book listed probably about 1812 was the earliest known, but a lot of people were not involved in the Underground Railroad who made it to safety," Knepp says. "They made it on their own. They weren't recorded."
Clermont County was a major part of the effort to get people out of states that allowed slavery. A lot of abolitionists lived there.
Knepp says for years, farmers in Ohio could hire enslaved people from Kentucky.
"It was so common to see Black people working on the farms in Clermont County, that one of the ways they would help them escape was basically give them a hoe or a shovel. They'd put it on their shoulder and walk up the road and nobody thought any different."
That same principle — hiding in plain sight — worked quite well, according to Greg Roberts. He says New Richmond and Ripley both had very vibrant Black populations.
"If you're a freedom seeker coming across that river and you've got slave catchers on your tail, and you've got people looking to turn you back in for bounty then where you gonna go?" Roberts says. "You gonna go to the white neighborhood where you're going to stand out like a sore thumb? No. You're gonna go to the Black neighborhood where you can hide in plain sight."
Brian Hackett says Cincinnati had Black neighborhoods, like Little Africa, where the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center sits today, and Bucktown, reaching from the riverfront to the east side of what is today's downtown Cincinnati.
"And you can imagine slave catchers running into Bucktown looking for runaways. They're not going to get any help," Hackett says. "In fact, I wonder how many slave catchers' bodies are buried in basements in that area."
Ohio wasn't the only state with abolitionists. Indiana and Kentucky are also rich with that history. Hackett says his research suggests the founder of Newport, General James Taylor, may have been close to some, if not cooperative.
"I think Keturah Taylor, who was the wife of James Taylor, was working with some of her enslaved people to run an Underground Railroad operation right under the general's nose," Hackett says. "He might have known about it, but there seems to be indication [that] this is going on in a lot of other places. It's just not talked about."
Some historians estimate the Underground Railroad helped 100,000 thousand people escape, but Knepp says that's impossible to estimate.
"There's an estimate regarding one fellow — his name was Charles and his nickname was Boss Huber, from Williamsburg," Knepp says. "A historian that wrote about it in the early 1900s estimated that he helped 350 to 400. That would probably be some people that came across at New Richmond and moved their way North."
Today, it's easy to track the paths of people who were running for their lives. Clermont County has published a guide including 42 sites important to the fight for freedom. The National Underground Railroad Museum has an app that uses GPS tracking to help the user find the important places.
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