Africa, Ohio
Near Columbus, Ohio
The name on the map here is Africa, Ohio, and the story behind it is one of the quieter testaments to resistance in this state. In the eighteen forties, a community of around thirty-five freed Black men and women from North Carolina settled along what is now Africa Road in Delaware County. A neighboring pro-slavery landowner mockingly called the settlement Africa and the name stuck, which makes Africa thought to be the only town in the world named directly after the Underground Railroad.
The community partnered with local abolitionists and Wesleyan Methodists to shelter and guide freedom seekers moving north toward Lake Erie and Canada. Decades later, when the Army Corps of Engineers built Alum Creek Dam in the early nineteen seventies, most of the original settlement's farmsteads, homes, and churches disappeared beneath the reservoir. The name survived.
The road survives. And an underwater village is still down there.
