John Parker: The Man Who Rowed into Slave Territory

John Parker was born into slavery in Norfolk, Virginia, in eighteen twenty-seven. He purchased his own freedom in eighteen forty-five, moved to Ripley, Ohio, opened an iron foundry on the free bank of the Ohio River, and then kept crossing back.

For roughly two decades Parker rowed across the Ohio at night into Kentucky, guided freedom-seekers to the water's edge, and rowed them north. He sometimes traveled as far as twenty miles on foot into Kentucky before the return crossing. He was working in the most dangerous position on the Underground Railroad: south of the legal line, in slave territory, where a free Black man could be seized and re-enslaved, and where helping an enslaved person escape was a capital crime. He was never caught.

Parker worked in concert with Reverend John Rankin, a Presbyterian minister whose hilltop house above Ripley could be seen from the Kentucky shore. Rankin kept a light burning. Parker rowed toward it, night after night.

His memoir, dictated late in his life to a journalist, sat unpublished for nearly a century. When it finally appeared in nineteen ninety-six, published by W.W. Norton, it documented crossings and close calls in enough detail to give historians a ground-level account of operations that the network had deliberately avoided committing to paper. Freedom-seekers' names were not recorded to protect them. Parker's own name had nearly vanished for the same reason.

The Parker House and the Rankin House both stand in Ripley. The Ohio River is right there below them, exactly as it was.